"Don't what?" she said. "Don't say what we both know? Don't acknowledge what's been building between us for four years?"
He looked at her in disbelief. “Nothinghas been building between us."
"That's a lie and you know it."
Drew just stared at her. And a torrent of memories crashed through him all at once. His body had gone ice cold.
"When did we go to the carbonara restaurant?" he asked abruptly.
The shift threw her. "What?"
"The carbonara place in Rittenhouse. You brought it up at the dinner party.Remember that carbonara.Who was there?"
"The team. Priya, Tom?—"
"It was just us, Tori. I lied to my wife about it because you told me the whole team was coming and then nobody else showed up. I didn't think about why. I didn't think about any of it. The San Francisco story — you corrected me in front of eight people.You froze. I counted.You could have let me have my version. You rewrote it to make it about us. You sent my wife a candle after the dinner party, signed the cardVand called her cooking agift,like she was the caterer."
"I was being gracious?—"
"You were marking territory. And the whole time — every late night, every closed door, every coffee on my desk in the morning — you were building something and I was too stupid or too flattered to see it. Maddie saw it. She saw it from the beginning. She told me at the dinner party and I said she was overthinking. She told me in our bedroom and I said you weren't a threat. My wife told me the truth over and over and I chose your version every single time."
Victoria's jaw tightened. She gripped the edge of the desk with both hands and leaned forward. "I have given you years of my life. I built this company with you. I held it together when you couldn't, I closed deals you were too cautious to close, I?—"
"And you tried to kiss me. Just now." He was shaking. He could see his hands trembling and he couldn't stop them. "What were you going to do, Tori? If I'd kissed you back? Were you going to comfort me? Were you going to tell me that Madeleine and I hadgrown apartand this was natural, this was inevitable, this was just two people finally being honest?"
She said nothing. Her silence was the loudest thing in the room.
"I need you to find a new office," Drew said. "Different floor. I'll buy out your equity if you want to leave the company — at a premium, whatever's fair. But you are not going to be in my office, at my desk, in my daily operations. Starting now."
"You can't be serious."
"I've never been more serious."
"Because you refuse to see what’s between us?!”
“Jesus, Tori, there is nothing between us! My wife was right about everything. Every dinner party, every late night, every closed door. She watched you take her place and she told me it was happening. I looked her in the eye and told her she was crazy. I did that. That's on me. But you made it easy. You gave me the words.She's reading into things. She's overthinking it.I was quoting you. I just didn't know it."
Victoria straightened. She walked to the door with the rigid posture of a woman holding herself together through sheer force, and in the doorway she paused.
"You're wrong, Drew.”
She left. Drew immediately picked up his phone. Madeleine's contact photo was from a morning at Cape May — her hair blowing across her face, blue eyes squinting into the sun, laughing at something he couldn't remember. He'd taken it with one hand while holding her coffee with the other. He remembered the weight of the mug, the wind and her voice sayingstop, my hair is insane. He'd taken it anyway because she was the most beautiful thing on that beach and he'd wanted proof.
He hesitated. She'd asked for time and he would give her time. He would give her whatever she asked for because he was beginning to understand that giving her what she asked for was the bare minimum of what he owed her, and he hadn't been meeting even that.
Drew put the phone down. He sat in his office alone.
He'd built a company. He'd built a fortune. He'd built a partnership with a woman who'd mapped his blind spots and moved into them, and while he'd been building, his wife had been standing in their kitchen making coffee he forgot to drink, cooking meals he forgot to taste, telling him the truth he refused to hear, waiting — with a patience he did not deserve — for him to turn around and see her.
He hadn't turned around. And now she was gone.
Drew opened the velvet jewelry box app on his phone — the one connected to the custom jeweler on Walnut Street — and looked at it for a long time. Then he closed it. A ring wouldn't fix this. A gesture wouldn't fix this. He didn't know what would fix this. He only knew that for once in his life, the man who had a system for everything was going to have to figure out how to earn something that couldn't be optimized, leveraged, or closed.
CHAPTER 9
MADELEINE
Madeleine was breakingdown a case of chickens at Lark when Victoria Stewart walked through the front door.
