Chapter 25
SIENNA
ONE YEAR LATER
I’m putting in the second earring when Cade comes in with something in his hand and no announcement, and stops behind me.
In the mirror I watch him look at the dress, then at my throat, then at me.
“May I?”
It’s a necklace. I’ve never seen it. It isn’t the kind of thing that arrives in a box from someone whose job it is to choose things, and I know that before he says a word, because he’s holding it like he isn’t sure it’s right.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I wanted to.” He lifts it over my head. “I saw it in a case and it looked like it had been made for you. I wasn’t leaving it there.”
“When were you in a jewelry store?”
“Tuesday. The board took lunch two doors down.”
“During the board lunch.”
“Before it. The old bastards could stand to wait.”
I laugh, and then his fingers are at the back of my neck, brief and careful with the clasp, and the chain settles cool against my skin, and every hair on my arms stands up.
Then his hands are gone. He steps back and meets my eyes in the mirror, and I turn my ring with my thumb the way I do a dozen times a day.
“You’re beautiful,” he says. “Most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
He looks happy. That’s the thing I keep noticing, a year on. There’s no distance in his face anymore, nothing held back for later. He’s just standing in our bedroom looking at his wife.
“I love you.” It comes out rougher than he means it to, and he has to stop. “I don’t know how I got this lucky.”
“Cade.”
“I mean it.”
I turn around to face him without the mirror between us. He’s still looking at me the way he was a second ago. My pulse kicks in my throat. I know exactly what would happen if I took one step. His hands in my hair, this dress on the floor, and neither of us making it out of the bedroom.
“People are counting on us to be at this party,” I whisper.
His gaze drops to my mouth, heavy and deliberate. “Let them count.”
Neither of us moves.
Cade closes his eyes, exhales a ragged breath, and steps back to save us both.
“Car’s here,” he says finally, his voice not quite steady.
“Security too?”
His expression goes suspiciously neutral, and I narrow my eyes.
“Cade.”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Enough.”
I pick up my clutch from the dresser. “Ashley was last seen in Europe.”
The charges hadn’t amounted to much. The video had been less forgiving. Apparently, Europe offered fewer people who recognized her on sight.
“According to whom?”
“Half the internet.”
“Half the internet also filmed her hitting you.” He buttons his jacket. “The security stays.”
There is no point arguing. I learned that about this particular subject months ago.
Cade cut the Vauclairs out of every part of his business.
He never told me what it cost. I found out because Marsh, after two glasses of wine at dinner, said, “Your husband appears to have developed some very expensive principles,” and then told me the number.
I asked Cade about it later. He said Richard sent the bill. Apparently Cade paid it.
Ashley has not been in the same room with me since the night she hit me. I don’t know where she lives now, or who she’s seeing, or whether she’s happy, and I discovered somewhere along the way that not knowing is considerably better.
“Fine. Keep your security.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t sound so pleased with yourself.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“Badly.”
“Also true.”
He goes to check on the car, and I take one more look at the room before I follow him.
The cottage is bigger than it was. The kitchen gained six feet and a new dishwasher, Cade gained an office because running a company from my couch had stopped being dignified, and the wall that made this room a box came down after three contractors said it couldn’t and Cade found a fourth who understood the motivating power of obscene amounts of money.
His shoes take up more of the closet than seems structurally possible, and there is a jar of blue cheese dressing in the refrigerator that he claims to smell through two sealed containers and has learned to live with anyway.
He moved here. I never went back.
The gala is already crowded when we arrive. I know half the faces before we make it through the doors, and by the time my coat is gone, Marsh has found me with two operations directors and a question about the expansion schedule, and Cade loses me before we make it twenty feet.
I glance back once. He’s smiling. Not the thing he does with his mouth for cameras. Smiling.
It takes another ten minutes before I get back to him.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“Immensely.”
“You realize three people have spoken to me without acknowledging you were standing there.”
“Four.”
“You counted?”
“The fourth was particularly satisfying. Halloran.”
I stare at him. He gives me the innocent look he has spent the last year perfecting and remains terrible at.
The year has been better than good to Ellerin.
