Page 90 of Don't Tell

"I'll walk you out."

"Suzanne — "

"I'll walk him out, Cade."

She takes Adrian's elbow gently and walks him into the hallway.

The door closes behind them.

I’m alone in the foyer.

I can hear their voices through the door, muffled and low. I can hear that he is being gracious. I can hear her voice — apologetic and confused.

She is smoothing it over for the rep she thinks she has just humiliated.

I have to hold myself still.

I have a list of things I want to do, and none of them will help.

I put my hand on the wall and my forehead against it. I count to ten under my breath, and I don't move.

I count to twenty…to thirty.

I think about my hand at the back of Adrian's neck. I think about the punch in the service hallway with Brandt and how clean it was and how good it felt to know it had landed before my mind had caught up to my arm.

I don’t move. The woman I love is on the other side of the door, making the wrong man feel better about a situation she doesn’t understand, and anything I do in this foyer in the next sixty seconds will make her job harder.

The door opens.

She comes back in.

She is furious. She is still holding the bottle and the flowers. She sets them both down on the foyer table without looking at them.

She closes the door behind her.

"Cade."

"You are not working with that man."

"What?"

"You are not working with him. End of story."

Her face changes. "I thought we were going to talk about this."

"There is nothing to talk about. It's not happening."

She stares at me.

She goes through several reactions in real time and discards most of them. She lands on the calm one, which is worse than the angry one would have been. The angry one I could fight with. The calm one is the one she uses when she has decided the conversation is going somewhere I'm not yet aware of.

"I have spent a lot of time meeting with that man, Cade. I have vetted him. I have looked at his roster. I have read the contract. I have sent it to a lawyer I chose. I have done the work. I have been telling you the entire time that this was my career and my decision. And now you are standing in your own foyer telling me no."

"Suzanne — "

"Help me understand, Cade."

I take a breath.