Chapter 4 #2
The names hit me hard, driving the remaining air out of my lungs.
While I had been sitting alone on a wind-battered island, staring at the ocean and trying to convince myself that my marriage was going to survive, he had been huddled in a boardroom with another woman, actively designing the next two years of his absence.
"Twenty-four months?" I whispered, the words tasting like ash in my mouth.
"At a minimum," Reid confirmed, his eyes scanning a complex, color-coded spreadsheet on his tablet, completely blind to the fact that he was systematically tearing my heart out of my chest. "I’m going to have to practically live at the Tacoma site for the first six months.
The oversight required is going to be relentless.
I can't trust the floor managers to understand the micro-tolerances of the fire-resistant casing.
I have to be there on the line, physically inspecting the first generation of units.
And once the assembly is stabilized, we have to finalize the international distribution deals.
I'll be flying to Europe and Tokyo every other week. "
He looked up from the screen, his expression glowing with an innocent, oblivious euphoria. He expected me to be thrilled. He expected me to match his adrenaline, to marvel at the sheer, staggering scale of the empire he was constructing.
"We are changing the world, Gwen," he said, his voice thick with a profound, unshakeable conviction. "We are going to eliminate the risk of thermal runaway in commercial energy storage forever. This is the legacy. This is what all the sacrifice has been for."
I stared at the man standing in my kitchen. He looked exactly like the man I had married. He had the same broad shoulders, the same sharp, aristocratic jawline, the same dark, intelligent eyes. But the soul inside of him had been entirely hollowed out and replaced by a corporate algorithm.
"You planned two more years of this," I said, my voice completely flat, stripped of all emotion because the pain was simply too vast to articulate. "Two more years of missing weekends. Two more years of canceled dinners. Two more years of endless travel."
"It's all temporary," Reid said, waving away my concern with a casual flick of his wrist. "Once the supply chain is automated, I can delegate the daily operations to the regional vice presidents. Then things will settle down. I promise."
I promise.
The words echoed in the quiet kitchen, mocking me.
It was the exact same promise he had made six months ago.
It was the exact same promise he had made a year before that, when he was desperately trying to secure his first round of venture capital funding.
The finish line wasn't real. It was just a tool he used to keep me running alongside him.
Reid checked the silver watch on his wrist, a sudden urgency tightening his posture. "I have to go. The transition team is waiting in the boardroom, and Victoria scheduled a press briefing for noon to control the narrative around the acquisition."
He walked over to me, leaning down to press a swift, perfunctory kiss against my cheek. That was it. That was all I got after we had been apart all weekend.
"I'll have my assistant order something incredible for dinner tonight to celebrate," Reid said, already turning toward the entryway, his mind already miles away. "I love you, Gwen. Have a great day."
The elevator doors opened and Reid stepped into the steel box.
The conversation was over. What little warmth he had provided in the space went with him, leaving me freezing cold as I stood directly beneath an air vent.
And even though this was a sunlit kitchen, I was completely frozen.
The absolute silence of the loft crashed down on my shoulders, a physical, crushing weight that forced me to sink into one of the velvet stools at the kitchen island.
I stared at the cooling espresso in my cup, my vision blurring as the devastating, undeniable truth finally shattered the last remaining illusions I had been clinging to.
There was never going to be a finish line.
The goalpost was an illusion, a mirage shimmering on the horizon, designed to keep me walking endlessly through a desert.
Reid genuinely believed what he was saying.
He wasn't lying to me out of malice; he was lying to me out of a profound, terminal blindness.
He truly believed that the next acquisition, the next factory, the next global expansion would finally be the one to satisfy his hunger.
But I could see the terrifying reality with absolute clarity.
Mitchell Energy was a beast that could never be satiated.
Once the Tacoma plant was integrated, there would be a flaw in the European distribution network that required his immediate intervention.
Once Europe was secured, there would be a hostile takeover attempt in South America that demanded his total focus.
The machine he had built was too massive, too complex, and too ravenous to ever allow him to step away. There would always be something else.
The rift inside of me, a fracture that had been slowly spiderwebbing across my heart for years, finally cracked wide open.
Reid was entirely consumed by the blinding glare of his own visionary ambition.
He was ascending to an altitude where oxygen was scarce, where human connections were viewed as inefficient, and where the only currency that mattered was velocity.
He was so busy building a legacy for us that he had completely forgotten how to live with me.
And in that brutal, rarified air, Victoria Albright was the only person who could survive.
I didn't hate her for moving my furniture during the executive meeting, or for dismissing my attempts at domestic normalcy, or for commanding the catering staff in my own home. That was just the petty, superficial sting of a corporate consultant marking her territory.
The true, horrifying power Victoria held was her absolute willingness to run at his grueling pace.
She never asked him to slow down. She never asked him to look back.
She stood beside him on the precipice, staring into the terrifying abyss of a twenty-four-month build-up phase requiring relentless travel and excessive oversight, and she didn't ask for a weekend off.
She handed him a pen and told him to conquer it.
She fed the fire that was slowly burning my marriage to the ground.
I wrapped my hands around the ceramic mug, the heat of the espresso seeping into my freezing palms. A single tear slipped over my lashes, tracking silently down my cheek, dropping onto the pristine quartz countertop.