18. Sutton
— ? —
Sutton
“Vivienne. A word.”
She turned from the conversation she was having with two donors, her smile still in place.
“Of course,” she said, excusing herself smoothly. “Is something wrong with the arrangements?”
I didn’t answer. I walked toward the far corner of the ballroom, away from the crowd but not far enough, not private enough, and I didn’t care.
I had spent the last hour watching Charlotte move through the room in that green dress, watching her let my mother speak to her without running, and the whole time the message from Jay had been burning a hole in my pocket.
Jay: The deletion was made from a secondary access point. Account registered to Vivienne. I’m sorry, Sutton.
I stopped near the windows where the light from the harbor came through, where anyone walking past could hear us if they listened, and turned to face her.
“The morning of Charlotte’s wedding,” I said. “She sent me a text.”
Something flickered across Vivienne’s face. Just for a second, just a crack in the mask, before she smoothed it over.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“It was deleted off my phone within two minutes of arriving,” I said. “The carrier logs show the deletion came from a secondary access point. Your account, Vivienne. Your login. Your hand.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” I said. “Tell me I’m wrong, Vivienne.”
“You’re not wrong,” she said.
I had known, somewhere beneath the denial, I had known it had to be her because she was the only one who touched my phone.
“Say it again,” I said. “I want to hear you say it out loud, in your own words, so there’s no confusion about what you did.”
“I deleted a text from Charlotte Waltham,” Vivienne said. “She was begging you to come get her. And I made sure you never saw it.”
A couple walked past us, close enough to hear, and I saw them glance over with curiosity before moving on. I didn’t lower my voice.
“I protected you,” she said.
“Protected me from what?”
“From her.” For the first time, something cracked in Vivienne’s composure.
“From the mess she made of you for months. She divorced you, Sutton. She signed the papers. And the second she got cold feet about marrying Smith, she wanted to come running back. Do you know what it was like, watching you fall apart over a woman who already walked out on you once? Do you know how many nights I sat in your office cleaning up after her chaos while you pretended everything was fine?”
“That wasn’t your decision to make,” I said.
“Someone had to make it.” Her voice was rising now, and I could see people at nearby tables starting to notice.
“The divorce was final. You were finally free of her. You were finally moving forward. And then she sends you a text on the morning of her wedding to someone else, begging you to take her back, and I’m supposed to let that blow everything up?
I’m supposed to watch you throw away everything we built because she changed her mind at the last second? ”
“We didn’t build anything,” I said. “You work for me. That’s all you’ve ever done.”
“I’ve done everything for you.” She stepped closer, and her mask was fully gone now.
“I’ve anticipated every need, solved every problem, made sure everything ran perfectly so you could focus on what mattered.
And she gave you nothing but heartache, and you would have gone running back to her the second she asked. ”
“Yes,” I said. “I would have. Because I never stopped loving her, divorce or no divorce. Because she was asking me to save her from a marriage she didn’t want. She needed me and I wasn’t there, and now I know it’s because you made sure I wouldn’t be.”
“You would have destroyed yourself for her,” Vivienne said.
“That was my choice to make,” I said. “Mine. Not yours. You stole months of my life. You stole her life. You let her believe I abandoned her when she needed me most, and you did it because you were jealous of a woman who actually had a claim on me.”
“I had a claim on you,” Vivienne said, and her voice broke on the words. “Every time you needed someone, I was there. And she waltzed in and out of your life like it was a hotel she could check into whenever it suited her, and you loved her anyway. You loved her more than you ever saw me.”
I stared at her, at this woman I had trusted with everything, and felt nothing but cold.
“You’re right,” I said. “I never saw you. Because there was nothing to see. You were good at your job, and I was grateful for that, and that’s where it ended. Whatever you thought was happening between us, whatever you convinced yourself you were building, it was in your head. It was never real.”
“You’re done,” I said.
She went still.
“I want you out of Newport by the end of the day. I want you out of my company by the end of the month. And I want you to understand that if I ever see you again, if you ever come near me or Charlotte or anyone I care about, I will make sure everyone in this industry knows exactly what you did and why you’re unemployable. ”
“You can’t do this,” she said. “Everything I know about your business, your clients, your…”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Sue me. Sell your stories. Do whatever you need to do to feel like you’ve won something. But you’re done, Vivienne. We’re done. And nothing you say or do will change that.”
Movement at the edge of my vision. I turned and saw Charlotte standing twenty feet away, close enough to have heard everything, her face gone white, her champagne glass frozen halfway to her lips.
I didn’t watch Vivienne leave. I didn’t care where she went or how she felt or what wreckage I’d left behind.
I left Vivienne standing in the wreck of the life she’d built managing mine, and crossed the room toward Charlotte, who had spent six months hating me for a silence that had never once been mine.