CHAPTER 25
Caroline
Chaos.
Controlled chaos. That’s the only word for it.
On Monday, the boardroom in New York fell into stunned silence when I projected the summary page on the screen with no preamble and no warm-up. Just numbers. Evidence. Timeline. The full presentation lay printed at each seat like verdicts.
Lawyers mobilized. Crisis team drafted statements. Funds recovery processes initiated.
By Wednesday, in London, composure shattered.
Shock travels through corridors of the regional office like electricity.
The leadership meeting dissolved into something rawer – tears, pleas, and defensive narratives thickening the air.
Security escorted George and the other out.
Marie fought until HR laid down hard evidence.
Only then did her spine bend. Only then did she cry.
I glance at the time. It’s only 4:30 p.m. I drag a hand down my face as someone knocks.
“Come in.”
Arjun, our Head of Sales, steps inside. “May I have a minute?”
“Of course. Please take a seat.” I say.
He shakes his head. “I’ll stand.”
There’s a brief pause, the kind that carries intention. “You showed us today that you are the next generation of Hammond leadership,” he says, voice steady but warm. “Focused. Decisive. We appreciate what you’re building here. Call us anytime. For anything.”
He extends his hand. It’s firm. Real.
“Thank you, Arjun,” I say, and I mean it more than he knows.
He nods once and leaves, closing the door with quiet respect.
The next footsteps hover outside - hesitant, uneven.
I don’t need to look up.
“Hi…” Jill.
I let the silence stretch, not cruelly but deliberately. I let her feel the space where trust used to live.
“I… I guess… I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“I’m going to accept your resignation,” I say, voice calm, almost gentle. “That’s the cleanest path for you.”
She keeps her eyes on the floor. “I’m so very sorry,” she whispers.
“I trusted you,” I say quietly. “I invested in you.” A breath. “Let this be your lesson. You have a long career ahead. I won’t let this destroy it.”
Her lips tremble. “I don’t deserve—”
“No,” I say softly. “But I’m choosing not to punish you beyond what you’ve already done to yourself.”
She nods, small and fragile, then slips out. The door clicks shut with a finality that echoes longer than it should.
The office feels lighter than the last few months, as if pressure has been released from the walls. But sadness lingers, a thin, invisible film over everything.
And why does it always hurt, even when you win?
I lean back, staring at the ceiling as if it might answer me. All week I’ve been in motion - decision after decision, hour stacked on hour, momentum carrying me like a current too strong to resist. But now the movement stops, and the silence rushes in.
Inside me, the wound I’ve been outrunning inhales slowly, deliberately, and impossible to ignore.
I reach for my phone before I can talk myself out of it and dial.
“Hello, Cara.” Connor answers on the second ring.
“Could we talk now?” I ask, and I hear the fracture in my voice, the one I tried to sand down before he picked up.
A beat. Then, “what happened?”
“I ran into Brandon.” That’s all I say, because the name alone still carries too much history, too much weight, like a box I refuse to open but never quite put away.
“Where?” he asks gently.
“At dinner. With my parents.” I let out a slow breath. “I thought I was past it. I really did. But it isn’t really Brandon I want to talk about. You know what I mean.”
Another quiet beat, and then, with that calm certainty that has always been his way of loving his best friend without saying the word, “I’ll change my flight. I’ll go to Lake Como early. Meet me there.”
The offer lands softly, like a hand settling between my shoulder blades, steadying my breathing.
“Thanks, Con.”
He exhales, “Don’t you dare thank me, Cara. I’ll text when I board.”
The call ends, and the quiet that follows feels different. It’s less sharp, but much deeper.
For the first time in longer than I want to admit, I feel the urge to lie down and just…
stop. No strategy. No composure. I want to curl inward, arms wrapped around myself, like I’m both the storm and the shelter.
I want to surrender to whatever rises instead of managing it, containing it, and outrunning it.
I need to go back to therapy.
The thought lands with a strange mix of resistance and relief, like pressing on a bruise just to know it’s still there.
I went for years after William. Even when we uprooted everything and moved the whole family to San Francisco, I kept going. Through college, through reinventions, through the slow, stubborn work of learning how to live inside my own skin without flinching.
Until Brandon.
His betrayal didn’t just hurt. It rearranged something fundamental in me.
