Chapter 6 #2
“He walked in with Sloane. Both of them. Matching confidence. Like it was their day.” I lean my head back against the cushion.
The ceiling fan is turning in slow circles and I watch the blades go around.
“My father announced James as CEO and Preston launched out of his chair screaming that the job was his. In front of the whole board.”
“Oh my God.”
“Then my father fired them both. Right there, in front of everyone. Security walked in.” I take another sip of wine.
The fury that powered me through the boardroom is draining out of my arms and legs, and what’s underneath is quieter and stranger.
Not emptiness. More like the ringing silence after a very loud noise.
“Diana read the termination clause. My mother laid every receipt, every photo, every hotel invoice on the table. And the San Francisco photos. The elevator ones.”
Cecily’s hand goes to her mouth. “In front of the whole board?”
“In front of the whole board. And Preston just—he went gray. The color drained out of him.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was family.” I close my eyes. The ceiling fan pushes warm air across my face and I feel the sweat at my hairline cool. “My father said you were family. Past tense.”
Cecily exhales—a long, slow push of air. She pulls her legs up under her. “How do you feel?”
The ceiling fan turns. I track one blade through a full rotation.
The trembling in my hands has stopped. I lift the wine and take another sip and my arm feels heavy—thick, sluggish, like my blood has been replaced with something denser.
The adrenaline is leaving and what it’s taking with it is the razor clarity, the ice-cold control, and what’s left is a tired woman on a couch with a glass of wine and a marriage that ended two hours ago.
“Relieved. Exhausted.” I press my palm flat against my sternum.
My heartbeat is slow now—too slow, like my body overcorrected.
“Sad, which makes no sense because he earned every second of what just happened. But I’m sad anyway.
Not for him. For the version of us that never existed.
The one where he came home and said thank you and kissed the kids and looked at me like I was enough. ”
“That version was never real, Brit.”
“I know. But I believed in it for seven years, and that’s a lot of years to grieve.”
My phone buzzes in my bag. I pull it out. Preston’s name on the screen.
I stare at it. The phone vibrates in my palm—one, two, three, four—and I watch his name pulse on the glass and I think about answering. About hearing whatever scrambled combination of fury and desperation and blame he’s assembled in the hour since security walked him out.
The call goes to voicemail.
He calls again. I set the phone face-down on the cushion. We both watch it vibrate against the fabric. Then it stops.
I turn the phone to silent. Pick it back up.
“I need to call my mom,” I say. “I was supposed to get the kids by three.”
Cecily looks at me, then at the wine glass, then back at me. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to.
“Yeah.” I almost laugh. “I’m not driving anywhere.”
I dial my mother. She picks up on the first ring.
“The kids,” I say. “Can you keep them tonight? I’m at Cecily’s and I’ve been—”
“Of course.” No hesitation. No questions. “They’re fine. Rosie’s napping. Lily’s reading to Nancy in the garden. Stay where you are.”
“Thank you, Mom.”
“You did well today, Brittany.” Her voice is low, private—the mother voice, not the general’s. “I admire the strength you showed.”
I hang up. My eyes are stinging and I press my fingers against them until it stops.
Cecily is watching me with her wine glass held at an angle, a grin spreading across her face that I haven’t seen since before I called her from the school parking lot three weeks ago.
“What?” I say.
“The kids are safe. You’re off duty. Your asshole husband just got fired in front of a full boardroom.” She stands up, crosses to the kitchen, and comes back with the bottle. She tops off my glass. Tops off hers. Sets the bottle on the coffee table like she’s planting a flag.
She lifts her glass.
“To being rid,” she says, “of that cheating, lying, two-faced asshole scum. Who told you to join a gym while he was booking spa weekends with his secretary.”
I laugh. A real laugh—loud, sharp, the kind that hurts the muscles under my ribs because they haven’t been used in weeks. “Cecily—”
“No, I’m not done.” She’s standing now, wine sloshing, one hand on her hip.
“To Brittany Greenwood, who is beautiful and perfect and who just has her own husband fired in front of the board of directors. That man walked in thinking he was getting a crown and walked out with security guards. Security guards, Brit.”
“Four of them.”
“Four!” She throws her free hand in the air.
“To the woman who packed his lunches and pressed his suits and raised his three children while he didn’t even put his plate in the dishwasher—and who just watched him lose everything.
Severance? Gone. Stock? Gone. Corner office?
Gone. Sloane?” She raises her glass higher. “Also gone.”
“Also gone,” I repeat, and something in my chest cracks open—not grief this time, not fury. Something lighter. Something that has been trapped under seven years of I’ll figure it out and is only now getting air.
“To you.” Cecily clinks her glass against mine so hard the wine jumps. “To you, you gorgeous, terrifying woman.”
I drink. The wine is warm going down and the ceiling fan is turning and Cecily is standing in her living room in yoga pants giving a toast like she’s at a podium, and I am sitting on her couch in the middle of the afternoon with mascara smudged on my fingertips and a marriage in ruins and three children safe at my mother’s house and a husband who is right now sitting in a car somewhere trying to call a wife who will never pick up again.
And I’m laughing. I’m laughing and my hands are steady and my back doesn’t hurt and tomorrow I will have to tell my children and file for divorce and figure out what the rest of my life looks like without the man I built it around.
But right now—right now—Cecily is pouring the last of the bottle into my glass and saying “I’m opening another one, don’t even try to stop me,” and the jacarandas outside her window are dropping purple blossoms across the front walk, and I am free.
I am free and it is terrifying and I have earned every single second of it.