Owen. That man had pursued me for months, but the whole time he was with Elspeth. When I finally found the messages, he didn’t even deny it. He shrugged. Like it was an inconvenience he’d budgeted for. I’d tried to warn Elspeth about him, but she’d blamed me for trying tostealher man.
And now she was offering me a desk at his company. A front-row seat to my own humiliation, served fresh every morning with a side of pity.
“I’d rather suffer and starve,” I snapped.
Elspeth laughed. That bright, tinkling sound that used to make me feel small. “You were always too proud for your own situation. The offer stands whenever you stop being stubborn.”
Then the sweetness dropped.
“It must be hard,” she said, her voice laced with fake sympathy. “Watching everything fall apart when you had so much to prove.”
I gripped the phone hard. “Yeah, it’s funny,” I said. “At least when I fail, it’s my own failure.” I took a breath. “You married yours.”
The line went dead.
I threw the phone onto the couch and sat there, fists in my lap, heat behind my eyes that I would not—absolutely would not—let turn into tears. Not for Elspeth. Not anymore.
The next morning, the phone rang at eight-thirty. A number I didn’t recognize.
“Good morning! Is this Miley Torres?”
Whoever was on the other end sounded unreasonably cheerful for this hour on a day that had no right to contain joy.
I asked, still half-asleep. “Who’s asking?”
“Trisha Park. Executive assistant to Christopher Vale.” There was a half-second pause that sounded like she was smiling on the other end. “I’m calling because Mr. Vale would like to meet with you. At your earliest convenience. Totally private, not formal at all. He’d like to discuss the recent situation and explore a resolution.”
I sat up in shock. My stomach dropped through the floor. “A resolution?”
“The good kind. I promise. Well, I’m pretty sure.” She laughed. It was a warm, conspiratorial sound, like she was letting me in on something fun. “Between you and me, he’s not as scary as the internet thinks. Dress comfortable. It’s not a deposition.”
She gave me an address. A time. I wrote both on the back of a grocery receipt because I couldn’t find paper, and my apartment was a disaster, like everything else in my life lately.
After I hung up, I stood in my kitchen for a long time. Christopher Vale wanted to meet with me.
Terrified was in the lead. Hope was trying to catch up. Neither was winning.
The address Trisha gave me was not an office.
I’d expected an office. Somewhere billionaires had meetings and regular people sat in uncomfortable chairs and tried not to touch anything.
On the day of the meeting, the car pulled up to a private resort on the coast, gated and guarded behind a wrought-iron entrance.
Trisha met me at the entrance and walked me through a path lined with palms and bougainvillea. Up close, she was shorter than she sounded on the phone but carried herself like a woman who could organize a revolution before lunch and still make time for coffee.
She was wearing a blazer over a graphic tee that read“THIS TOO SHALL PASS (but not quickly)”and her mismatched earrings caught the light as she walked, one star and one moon.
“Miley!” She said my name like we were old friends. “Love the blouse. Follow me.”
She walked me past a main building that looked like it belonged on the cover of a travel magazine, toward a villa at the far end of the property.
“Mr. Vale is expecting you,” she said and opened the gate to a terrace overlooking an infinity pool.
CHAPTER 6
Miley
Therehewas.
