Believing it hadn’t been enough.
“That Emilia Rivera reports her own stories,” I said. “Under her own name. On her own terms. And no one — not even you — gets to take that from me.”
I walked away before he could respond. Through the crowd that parted. Past Victoria Ashford’s delighted smirk. Past board members whispering behind their hands. Past all of it and through the doors and out into the flashbulbs and shouted questions.
“Ms. Rivera, can you comment on your relationship with Sebastian Laurent?”
“Is it true your investigation was compromised by personal involvement?”
“Did you trade access for?—”
I raised my hand, and somehow, they quieted.
“My name is Emilia Rivera. I’m an investigative journalist. Every story I’ve published has been verified, sourced, and reported with complete independence.” I met the nearest camera directly, channeling every ounce of defiance my mother always said would get me in trouble. “The work speaks for itself. Anyone who suggests otherwise is welcome to check the receipts.”
Then I walked through them, one step at a time, until I hit the cold Chicago night.
Behind me, through the gala’s open doors, the event screens still displayed the op-ed. My research. My analysis. Someone else’s name.
I kept walking.
The fight for my reputation was far from over.
But I was done letting anyone else control the narrative.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sebastian “Bash” Laurent
The penthouse had never felt this quiet.
I stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows, watching Chicago’s skyline glitter like scattered diamonds against the night sky. Forty-seven floors below, the city moved on without me — taxis crawling through late-night traffic, couples walking hand in hand, people living their lives completely unaware that mine had stopped functioning properly the moment Emilia walked out of that ballroom.
Three days. Seventy-two hours since she’d looked at me like I was exactly the man she’d always feared I was. Since she’d walked through those press doors and faced the vultures alone while I stood frozen, my legal team buzzing in my ear about optics and liability and the particular calculus of a man who still, even then, had let strategy override instinct.
I’d called her forty-three times. Sent twenty-seven texts. Each one met with the same silence.
The number you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time.
She’d blocked me.
Emilia Rivera — the woman who’d crawled under my skin and rewired my entire nervous system — had removed me from her life with a few taps on a phone screen. And the fact that I recognized it as her right, that I understood exactly why she’d done it, didn’t make the silence any less total.
I pressed my palm against the cold glass, letting the chill seep into my skin. The signet ring on my finger caught the reflection of city lights, and I turned it absently — the habit I’d developed long before I understood what it meant to need someone more than I needed control.
My phone sat on the marble counter, silent and accusing. I’d refreshed my news feed approximately four hundred times in the past seventy-two hours, watching Emilia’s career expand in ways I couldn’t have orchestrated even with all my money and influence.
RIVERA SIGNS SOLO SYNDICATION DEAL: Investigative Journalist Charts Independent Path
FROM TABLOID FODDER TO INDUSTRY ICON: How Emilia Rivera Turned Scandal Into Success
VOICE OF A GENERATION: Rivera’s New Column Reaches 2.7 Million Readers in First 48 Hours
She was thriving. Without me. Despite me. Because of what I’d failed to do at a gala where she’d needed me to stand beside her and I’d let three lawyers step in front of her instead.
I read each headline twice. The feeling they produced wasn’t simple — I’d been trying to name it for three days and kept arriving somewhere between pride and grief and the specific bittersweet weight of watching someone you love become more fully themselves because of something painful you caused. She was becoming the version of herself she’d always been capable of being. The story I’d inadvertently helped write by failing herwas becoming the foundation of something larger than anything we’d built together.
She deserved every word of it.
