10. Skye
— ? —
Skye
The days after the gala blurred together. I lost track of time somewhere between the crying and the pizza boxes.
I catch a glimpse of myself in Ellen’s bathroom mirror and almost don’t recognize the woman staring back.
Greasy hair pulled into a messy bun. Dark circles under eyes that have forgotten how to cry.
Sweatpants I’ve worn for - how many days now?
Three? Four? The fabric is starting to smell like defeat.
I look terrible.
I feel worse.
But my laptop is open on the coffee table, and my evidence document has grown to seventeen pages.
I’ve been researching forensic document analysis, metadata extraction, digital paper trails.
Every rabbit hole leads to another, and I follow them all with the intensity of someone who has nothing left to lose.
I may look like a disaster, but my mind has never been sharper.
Ellen appears in the doorway, taking in the scene: the unwashed hair, the empty pizza boxes forming a cardboard skyline across the coffee table, the woman who used to grace magazine covers now buried under a blanket with tomato sauce on her chin.
“You’re allowed to fall apart,” she says carefully. “But not forever. She doesn’t get to win.”
“I’m not falling apart.” I don’t look up from my laptop. “I’m regrouping. There’s a difference.”
Ellen surveys the pizza graveyard. “This is regrouping?”
“Strategic regrouping. The pizza is fuel.”
“Fuel for what? A cholesterol emergency?”
I finally look at her. She’s dressed for work, laptop bag over her shoulder, that concerned crease between her eyebrows that’s become permanent over the past few days.
“I’m building a case,” I say. “Everything I remember - every meeting Adriana scheduled, every time Miranda acted strange, every document I signed that could have been copied. I’m writing it all down. Creating a timeline.”
“And you learned investigative journalism how?”
“I learned to pay attention.” I scroll through my document, the words blurring slightly from exhaustion. “Eight years of board meetings and donor events and watching people lie to each other’s faces. You pick things up.”
Ellen sets down her bag and crosses to the couch, peering over my shoulder at the screen. “Okay, I’m impressed. But maybe take a shower? You’re starting to smell like a conspiracy theorist.”
“Conspiracy theorists don’t have evidence. I have patterns. I have dates. I have a list of every person who had access to my signature.”
“You have seventeen pages of notes and marinara sauce on your chin.” She hands me a napkin. “Shower. Now. I’ll make actual food when I get home from work.”
After she leaves, I don’t shower. Instead, I find myself cleaning - not because I want to, but because I’ve run out of excuses to avoid the box in the corner of Ellen’s closet.
It’s mine - one of the few things I grabbed from the mansion in my fog of grief. A small cardboard box filled with photographs, ticket stubs, handwritten notes. Evidence of a life before I became Mrs. Rowland.
I open it slowly, like I’m defusing a bomb.
The first photo hits me like a punch to the chest.
Myself, in college. Holding up a thick stack of papers bound with a rubber band - my completed screenplay draft, the one that won third place in that student competition.
I’m grinning at the camera like I’ve won the lottery.
My hair is a mess, wild curls escaping from a scrunchie.
I’m wearing a ratty sweatshirt with a coffee stain on the sleeve.
I look happy. I look like someone who believes the world is hers for the taking.
“What would you do?” I whisper to the photo.
College-Skye would fight. College-Skye would burn the whole thing down and dance in the ashes. College-Skye hadn’t yet learned to make herself small, to fit into the shape someone else designed for her.
Something shifts inside me. A crack in the numbness. Not grief - something sharper. Something that feels almost like anger.
I dig deeper into the box. Movie ticket stubs from the indie cinema in my college town.
A napkin with notes scrawled on it - dialogue for a scene I was working on, back when I thought I’d be a screenwriter instead of a professional wife.
A photo of me and my roommate Maya, both of us laughing so hard we’re crying, our faces pressed together in the frame.
I was a person. Before Jayden, before the Foundation, before the galas and the photographers and the endless performance of being Mrs. Rowland - I was a person with ambitions and dreams and a future that belonged to me.
When did I give that up? When did I decide his dreams were bigger than mine, that his career was more important, that being his partner meant erasing everything that made me me?
“I didn’t do this, Ellen,” I say when she returns that evening.
She’s carrying grocery bags, looking exhausted from her own day, but she sets them down and gives me her full attention. “I know.”
“No, I mean-” I set down my laptop, the screen still glowing with my evidence file.
“I’ve spent the last week feeling sorry for myself.
Waiting for someone to fix this for me. But no one’s coming.
Jayden’s not going to swoop in and save the day.
The board isn’t going to suddenly believe me without proof.
I’m the only one who can clear my name.”
“Okay…”
“So I’m going to do it.” I pull up the file, scrolling through the pages of research, the timeline I’ve built, the questions I still need answered.
“Not for him. Not for the marriage. For me. For every kid who got a Starlight scholarship and is now wondering if it was dirty money. For Maria at Juilliard and DeShawn and all of them.” My voice strengthens, steadies.
“Those kids believed in me. I’m not going to let Adriana make them think they were wrong. ”
Ellen studies me for a long moment. Then she smiles - the first real smile I’ve seen from her since the gala.
“There she is. I was wondering when Skye Bennett would show up.”
“She’s been hiding under the pizza boxes.” I manage a weak smile of my own. “But she’s done hiding.”
Ellen unpacks the groceries, pulling out vegetables and actual protein instead of more delivery containers. “So what’s the plan?”
“I need to find Miranda Costello. Jayden’s assistant. She tried to warn me at the gala, right before everything exploded. She knows something.”
“You think she was involved?”
“I think she was used. And I think she feels guilty enough to talk.” I close my laptop. “But I need leverage. I need to know what I’m walking into.”
Ellen hesitates, her hand hovering over a bag of spinach. Then she says: “Actually… I’ve been doing some digging of my own.”
“What?”
“I work in tech, remember? Data analysis is literally my job.” She pulls out her phone, opens Instagram, starts scrolling. “I found Miranda’s social media.”
“And?”
Ellen turns the phone toward me. The screen shows a photo of crystal blue water, a private infinity pool overlooking the Caribbean.
The next photo: Miranda Costello in designer swimwear, lounging on a yacht.
The next: shopping bags from Hermès, Chanel, Louis Vuitton - the kind of haul that screams “someone else is paying.”
“St. Barts,” Ellen says. “About five months ago - right after Adriana joined the company. Private villa. The kind of place that costs twenty thousand a week.”
I stare at the photos. Something cold settles in my stomach.
“That’s not an assistant’s vacation. And that’s not how someone spends money when their mother is dying.”
“Unless someone told her to.” Ellen meets my eyes. “Unless it was part of the payment - and the blackmail. Hard to claim you were coerced when your Instagram shows you living your best life on a yacht.”
“Adriana was building evidence against her own accomplice.”
“From day one. So Miranda could never turn on her without looking complicit.”
I look at the photos again. Miranda’s smile in every picture is slightly forced, like someone who knows they’re being bought but hasn’t decided how to feel about it yet.
Miranda had access to Jayden’s calendar. Miranda had access to the executive floor, to signature samples, to everything Adriana would have needed to build her case. Miranda had been nervous and guilty at the gala, trying to warn me before the bombs dropped.
Miranda is the key to proving everything.
And I’m going to find her.