Chapter 9 Terms Rewritten #2
"In two days, Cumbre Verde's lawyers will have had two days to get their story straight," I say.
"Their other regional partners will have had two days to distance themselves by the time anyone notices they were ever attached.
The board member Channelle rattled with one voicemail will have had two days to remember he has a PR team of his own. "
He steps forward, towering over me. "Or we do this right, and it actually holds up instead of getting torn apart in a retraction next week."
"It already holds up!" I roar. "Erica's citing a permit suspension that's on record with an actual government authority right now, not a rumor.
She's citing a report with Santi's name on it that he gave her permission to cite five minutes ago.
This isn't reckless, Derrick. It's fast, and fast is the only version of this that actually costs them something before they get to control the timeline themselves. "
His glare is steely. "You're not the one whose name is on the company that gets sued if this goes sideways."
The air punches out of me. "No," I say, feeling slightly sick and dizzy. "My name is not on your company, is it, my darling husband?"
He falters and blinks. "Riley..."
"Don't get me wrong, I don't want half of your company," I spit. "You're the one who didn't want the prenup, remember? I didn't marry you for your company or your money. I love you, and I thought you were the kind of person who would always do the right thing."
"I am that person," he seethes through gritted teeth.
"Then do the right thing!" I step up close to him, refusing to be intimidated by his height.
"I'm the one whose idea this was. So if you want to be angry at someone for the exposure, be angry at me.
Don't dress it up as caution when what it actually is, is you wanting to manage this the way you manage everything, on your timeline, with your lawyers, after the danger's passed and there's room for you to control how it looks. "
Derrick doesn't say anything for a second. The room around us has gone quieter than I'd like, Andrew very deliberately finding a sudden fascination in his own drink, Alex and Channelle not looking at either of us.
He looks at his phone, still lit up with his lawyer's last message, then at Erica's laptop, then at me. I watch him run the numbers one more time, check his own reasoning for the part where it's actually about him.
"How fast can it go out?" he asks Erica carefully, "if I don't fight you on it?"
"Fifteen minutes. It's basically done."
He's quiet again, longer this time.
"Send it," he says thickly.
"Derrick—" I start.
"No. You're right." He says it like it costs him something, which it should, which is sort of the point.
"I wanted to be the one managing this. Managing things is what makes me feel like I'm doing anything useful, even though I couldn't actually be out there today.
That's mine to deal with, not yours to absorb under the guise that I dressed it up as legal risk.
Send it, Erica. Cite whatever you need to cite.
I'll deal with our counsel myself, after. "
Erica's already typing almost as soon as he starts talking.
"You don't have to credit me," I tell Erica when she asks how I want my name in it. I coordinated exactly none of the actual reporting, and all I really did was tell her what we needed to do and not wait for Adler PR to draft something careful and toothless first, no offense to Aubrey and team.
"I'm not asking because I have to," Erica says, slanting a look at Derrick.
***
He stands up at the end of dinner, glass in hand, and the table quiets as it always does when Derrick Adler decides to speak.
I've watched him do this a hundred times—boardrooms, press events, our own wedding—and I know exactly what his public voice sounds like when it's performing gratitude versus when it's telling the truth.
Tonight it's the second one, and I can hear the difference the moment the first words leave his mouth.
"I want to thank Carmen and her team, and the park authority, for getting Mateo home safe," he says.
"I want to thank Ryan, whose paranoia I will never again describe as excessive in any context, ever, ever again.
" Laughter, a toast from Andrew's end of the table.
"I want to thank Santi for eight months of work nobody acted on until it mattered, and for going out there today anyway.
And Erica and Channelle, who turned a mundane incident report into a story that's already costing a very bad company a great deal of money tonight, which I'm told was mostly Riley's idea. "
A few heads turn toward me. I keep my face composed and entirely unbothered.
"But there's one more thing I need to say, and I should have said it days ago, and honestly, years ago.
" He looks at me, and the table goes properly quiet now, the way it does when everyone senses a genuine moment is about to happen instead of another toast. "When this trip went wrong, the person who held the upper trail group together, who ran the extraction priorities, who called this in clean and clear while the rest of us were still catching up to what was happening—that wasn't me.
I let people assume it was, more than once, on this trip and before it, and I didn't correct that.
I won't make excuses for myself. People expect me, Derrick Adler, to have my shit together all the time. But it's not always me that does."
The room has gone fully silent.
"Riley Mitchell does, though," he says, clear and steady, no qualifier in front of my name, no my wife, nothing that makes this about him at all.
"She built a career under her own name long before she ever met me, and she has been doing the work in the background that keeps this company and this group standing upright more times than I can count, while I took the visibility that should have gone to her. I'm done letting that happen."
The applause starts somewhere near Andrew and rolls outward, warm and real, Channelle's hand pressed briefly to her own chest, Alex grinning in that special way of his, Erica already typing notes on her phone that I suspect might be going in another article.
My eyes are doing that slightly inconvenient thing in the lantern light, and things look a little blurred at the edges.
Derrick sits back down beside me, finds my hand under the table the way he's found it a hundred times over the years, and doesn't say anything else. He doesn't need to. The room had already heard it.
"You're crying," he whispers close to my ear, careful and quiet enough that it stays between us.
"I am not."
"Okay." His thumb moves once over my knuckles. "You're not."
He's quiet for a moment, the table settling back into its usual noise around us: Andrew already onto some new story, Channelle laughing at a comment Alex said.
Then, low enough that it's only for me, Derrick says, "You asked me a question once. Years ago, in New York when we first... 'What happens when you get tired of my smart mouth, or I get tired of your control issues?'"
My breath hitches, my mind thrown back all those years to those early days when I had to decide whether our love for each other was enough. "I remember," I breathe.
"I think about that question more than you'd guess.
" He brings my hand up and presses his mouth briefly to my knuckles, and doesn't let go.
"Turns out I didn't get tired of it. I just needed a missing guide and a wife willing to roar at me in front of our friends to remember exactly why I fell for it in the first place. "
I arch my brows at him. "It only took one missing guide."
"Don't ruin the moment, Mitchell," he purrs.
"I have got a smart mouth," I tell him fondly, half a joke back then, half a warning he never once took seriously. "Always gets me into trouble."
His smile is slow and playful, entirely his, and exactly the one I married. "I'm counting on it."