It bent the compass I used to navigate people, and made me question my instincts, my memories, my version of reality.
After that, sitting in a room and being asked how I felt was just unbearable.
I couldn’t stand the idea of dissecting it, of saying it out loud and letting it exist outside my body.
So, I stopped. I told myself I was done needing help.
That discipline and forward motion would be enough.
Connor became the only person who ever heard the truth without filters. Connor never rushed me, never tried to fix me, just stayed steady while I searched for solid ground again.
I relearned my instincts the long way. I rebuilt my sense of reality by throwing myself into the world - backpacking, drifting from place to place, working wherever I landed, letting distance and motion smooth the sharpest edges. I learned what my gut felt like when it wasn’t afraid.
And I rebuilt the rest of myself the only way I knew how - through force.
I worked until exhaustion. I boxed until my lungs burned.
I fought bare-knuckle until I bled. I pushed my body into spaces my mind was too scared to enter: edges, impact, risk.
If I could survive the physical hit, I told myself, then I was unbreakable.
If I could master fear in my muscles, maybe it would quiet in my chest.
Piece by piece, I constructed a version of myself that could not be easily shaken.
But right now, sitting here in the quiet, I can feel how tired I am. How heavy it is to always be the composed one, the decisive one, the one who doesn’t flinch.
I was never weak. I am not defined by Brandon or by what he did. And yet, some echoes don’t mean I’m broken. They just mean I remember.
And this time, I don’t want to outwork the memory or outrun it. I want to speak it out loud to someone who knows how to hold it, before the silence stretches it into something bigger than it needs to be.
***
Edoardo
A tornado. A hurricane. A deadly storm.
Whatever it is, it’s coming. I can feel it, low and electric, like pressure building before the sky splits open. I feel it in my bones.
I let Lisa stay in New York a few extra days to scout more artists and partnerships while Caroline and I flew back to London on Tuesday.
I went straight into work; she disappeared into her own orbit.
Celina picked her up, and the two of them holed up at Celina’s place, finalizing details for Wednesday’s showdown like generals before a battle.
Then Thursday, we flew to Lake Como for Stefano’s engagement.
Beautiful, loud, celebratory - champagne, laughter, the illusion that life is simple when you’re surrounded by love.
We FaceTimed Xander and Clive, and Clive, of course, is more excited than anyone on the planet to plan the bachelor party.
He’s already treating it like a global summit.
Now we’re in Tuscany for the weekend. Rolling hills, soft light, wine that tastes like patience.
And Caroline is quieter than I’ve ever seen her.
Not fragile, she’s never fragile. But contained. Like something vast is coiled just beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to break through.
I can’t pinpoint what it is. I keep replaying the timeline in my head, trying to find the moment the air shifted.
It must trace back to that dinner with her parents in San Francisco. Something subtle happened there - nothing obvious, nothing you could name, but the energy changed. After that, she worked nonstop through the weekend, like motion itself was a shield.
Then Lake Como. Connor arrived early. They sat together for hours, just the two of them, heads close, speaking quietly. When she came back, she looked lighter, like color had returned to her face after a long winter.
But Connor… The look he gave her before he walked away - soft, steady, worried. The kind of look you give someone you love when you can’t fix what’s hurting them.
Months ago, Caroline was the one losing sleep over Connor, over what he went through. Now he’s the one watching her, eyes still shadowed, heart still raw from ending things with Celina, and somehow he’s holding space for her too.
Caroline is hurting. That much I know. I can feel it in the pauses, in the way her laughter arrives a second late, in the quiet that follows her when she thinks no one’s paying attention.
But what the fuck is really going on? What could possibly shake her like this?
I hate not understanding. I hate the feeling of standing just outside a room where something important is happening, voices low, door closed, and no one thinks to let me in.
For the first time in my life, I don’t know what to do. I can’t fix this, can’t charm it away, can’t bury it under work or momentum. All the things that usually make me useful suddenly mean nothing.
And that terrifies me more than I want to admit.
For the woman I want to spend my time with. For the woman I can’t keep my thoughts away from. For the woman I care about more than I should probably say out loud.
And I hate this feeling, this helplessness sitting heavy in my chest, like watching a storm roll in over the horizon and realizing I don’t know how to build shelter, only how to stand there and hope it spares her.