Chapter 2 #2
“You don’t know. You know the facts. You don’t know what it was like to sit in a lawyer’s office at eight months pregnant and sign paperwork dividing the life I thought we were building.
You don’t know what it’s like to walk past the Buchanan Biopharma building every day on my way to work and feel my chest cave in.
You don’t know the first thing about what the last fifteen months have been like because you weren’t there. You chose not to be there.”
He flinched. A real one — not performed, not controlled. Something I said had hit bone.
“I’m not asking you to tell me,” he said quietly. “I’m not asking for anything.”
“Good. Because there’s nothing I owe you.
We were married for five years. I put my career on hold for your foundation, your galas, your network.
I smiled at every donor’s wife and every board member’s husband and I forgot what my own work felt like.
That’s on me — I made that choice. But the affair?
That was you. That was your entitlement and your carelessness and the culture your father built and you swallowed whole.
So no, you don’t get to recuse yourself from a vote and look at me with those eyes like you’ve changed and expect me to notice.
I am here for the grant. I earned my place on that shortlist. And you will treat me like every other finalist or I will withdraw and file a conflict-of-interest complaint with the foundation’s oversight board. Are we clear?”
“Crystal,” he said.
“Good.”
I picked up my coffee and walked away. This time my hands were shaking, but I kept the cup low at my side where he couldn’t see it. I found the door, the hallway, the elevator. I stood inside it alone and pressed the button for the lobby and watched the numbers descend and breathed.
I had said too much. I knew that even as the words were still in my throat.
The plan had been clipped, professional, a wall of ice.
Instead I’d given him the wound. I’d handed him a roadmap of exactly how badly he’d broken me, and now he had it, and he would use it — not as a weapon, because even the old Liam wasn’t that cruel, but as information.
As a map for how to come back. And I could not afford for Liam Buchanan to know the way back to me.
The elevator opened. I crossed the lobby, pushed through the glass doors, and stood on the sidewalk in the November cold until my breathing steadied.
Then I got in my car and drove to Cambridge.
Kinsey had Fern on the floor of the apartment when I got home.
The living room was scattered with the soft chaos of a baby’s afternoon — a play mat, a ring of plastic keys, a burp cloth draped over the arm of the couch, and Fern herself in the center of it all, sitting propped against a pillow and gnawing on a rubber giraffe with the focus of a scientist studying a specimen.
“Mama’s home,” Kinsey said, without looking up from her laptop, which was balanced on the couch cushion beside her. She was grading lab reports. She always graded lab reports when she babysat, because Kinsey Doyle had never in her life done only one thing at a time.
I dropped my bag by the door and went straight for Fern. Scooped her up, pressed my nose into her hair. She smelled like baby shampoo and oatmeal and the specific warm-bread scent that was just her. She squirmed, made a sound that was half-laugh and half-protest, and immediately grabbed my earring.
“Ow. Okay, we’re trading.” I unhooked her fingers and handed her the giraffe back. She accepted the trade and resumed chewing. I held her against my chest and felt the last two hours of tension start to unknot.
“How was it?” Kinsey asked. She was watching me now, laptop forgotten. Kinsey had a radar for when I was holding something, and she never let it pass uncalibrated.
“Fine. The presentation went well. A board member gave me unsolicited advice about my pediatric data. I think she might be an ally.”
“And?”
“And what?”
Kinsey raised an eyebrow. The eyebrow said everything. I sat down on the floor with Fern in my lap and let her grab my fingers.
“He tried to talk to me after the session. I shut it down.”
“Define ‘shut it down.’”
“I told him the marriage was over, the affair was his fault, and if he couldn’t treat me like every other finalist I’d file a complaint.”
Kinsey stared at me. Then a slow, fierce grin spread across her face. “That’s my girl.”
“I also told him he destroyed our marriage for something meaningless and that he doesn’t know what the last fifteen months have been like.”
The grin faded. “Hal.”
“I know.”
“That’s not shutting it down. That’s ripping the door off the hinges and showing him what’s behind it.”
“I know.”
Kinsey closed her laptop and moved to the floor beside me.
Fern, sensing an audience, waved the giraffe and shrieked with delight.
We both looked at her instead of each other for a moment, which was one of the many things babies were good for — providing a neutral space in the middle of difficult conversations.
“Did he seem different?” Kinsey asked carefully.
“I don’t care if he seemed different.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I looked at Fern. Her dark eyes — his eyes — were fixed on the giraffe with total concentration. She had his jawline, too. Every day she looked a little more like him, and every day I loved her more fiercely for being entirely her own person in spite of it.
“He recused himself from the final vote,” I said. “Told Hale before the session. He said he didn’t want his position to affect my chances.”
Kinsey was quiet. That was unusual enough to make me look at her. She was chewing the inside of her lip the way she did when she was thinking something she knew I wouldn’t want to hear.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to say that’s a decent thing to do and I don’t want to hear it.”