Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
brOOKS
Ivy Sullivan is a marvel.
She doesn't arrive in the "Hamptons Camouflage" her partners assembled for her.
She marches down the center aisle of the gala tent in a black leather jacket, dark denim, and boots that look like they've seen a war zone.
A riot in a room full of statues. And when she takes the microphone from my trembling hand with a grip steadier than my own, she turns my public self-destruction into a love story the crowd can swallow.
I said "I do" and meant it. I dropped that microphone, pulled her into me, and kissed her like a man detonating his own life on purpose. Hundreds of people watched me torch every bridge I'd ever built, and I have never felt lighter.
"Who wants cake?" she asked, and the tent cracked open with laughter.
Three hundred people who usually need a board vote to exhale.
I watched the stiff faces of my directors cycle from horror to grudging acceptance, recalculating me in real time.
Ivy Sullivan redirected a room full of apex predators with two words and a dessert pivot.
I have never been more terrified of a woman, or more certain I'd follow her off a cliff.
Then I looked down and saw her bare ring finger.
The void where my grandmother's emerald-cut diamond should be, hit me like a cold front moving through my chest cavity.
That ring has been the anchor of our contract for weeks, the single prop that made the performance feel dangerously close to truth.
Seeing her hand empty, I could picture it sitting alone on the mahogany kitchen table where she'd left it, a goodbye I hadn't been ready to read.
The diamond was never the prize. She is the only asset that has ever mattered, and her bare hand is telling me she already considers herself gone.
I stayed close as we circulated, a shadow she didn't ask for. When I spotted Penelope Vanderbilt standing near the dessert bar, looking carved from ice and running out of oxygen, I steered Ivy toward her with a stride that had nothing recreational about it.
"You have nine lives, don't you?" Penelope said, her voice bitter, her eyes fixed on Ivy.
"I have excellent timing," Ivy corrected, her voice cool and level.
I stepped between them, a physical wall, and used the flat, cold tone I reserve for terminating contracts for cause.
"I saw the footage, Penelope. The security feed from the library.
You cornering her. Stealing her phone. The entire blackmail attempt.
I have every second of it. And if you ever come near Ivy or my family again, I won't release it to the board.
I will buy your lifestyle brand, strip it for parts, and sell the trademark to a discount retailer in Ohio. "
Her hand flew to her throat. She turned and walked away without another word, her heels sinking into the soft grass, robbing her retreat of any dignity.
I watched her go, but my focus was already locked on Ivy. The adrenaline was bleeding out of her in real time, her shoulders dropping, her jaw losing its defiant set. She looked like she was running on fumes and sheer stubbornness.
We walk toward the cottage in silence.
The night air is cool, carrying the first trace of autumn and the heavy scent of dampened earth. Ivy moves a few steps ahead of me, her arms wrapped around herself, and the leather jacket that looked like armor on stage now looks like dead weight she's desperate to shed.
I have spent my life managing narratives.
Controlling outcomes. Reading a room and adjusting my performance accordingly.
Every relationship, every alliance, every handshake has been a calculated move on a board I designed to keep myself untouchable.
And it worked. For years, the strategy was flawless.
Then a woman from New Jersey showed up with a crisis management playbook and a complete inability to be impressed by me, and the entire architecture collapsed.
I watch her boots scuff the gravel path.
She isn't performing anymore. The "fiancée" mask is gone, and what's left is the woman who spent ten thousand dollars she couldn't afford on a last-minute helicopter charter to save a man who didn't deserve the rescue.
She came back. Not because of the contract.
Not because of the money. She came back because she is pathologically incapable of letting someone she cares about self-destruct on a public stage, even when that someone is a controlling, emotionally illiterate billionaire who told her she was hovering.
My throat tightens. I have closed deals worth more than most countries' GDP without a single spike in my heart rate. But walking ten feet behind Ivy Sullivan on a gravel path in East Hampton, watching the moonlight catch the mess of her hair, I am falling apart at the molecular level.
She reaches the cottage door and pauses, her hand on the knob. She doesn't look back. She doesn't invite me in. She pushes the door open and steps inside, leaving it ajar behind her.
An open door. Not a slammed one, not a locked one. An open door from a woman who has spent her entire career closing them behind her.
I stand on the threshold, the sounds of the distant gala fading to a murmur behind me. The old Brooks would calculate this. Would run the risk assessment, weigh the exposure, consider the morning-after optics. The old Brooks would find a way to maintain control.
I am so tired of the old Brooks.
I step inside and close the door behind us.