Page 35 of Cruel Lies

The timeline stretched across the screens. She picked it apart and walked the room through the intricacies, never once raising her voice. The scale. The song. The heat map. The school pickups. The texts. The lease, the retainer, the LLC. And then, the final cut, the Santorini reservation with her name removed and the mistress's name slotted in.

"Cali," Todd kept begging. "Stop. Cali, for God's sake."

She sure as hell didn't stop. She didn't even slow down.

She just wentclick, click, click,and murdered him, one slide at a time.

"The engine works," she concluded into the dead silence. "I built it to catch supply-chain fraud. Turns out it works just as well on a cheating husband."

Then she turned to face her miserable soon-to-be ex and beamed.

"What do you think, honey? Wanna invest?"

Not one of the soft, overpaid bankers in the room knew what to do with themselves. Glover's face was torn halfway between blown away and very much over it.

And Todd?—

Well, Todd was as good as dead.

He had the blank-eyed stare of a man who's been gut-shot and was only now realizing the wet warmth spreading across his shirt was his own blood.

He stood up on unsteady legs. The chair ricocheted back behind him and clattered into the wall. "This is—" His voice broke and rose to a shrill screech, so he cleared it and tried again, but the second go-around wasn't any better. "This is a personal matter! This has no place in a professional… Emmett, I'm so sorry, my wife is clearly unwell, she's been struggling, she's?—"

"Sheis struggling?" Glover says in disgust.

"Mental health," Todd insists, "it's a real problem, she needs help, she's not?—"

"Todd." Glover didn't need to raise his voice to shut Bradshaw up. "I've been doing this thirty years. I know what a woman who's struggling looks like. That's not what I just watched."

I almost felt sorry for Todd then. Almost. He was floundering and casting around for a lifeline, but not a single soul in this room was willing to throw him one. They all just sat and watched, scooting away in their rolling chairs as if they didn't want to get too close to the contagion.

"Cali, please." Todd spun back to face her, crumbling lower and lower as he went. "Can we just—can we go home and talk about this like adults?"

She tilted her head at him. "I don't think so, darling. I think we've done plenty of talking."

She started packing up her laptop. She coiled the HDMI cable in neat loops and handed it back to the junior banker with a polite little nod,thank you,like she hadn't just incinerated her entire marriage in his conference room. The kid took it with both hands as if he were handling a live snake.

What a fool.That's all I could think. What kind of idiot has a woman like this in his life and lets her go? She's a fucking tigress, aqueen,and this idiot blew it in eight different ways.

She let herself go,he'd told me while sitting in my office torture chair, proud of his own cruelty.I'm moving on.

The man is a moron. There's no kinder word for it. You don't move on from a woman like that. You can't. You just spend the rest of your life knowing she was the best thing that ever happened to you and you were too small, weak, and pathetic to hold her.

Just like that, I reached a decision.

I am not going to make the same mistake.

When the meeting breaks apart, everyone stumbles in different directions, dazed and confused by whatever the hell just happened. They leave in muttering twos and threes. Todd is slumped in the corner, his head in his hands, moaning.

At first, he tried to follow Glover out, but the man didn't slow down. He paid Todd no mind as he typed furiously on his phone,no doubt spreading the news of this disaster to anyone who's anyone in their world.

By lunch, the whole building will know.

By tomorrow, the whole city.

By the weekend, the whole damn industry.

A managing director whose wife pitched his affair as a fraud-detection demo to his biggest client and every single one of his colleagues? There is no surviving that. There is no spin, no HR memo, no sneaky transfer to the London office that erases that story.