We closed the strongest year in company history in June, and the employee profit-sharing pool broke a record with it, which meant more to me than the revenue number and made Marsh cry in my office after pretending something had gotten into his eye.
The board stopped introducing me as James Ellerin’s granddaughter somewhere around Christmas.
Now they call me before they call Cade, and he enjoys that too.
I used to stand beside him in rooms like this and keep a running list in my head.
Names. Spouses. Deals. Which conversation he needed next, who should be seated near whom, whether he’d eaten, whether his drink was still full.
Tonight a board member catches Cade near the bar and starts talking about something involving ports, and I don’t follow, because I don’t need to.
He has people to help with his work. I have people to help with mine. We find each other anyway.
Patricia waves a champagne flute over her head from across the ballroom.
“There,” I say, and Cade looks.
The book club has been given a table near the front. Barbara is delighted and has John on her arm, and I know him at once from her stories. Nancy looks as though she has been brought to observe a particularly elaborate species of bird. Patricia is wearing something silver and furious.
“You did this,” I say.
“They needed a table.”
“They did not need this table.”
“I wanted them where we could sit with them after the program.”
I don’t say anything to that, because I can’t.
Patricia reaches us first.
Cade looks past Patricia. “Where’s Cardio?”
“Couldn’t keep up.” Patricia takes a sip of champagne. “I’m seeing Jackhammer now.”
Cade turns to Nancy.
She shrugs. “One doesn’t bring window dressing to a company gala.”
Patricia points her flute at him. “I was promised alcohol.”
“You have alcohol,” Cade points out.
“This is champagne. I was promised the stuff you bring to book club.”
“Patricia,” I say.
“What? He set a standard.”
Cade nods solemnly. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“You encourage her,” I say.
“She frightens me.”
“I heard that,” Patricia says.
“That was the intention.”
“He’s improving,” Nancy says.
Barbara pats Cade’s arm. “He really is.”
“I am standing here.”
“We know, dear,” Patricia says.
I laugh.
Cade looks at me. A year later, in rooms full of people who want something from both of us, I still catch him looking at me for no reason except that I’m there, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop noticing.
The lights dim before Patricia can extract anything more expensive from my husband.
We take our seats for dinner. Cade and I are at the company table for the first portion of the program, which means Patricia gives him a wounded look from twenty feet away until he mouths later and she accepts this with grave reluctance.
The first awards are what I expect. Service anniversaries. Safety. Operations. Marsh receives a standing ovation for forty years and cries openly this time, which makes three other people cry and then makes Marsh furious about it.
I know the program. I approved most of it.
Which is why I’m confused when the board chair returns to the microphone after the final scheduled recognition.
“We have one more.”
I look at Marsh. Marsh looks studiously at his dessert.
Oh, no.
Beside me, Cade pushes his chair back and stands, buttoning his jacket.
“Cade.” I don’t move my lips much. “What did you do?”
“Nothing illegal.”
“That is an alarmingly specific answer.”
One corner of his mouth lifts, and then he’s walking toward the stage.
The room applauds before he reaches it. Cade Belluomo still does that to rooms, and he probably always will. The difference is that I no longer disappear beside it.
He shakes the chair’s hand, takes the microphone, and waits.
I know that wait. I’ve watched him use it in boardrooms, in negotiations, and in one disastrous book-club discussion about whether a fictional heroine should have forgiven a fictional idiot before page two hundred. Tonight his eyes find mine.
“I was told to keep this brief.”
Someone laughs. Cade looks toward Marsh.
“That instruction came from a man who has known me long enough to know better.”
More laughter, and then his attention comes back to me.
“Most of the people in this room knew James Ellerin.”
The room quiets, and my throat tightens before I can stop it.
“He built this company from a room above a hardware store, and by the time he was done, thousands of people depended on decisions that started at his desk. He spent the end of his life worrying about what happened after him. He wanted the company protected. He wanted the jobs protected. He wanted the name protected.”
His eyes stay on mine.
“He got what he asked for.”
A small laugh moves through the room. I don’t move with it.
“But James was wrong about one thing. He thought Ellerin needed someone to preserve what he built.” Cade looks around the room. “It didn’t.” Then back to me. “It needed someone willing to build past it.”
The room is completely silent.