Chapter 17 #2
“Paige, Malcolm walked into my office yesterday morning, dropped his entire schedule on my desk, and told me he was completely unavailable for the foreseeable future.” Gavin leaned in slightly so he wouldn’t have to shout over the hissing steam wands.
“He is still the CEO of this firm. He hasn’t signed anything away officially.
But as far as the corporate world is concerned, the man is a ghost.”
The chaotic noise of the bustling coffee shop seemed to vanish, plunging me into a sudden, ringing silence. The polished concrete floor felt incredibly unsteady beneath my wet boots. “He just walked out?”
“He dumped his phone in my top drawer and walked out,” Gavin confirmed, his voice calm and steady.
He was delivering the objective facts, making sure I understood the gravity of the situation.
“We are in the middle of closing the funding for the Klein Tower. It is the crown jewel of his entire career, the building he has poured his blood into for the last five years. We have a syndicate of high-stakes international investors who flew in from Tokyo and London specifically to finalize the allocations this week. They are incredibly traditional. They expect the founding CEO at the head of the table.”
Gavin shifted his briefcase to his other hand, unfazed by the memory of the corporate crisis. “When they found out Malcolm was absent, they threatened a mutiny. They threatened to pull hundreds of millions of dollars out of the foundation budget right there in my office.”
“What did you do?” I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.
“I put them in a conference room with bad coffee and I called Malcolm’s personal line,” Gavin said. “I told him the investors were threatening to walk. I told him he needed to put on a suit, come down to the boardroom for one hour, and save the biggest financial deal of our lives.”
“And?” I whispered, my voice barely audible. “What did he say?”
“He was incredibly calm,” Gavin said, a faint smile touching the corners of his mouth.
“He told me to handle it. He said he trusted me to keep the walls up, but if the investors wanted to walk, I should let them walk. He told me to let the building permits expire and let the tower sink into the dirt if they didn’t want to deal with me.
He explicitly said he couldn’t leave Ballard because he was busy fixing the only foundation that actually mattered to him. ”
The breath left my lungs.
I stared at Gavin, my knuckles turning stark white where I gripped the heavy canvas straps of my shopping bags. Every single defense I had tried to resurrect during my freezing morning walk shattered into dust.
When Malcolm had sat in the dark of his penthouse the night before and told me he didn’t care about his empire, a cynical, self-preserving part of my brain had tried to write it off as a temporary lapse in judgment.
I had tried to convince myself that his manual labor at my theater was a side project, a momentary expression of extreme guilt squeezed in between his high-stakes corporate negotiations.
I assumed he was keeping his iron grip on the skyline while playing the martyr in the mud.
Hearing the brutal, unvarnished truth from the man currently catching the massive weight of Malcolm’s abandoned kingdom obliterated my final, lingering doubts.
Malcolm hadn’t officially resigned, but he was actively risking his crown jewel.
He was playing a massive, dangerous game of chicken with his investors, willing to slaughter the towering ambition that had destroyed our marriage just so he could be free to haul stage weights.
He was putting my community theater above a multi-billion-dollar skyscraper.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Paige,” Gavin said softly, the exhaustion briefly showing through his steady demeanor.
“It is a massive headache. The Mayor’s office called twice yesterday.
The zoning board is breathing down my neck.
Two different tech billionaires called to offer hostile buyout options.
Malcolm is ignoring all of them. But I am absolutely thrilled to carry the load. ”
I looked at him, stunned by his lack of resentment. “Why aren’t you furious with him? He abandoned his post. He left you to manage a massive crisis by yourself.”
“Because I’ve been his partner for fifteen years,” Gavin said simply, his voice carrying a profound loyalty.
“I was there when he drafted his first commercial building on a wet napkin in a dive bar. I watched him sacrifice his sleep, his health, and eventually his marriage for glass and steel. Since you walked out of that office, I have watched him operate as a ghost. He was a walking corpse in a tailored suit, Paige. He was miserable, and he was taking the entire firm down with him because his heart was dead.”
Gavin reached out and gently squeezed my shoulder, the physical contact grounding me in the noisy, chaotic room.
“When he told me he was going to Ballard, I told him to go get his wife,” Gavin said, his eyes perfectly serious.
“I told him I would hold the walls up here for as long as it took for him to fix his life. He loves you, Paige. He is an absolute idiot for how long it took him to see the damage he was doing to you, but he is unequivocally all in now. He would let the whole skyline fall into the Sound if it meant keeping you safe.”
“I have an iced Americano for Gavin,” the barista called out loudly from the pickup counter, breaking the intense bubble that had formed around us.
Gavin blinked, dropping his hand from my shoulder and pulling himself back into the present moment.
He gave me a brief, supportive nod. “I have to go. I have a room full of furious bankers waiting to yell at me about profit margins. Just take care of yourself, Paige. And go easy on him. He’s bleeding out there. ”
He turned and walked away, smoothly grabbing his iced coffee off the counter and pushing his way out through the heavy glass doors into the freezing Seattle rain, instantly vanishing into the sea of dark umbrellas.
I was left standing frozen in the middle of the bustling coffee shop. The loud conversations of the executives around me, the clinking of ceramic mugs against saucers, the hissing of the steam wands all faded away into a dull static.
The truth was glaringly obvious. There was absolutely no more room for denial.
There were no more defensive walls left for me to hide behind.
Malcolm had willingly cast himself out of the kingdom he had built.
He was risking his money, his power, and his untouchable reputation with absolutely zero guarantee that I would ever take him back.
He had explicitly told me he expected nothing in return, and he had backed up that devastating confession by letting his life’s work hang by a thread while he bound his bleeding hands in white athletic tape.
A fierce, violent clarity swept through my entire system, burning away the last remnants of my hesitation, my fear, and my lingering resentment.
The replacement carabiners and vintage brass closures suddenly felt like meaningless dead weight.
I tightened my grip on the heavy canvas straps of my tote bag, my heart hammering against my ribs with a rapid, beautiful, terrifying rhythm.
I spun on my heel, pushing my way aggressively through the crowd of bespoke suits, and walked out the glass doors into the relentless Pacific Northwest storm.
Abandoning the hardware store run, I turned my wet boots directly toward Ballard, breaking into a fast, breathless pace against the biting wind.
My husband was waiting for me at the theater. It was finally time to face him in the light.