Page 142 of Boardroom Mask

“We’re running a piece tomorrow morning. Front page, above the fold. It concerns your family. Your father, specifically, and the company.” Another pause. “It’s... significant, Kir. It’s a full investigative feature. Your mother’s name is in it.”

Only offices can be this quiet. Something about the combination of coffee pots and printers, of fluorescent lights and carpets and cubicles, sucks away the silence like nothing else in this world.

“My mother,” I echo.

“I’m sorry, Kir. It’s… Fuck, I hate even saying this, but it’s going to make things ugly.”

“Who wrote it?” I ask in a numb, deadened voice, even though I already know.

He clears his throat. “I can’t get into specifics. The piece has been through Legal, it’s been fact-checked, and it’s going to print tonight. There is nothing I can do to stop it at this point, even if I wanted to. I know you and I go way back and?—”

“Rick.”

“Yeah?”

“Who wrote the fucking article?”

He sighs. “A reporter named Jillian Pierce.”

I don’t say anything. I’m looking at the wall across from my desk, the one that still bears a mark from when she hurled my laptop at the wall. I’m looking at the dent in the plaster where it hit. I told Maintenance not to patch it. I like it there, same as I like when I look at my back in the bathroom mirror and see the faint traces from where she’s clawed me bloody every time we make love.

I like that she’s made herself known in my life.

I like that I’ve made myself known in hers.

“I’m telling you this because I consider you a friend,” Thornton continues, “and because you deserve time to prepare. Get your legal team together, get your PR people on the phone, do whatever you need to do.”

“Thank you, Rick,” I hear myself say. “I appreciate the call.”

I hang up.

Then I run.

I don’t remember the elevator. I don’t remember the lobby or the street or the cab or whether I ran the whole way or flew. The next thing that exists after Thornton’s voice is my hand on the penthouse door, shoving it open so hard the handle cracks into the wall behind it.

I know at once that she’s gone.

My heart supplies that message and then my brain goes rummaging for details to prove it. I find them easily.

There’s a space at the door where her shoes were that’s no longer filled. When I race into the bedroom, I see no laptop on the bedside table, no bag looped over the armchair. The bathroom counter has no toothbrush or Tom Ford perfume bottle. The air itself is screaming at me that she’s gone, gone, gone. It smells like lemon cleaning solution and nothing else.

No bergamot. No cherry. No Jillian.

I turn back out of the bedroom and charge up the hall. A woman is in the kitchen, but it’s not her. It’s the maid. She’s wearing earbuds and humming softly to herself as she scrubs the sink basin, her back to me, completely oblivious to the fact that I just blew through the front door like a fucking wrecking ball.

“Get out,” I spit.

She stops, half-turns, and frowns, then pulls out one earbud, unsure if she heard something or not. When she finally turns fully around to see me looming there like a specter of death, though, she screams.

“Ahh—!”

A soapy sponge falls from her yellow-gloved hand and lands on the floor with a wet smack. “Sir, I’m so sorry! You scared the daylights of me. I was almost done with?—”

“I said get thefuck out of my fucking apartment!”I roar.

My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds likehis. Lukas’s voice coming out of my mouth. I hear it and I hate it, but I am powerless to stop it.

The woman flinches at my wrath. She fumbles in her apron pocket for something and hurls it at me in terror. She mumbles something about “found this under the couch” as she flees past me. The door clicks shut behind her.