Chapter 6
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?
Duane walks into the boardroom and sees me.
“Rachelle.” The warm smile. “What are you doing here, babe?”
He comes around the table. His hand lands on my shoulder and my stomach rolls so hard I taste bile.
“Sit down, Duane.” Victoria doesn’t look up from her folder.
His fingers tighten on my shoulder. Then lift. He rounds the table to the head chair, pulls it out, and his eyes drop to the folder in front of him. To the words Article 7 in crisp black print.
The color leaves his mouth first. Then his cheeks.
He sits.
“This is an emergency session of the governance committee.” Victoria nods toward the far end of the table. “Ms. Dietrich, outside counsel, will present the findings.”
The counsel stands. Opens a laptop. Turns it toward the room.
Duane and Cassandra at the Langham entrance. His hand on the small of her back. Her body curved into his. The timestamp in the corner.
“Jesus.” Bryan Walsh, barely above a whisper.
The second photo. Cassandra leaving the hotel the next morning. The third—Duane’s car in the garage. The fourth—a sidewalk, his arm around her shoulders, his wedding ring and her engagement ring catching the same light.
“Three occasions in a ten-day surveillance window.” The counsel’s voice is measured. “The CEO checked in under the name David Webster. Ms. Merrill arrived separately each time. Every image is timestamped by the camera. The most recent is eleven days ago.”
“Now wait a minute.” Duane’s palms hit the table. “Wait a goddamn minute. Who authorized surveillance on me?”
“The evidence was provided to the committee through appropriate channels,” Victoria says. “Continue, Ms. Dietrich.”
“You can’t just—“ Duane’s voice is climbing. “You can’t drag a man’s personal life into a boardroom—“
“Mr. Webster.” The counsel clicks to the next slide. “I’d like to direct the committee’s attention to the email correspondence.”
His words fill the screen. I don’t need to read them—I photographed every one while he showered—but I watch the room read them. Margaret Steele’s hand goes to her mouth. Sandra Liu pushes back from the table.
“These span several years,” the counsel says. “The committee will note the dates. The earliest messages predate the CEO’s marriage.”
“Those are private.” Duane is gripping the table edge. A vein pulses in his neck. “Private communications obtained without my consent—“
“Scroll down, please.” Victoria’s voice slices through him.
The counsel clicks.
I found the ring. It’s being sized. Two more months and this is done.
And below it:
I’m going to handle the board. I’m going to handle the divorce. By next year, we’ll be together. You and me and the baby.
“Handle the board.” Alan Prescott’s voice, flat and hard. “He wrote handle the board.”
“That’s out of context.” Duane’s chair screeches back. He’s half-standing, both hands braced on the mahogany, his neck flushed dark above his collar. “You’re taking one line from a private email and—“
“Sit down.” Victoria.
“—building a case—“
“Sit. Down.”
He drops into the chair. His breathing is ragged—shallow, harsh, audible from three seats away. His eyes dart around the table looking for a crack, an ally, anything. Bryan won’t meet his gaze. Margaret is staring at her hands. Sandra’s jaw is set.
“Let me explain.” He runs his hand through his hair.
The polished CEO is gone. What’s sitting at the head of the table is a man with sweat on his upper lip and panic clawing at his throat.
“Cassandra and I—we have a history. Before my marriage. But the emails are old, the photos—I don’t even know when—“
“Eleven days ago,” the counsel says. “As stated.”
“This is a coup.” He’s shaking his head, the chair swiveling. “Victoria, you’ve wanted me out since the comp vote. You’re using my wife to—“
“Your wife came to me.” Victoria leans forward. “With surveillance photographs. With emails. With a recording of your mistress confirming the affair, the engagement ring, and a pregnancy. Your wife did the work this board should have been doing for seven years.”
Pregnancy. The word hits the room like a grenade. Alan Prescott’s pen clatters onto the table. Bryan Walsh says “Christ” under his breath.
“My family built this company.” Duane’s voice drops. Raw. Stripped. “My grandfather started it in a garage. You can’t take it from me over—“
“Over a what?” Victoria tilts her head. “Finish the sentence, Duane.”
He doesn’t.
“You married to satisfy Article 7. You told your mistress—in writing—that you would handle this board. You used a governance provision as personal infrastructure and promised a third party you’d manipulate the outcome.
” Victoria straightens. “I’m calling a vote.
All in favor of removing Duane Webster as Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. ”
Bryan Walsh’s hand first. Then Sandra Liu. Then Margaret Steele, Alan Prescott, three more—rising around the table. Duane’s head jerks from hand to hand, his chest heaving, his mouth working open and shut with nothing coming out.
“Motion passes. Effective immediately.”
Duane’s hands drop into his lap. His shoulders cave. The Tom Ford bunches at his neck. The chair at the head of the table looks too big for the man sitting in it.
He looks at me.
I stand.
“You bought another woman a ring and told her you were leaving me.” My voice doesn’t shake. “I was never your wife.”
I pick up my bag and walk past him. Cedar and bergamot. Then the hallway air swallows it and I’m through.
The elevator doors close and my knees buckle. I catch the brass railing, my forehead against the cold mirrored wall, my breath fogging the glass. My legs won’t stop shaking and my teeth are chattering and it’s not cold.
