Chapter 17 #2
“Was it protection? Were you protecting Burty’s retainer?
Protecting the firm? Or was it self-protection, burying your own complicity so deep that no one would ever find it?
” Sienna’s jaw was tight. Her hands were clenched at her sides.
“Because I’ve been trying to figure out which one is worse, and I keep arriving at the same answer: they’re the same thing. ”
“Let me explain—”
Sienna held up a hand.
“You’ve had three years to explain. You’ve had weeks in that conference room to explain.
You sat across from me and shared evidence and proposed an alliance and talked about integrity and the right thing, and you never once mentioned that you had been sitting on the single most damning piece of evidence in this entire case.
” Sienna’s voice rose. Not to shouting, to the raw intensity of someone who was no longer containing what she was feeling and was no longer interested in trying.
“I trusted you. I let you into the investigation. I let you into my bed. And you were withholding the document that would have made my entire investigation unnecessary.”
“That’s not—”
Adriana’s hand gripped the edge of her desk.
“Was the alliance real?” Sienna stepped forward.
“Because you let me fall in love with you while you were sitting on a secret that changes the meaning of everything. Not a mistake. Not an oversight. Three years of choosing silence while I was in that conference room trusting you with everything I had.”
“Sienna, no.” Adriana’s voice cracked. The Ice Queen she had rebuilt after their nights together, reconstructed brick by careful brick, collapsed.
The careful surface she had maintained through every confrontation since the gala, through the Palomar, the rooftop, the conference room debates, the nights in Sienna’s bed, fractured.
“The alliance was real. Everything was real. I buried the memo three years ago because I was afraid of losing the firm, and I should have disclosed it when we started working together, and I didn’t because I was ashamed and because telling you would have—”
“Would have what? Shown me who you really are?”
Adriana flinched. An actual, visible flinch, the first Sienna had ever seen on her face, the first crack in the Ice Queen that came from impact rather than from tenderness.
Her gray eyes went bright with tears she was fighting not to shed, and her hands gripped the edge of her desk, and she looked at Sienna across the distance of the office that had been their workspace and their battleground and, for two nights, a place much more vulnerable, and she said nothing.
Because there was nothing to say. Not because Adriana didn’t have words. She had more words than anyone Sienna had ever met. But because the truth of what Sienna had said was too complete and too accurate to be argued with, and Adriana was, underneath everything else, honest enough to recognize it.
Adriana’s eyes were wet. Sienna’s chest tore open a little at the sight.
The anger was enormous, but under it ran everything else.
The memory of Adriana’s laugh in the conference room, her hands sure on the case files, the warmth of her in Sienna’s bed.
She opened her mouth. For one terrible second, she was going to take it all back.
She didn’t.
“The partnership is over,” Sienna said. The words came out level, each one placed with the same careful deliberation she used in the cutting room when she was assembling the final version of a story and needed every frame to mean exactly what it meant.
“The alliance. The working sessions. The conference room. The shared drive. Whatever this was between us, the parts that were professional and the parts that weren’t. All of it.”
Adriana opened her mouth. Closed it. Her hands were white on the desk’s edge, and the muscles in her forearms were taut, and she looked like she was holding herself upright through will alone.
The eyes Sienna had loved, that Sienna still loved, were wet and wide and holding Sienna’s with a desperation that the Ice Queen had never shown before.
“Sienna. Please. Give me a chance to—”
“You had three years of chances.” Sienna’s voice was low, final, carrying the weight of a verdict that she was delivering not as a judge but as a woman who had been hurt by someone she had believed in.
“Stay away from me. Stay away from the project. Stay away from Dani. If you want to do the right thing, if you actually want to be the person you told me you could be in that conference room, you know where to send the evidence. All of it. Including the memo.”
She took a breath that shuddered on the inhale and steadied on the exhale, and she held Adriana’s gaze for three final seconds, and in those three seconds she let Adriana see everything: the anger, the hurt, the love that was still there beneath both of them. Then she turned and walked out.
Down the corridor. Past Andrew’s office, where Andrew was standing in his doorway with an expression that said he had heard everything through the thin walls and was deciding whether to intervene and choosing, with visible effort, not to.
Into the elevator. She pressed the lobby button. The doors closed, and the moment the metal panels sealed her from view, she pressed her back against the wall and her hands over her face and the tears came, not gentle, not relieved, but angry and burning and thick.
She had loved Adriana. She still loved Adriana.
That was the cruelest part; the love didn’t evaporate in the face of betrayal but remained, persistent and unwelcome, aching beneath the anger.
She loved the woman who had wept in her bed and laughed in the conference room and brought her oat milk coffee and kissed her in a parked car with fifteen years of loneliness behind it.
And that woman had been sitting on a three-year-old memo that proved she had prioritized money over justice and silence over truth.
Dani was in the lobby. She didn’t ask what happened.
She didn’t ask if Sienna was okay. She put her arm around Sienna’s shoulders and walked her to the car and drove her home to Echo Park, and neither of them spoke because there was nothing that words could do that Dani’s presence wasn’t already doing.
At Sienna’s apartment, Dani walked her inside, made tea she didn’t drink, and sat beside her on the couch where Adriana had sat three weeks ago with a legal folder and a flimsy excuse and a face that said she hadn’t come for the interview protocol.
The chamomile smell reached Sienna anyway, sweet and useless.
“What do you need?” Dani asked. Her voice was quiet, gentle, the voice of a woman who had been Sienna’s person through every crisis and heartbreak and late-night editorial decision of the last ten years and who was not leaving this couch until Sienna told her to.
Sienna pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. The apartment was dark. The city moved outside the windows. Through the wall, someone was playing music, a guitar and a woman’s voice, indistinct and melancholy. Everything looked like home and nothing felt like it.
“I need to finish the documentary,” she said.
Her voice was rough from the tears, but the words were clear.
The conviction underneath the pain was the same conviction she had carried since the gala, since the parking structure in Burbank, since the very first source had sat across from her and said, I’m here, aren’t I?
The conviction had not changed. The landscape around it had. “Without her.”
Dani nodded. She put her hand on Sienna’s knee and left it there, warm and steady and uncomplicated in a world that had just become very, very complicated.
They sat in the dark together while the city hummed and the night settled and the guitar played through the wall and the future rearranged itself into a shape that did not include Adriana Lovett.
Or so Sienna told herself. The love said otherwise. The love, stubborn and persistent and unwelcome, whispered that the story was not over. Sienna pressed her hands harder against her eyes and waited for the whisper to stop.
It didn’t.