He looked down, fists clenched on his knees.
“Andrea. Stop. You’re not making any sense.”
“I think I’m making perfect sense.” I glared at him.
“This is my job,” he said. “I make decisions. Sometimes there isn’t a clean option. Sometimes you choose the least bad one.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, whatever helps you live with yourself.”And I thought I was falling in love with thisman.
“You’re acting like I’ve done something to you, Andrea.” His eyes were cold. “I haven’t.”
“You have, though. And it’s exactly the same. You decidedforme that I needed saving. That it would be better if I didn’t have to wonder whether I could cut it as an artist, to sit with the risk that my painting might not sell. So you decided you’d remove that.”
“As I said before—”
“No, Liam.” I felt my eyes start to well up. “You took the only thing that mattered to me. I didn’t need you to make it safe. I needed the answer.”
The sound of keys in the lock cut through the room.
The door opened. Eliza’s voice drifted in from the hallway.
“Hey! I’m home—oh. Sorry. Am I interrupting?”
“No,” I said. “Liam was just leaving.”
Chapter 44
Liam
Mayfair felt emptyby the time I got back. The car slid into the underground garage, sensors chiming as I eased it into place. A few other expensive cars shared the space with me, but apart from that, no one else was around.
The lift doors closed, and I rose in silence, jiggling the keys in my hand before I slipped them into my pocket. Then the doors opened again, and I was in my apartment. I keyed off the alarm, and the lights came on in sequence. Hall, living area, kitchen.
It felt so empty withouther.
Andrea was wrong; it was that simple. I’d handled Novexia correctly because there wasn’t an alternative. Anyone competent would have reached the same conclusion.
With the changes I was making, there was no fat on the bone—and that meant cutting headcount.
It was arithmetic, not malice.
You decided the collateral damage wasacceptable.
No. She’d taken three separate things and braided them together until they looked like they were the same. Theredundancies, the fake relationship, and this issue with the painting. But they weren’t related in any way.
One of them wasn’t even valid. But that was what people did when they were hurt. They looked for a shape and forced things into it.
I didn’t need you to make it safe. I needed theanswer.
What the fuck had happened there? Why would the company have purchased her artwork without my knowledge, and if we had, who authorized it?
It must have been some kind of mistake.
Her words weren’t though. How long had she been assessing me?
Seventeen thousand was fantastic—at least there was that. It was serious artist money. Maybe this was a turning point for her? Fuck, she was definitely not in the right role at Novexia, even if she was good at it.
The air-conditioning had been on all day, and the leather couch was cold to the touch.