Lobby. Marble. Glass doors. The parking garage heat slams into me—hot concrete, exhaust, baked asphalt. My car. Door shut. Lock pressed.
My hands are clamped around the steering wheel. The leather groans under my grip.
Phone out. The number is saved under Saturday Yoga. Copied from Cassandra’s wellness page weeks ago. Paulette doesn’t know about it.
Two rings.
“Hello?”
“This is Rachelle Webster. Duane’s wife.”
“How did you get this number?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m calling to let you know your boyfriend just got fired. The board removed him as CEO. Unanimous vote, about five minutes ago.”
“That’s—that’s not—his family built that—“
“I know. He said that too. It didn’t help.
” My thumb digs into the steering wheel seam.
“You can have him, Cassandra. I mean that. He’s all yours.
But the CEO title is gone. The salary is gone.
And my divorce attorney has already told me to expect a substantial settlement, so the money’s going too.
Everything he promised you was built on lies.
The board knows who he is now and they’ve cut him out. Good luck.”
“You bitch.”
“Goodbye, Cassandra.”
I end the call. My hands are trembling and my mouth is doing something my face hasn’t done in weeks. I’m smiling. Sharp and hard and real.
Paulette’s apartment is twenty-two minutes from the Webster Industries parking garage. I make it in sixteen.
She opens the door and I don’t have to say anything. Whatever’s on my face—the mascara, the smile, the wild electricity I can feel buzzing under my skin—she reads it in half a second. Her mouth drops open. Her hands fly up and grab my arms.
“No.”
“It’s done. He’s out.”
She screams. Pulls me through the door and screams again, this animal burst of joy that bounces off the walls of her narrow hallway, and her arms are around me and she’s squeezing so hard my ribs creak and I’m laughing into her shoulder—wet, shaky, completely unhinged.
“Tell me everything.” She drags me toward the kitchen. “Sit. Wait—champagne first. I bought it just for this moment.”
The cork hits the ceiling. Foam spills over her hands and she doesn’t wipe it, just shoves a glass at me and pours until it’s overflowing, her eyes locked on mine the whole time, her face flushed and bright and cracked wide open with something I haven’t seen on my sister since her wedding day.
“Unanimous, Paulette.” The champagne burns going down and I feel it bloom warm behind my sternum. “Every hand went up. I watched him count them. He couldn’t even speak.”
“I want to live in this moment forever.” She’s gripping the edge of the counter and her knuckles are white and her body is vibrating—I can see it, the same tremor that’s been running through me since the elevator, the full-body hum of something enormous finally landing. “What did you say to him?”
“I told him I was never his wife.”
“Rachelle.” My name comes out of her mouth cracked down the middle. Her eyes are filling and she blinks hard, fast, her jaw working. “I could kill you. I could actually kill you right now.”
“Don’t. I have too much to live for. My divorce attorney says the prenup has a morality clause.”
Paulette goes still. Completely, absolutely still—glass halfway to her mouth, her eyes locked on mine, her whole body suspended.
“A morality clause.”
“His lawyers insisted on it when we got married. It protects the company. A cheating penalty.” The champagne fizzes against my teeth. My cheeks ache from smiling. “He forgot he was the one who’d trigger it.”
The sound that comes out of my sister isn’t language.
It’s a shriek that starts low in her chest and climbs until it hits a pitch that makes the champagne glasses ring on the counter.
She grabs my wrist and squeezes until the bones grind together and I don’t pull away because the pain feels like the opposite of everything Duane’s grip ever felt like—fierce, joyful, the grip of someone who would burn the world down for me and never once ask me to smile while it happened.
“I may have also called Cassandra.” I take another drink. “I may have been slightly catty.”
“RACHELLE.”
“I told her she could have him. That the title and salary were gone and the settlement would take the rest.” The champagne is cold in my throat and the kitchen is warm and my sister’s face is the best thing I’ve seen in weeks. “She called me a bitch.”
Paulette’s laugh is savage. It rips through the kitchen and my chest cracks open and I’m laughing too—ugly, loud, the kind that hurts my ribs and makes my eyes stream.
Tears are cutting through what’s left of my mascara and I can feel them tracking down my cheeks and I don’t care.
The champagne is spilling because my hand is shaking and I don’t care about that either.
“She’s sitting in her apartment right now.” Paulette wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Wearing the ring of a man who just lost everything. And she called you a bitch.”
“I know.”
“Incredible. Iconic.” Paulette refills my glass.
Champagne splashes onto the counter. Neither of us moves to clean it.
“You just finished blowing up your marriage. What you’re at the beginning of is the rest of your life.
” She raises her glass. “To the rest of your life. Whatever you want it to look like.”
My throat tightens. I lift my glass and the crystal rings when it touches hers and the champagne is cold and sharp and perfect and my sister is looking at me with so much love that something behind my ribs finally, finally unclenches.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I glance down.
Duane.
Paulette sees it too. Her jaw tightens. “Don’t.”
I pick up the phone. Swipe to his contact. My thumb hovers over the red text at the bottom of the screen—Block this Caller—and something hot flares in my chest. Not rage. Not grief. Something clean and final, the feeling of a door that only locks from one side.
I tap it.
“Done,” I say, and set the phone face-down on the counter.
Paulette pours me more champagne.