Grant opened his truck door and stepped out. Izzy didn’t look at him. Not when she turned toward the house, not when she walked past his fender, and not when her boots hit the wooden steps of the porch.
“Lunch good?” he asked anyway. The words came out rougher, more territorial than he meant them to.
She paused at the screen door.
“Great,” she said, her voice a controlled line.
She didn’t look back as she reached the porch. But instead of stepping inside, she headed straight around the corner of the house, her boots striking the side path with purpose. Grant stood in the middle of the yard for a moment longer, a sinking weight settling right behind his ribs.
Then her voice came from around the ridge line, outside.
“Hello?”
He glanced toward the side ridge. She’d walked fast toward the overlook, her phone pressed to her ear as she stared into the endless valleys below. Away from him.
Good. That was easier. He turned and went inside.
* * *
Izzy paced the very edge of the stone overlook, the Blue Ridge peaks stretching wide and unyielding in front of her.
“Marcus, if this is about the revised acquisitions proposal, I told you?—”
“It’s not the proposal, Izzy,” Marcus Halpern said from thirteen hundred miles away.
His voice was too calm. Too clean. Something in her went absolutely still.
“We’ve had a meeting with the primary investors,” Marcus continued, his clinical cadence cutting through the phone line like a razor. “And they’ve decided to move in a different direction.”
A heavy beat dropped between them. Izzy didn’t respond.
“The truth is,” Marcus went on, entirely untroubled by the quiet, “your approach isn’t aligning with what they want long-term for the market profile.”
There it was. Clean. Corporate. Final.
Anger flashed hard through her veins. “So that’s it?” she said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, icy register. “After six years, after everything I’ve built for you, that’s how this goes?”
“It’s just business, Izzy.”
She let out a short, humorless laugh that tasted like copper. “Of course it is.”
“We’ll have HR send over the transition and severance paperwork to your email?—”
“Don’t bother,” she cut in.
Silence stretched on the other end, cold and controlled.
“I’ll handle it,” she whispered and hung up before he could say another word.
25
Grant’s House
For a long minute, Izzy stood in the backyard, mountain wind tearing at her hair as the valley stretched endlessly below.
Her lungs burned.
Anger simmered hot beneath her skin, tangled with something far worse.
