Page 72 of Wreckage and Rain

She had the room booked before the celebration started.

"The hotel hallway camera shows her supporting you down the corridor. You couldn't stand on your own. The concierge's statement confirms she gave him fifty dollars and asked him to keep the photographer in the lobby for an hour. She wanted shots of you arriving. She didn't want shots of him following you upstairs."

Dom stops. Looks at me directly.

"The room itself doesn't have cameras."

"What?"

"There are no cameras inside the hotel room, Colt. I have to be honest with you about what we can prove and what we can't. We can prove she drugged you. We can prove she isolated you and alienated your marriage. We can prove she brought you into a private space where you were physically incapable of consent. We can prove she got into the bed with you. We can prove she took photos in that room. Some were posted to the firm's Instagram. Some are still on her devices. The rest she's presumably keeping as leverage."

His voice gets quieter.

"What we can't prove conclusively is what happened in that bed."

The kitchen is silent. The dead sunflowers. The refrigerator hum. My own breathing too loud in my ears.

"Your pants were still on when you woke up. Belt buckled. That tells us something. It doesn't tell us everything. Whether penetrative assault occurred is something I can't definitively answer for you. The room is a private space. The woman is an unreliable witness. Your memory is gone. There is a hard limit to what investigation can recover."

I'm staring at him. I try to make a word. Nothing comes.

"What I can tell you. By every legal definition what was done to you that night was sexual assault. The drugs alone are sexual assault. Putting an unconscious man in a bed with a woman he hasn't consented to be in a bed with is sexual assault. Whatever did or didn't happen between when she got you in that room and when you woke up six hours later, the legal threshold was crossed before the door of the room closed behind you. The text she sent you the next morning, the I've wanted that for so long, was deliberate fabrication. Either to create the impression ofconsent for any subsequent inquiry, or to manipulate you into believing something happened that would keep you from going to your wife."

I make it to the kitchen sink before I throw up.

My body is catching up to what my brain is trying to outrun. The realization that the worst night of my life wasn't a conscious choice I made. It was something done to me by a woman my father put in my path. I'm going to live the rest of my life not knowing what was done to my body in that hotel room. I'll have to make peace with that or I'll never be at peace at all.

Dom's hand on my back. Steady. He doesn't speak. He waits.

I rinse my mouth. Grip the counter.

"My father." My voice sounds like it belongs to someone I don't know.

"Your father has been embezzling from Bennet Holdings. Shell companies. Cayman accounts. Eight years. Twelve million, conservatively. He needs a compliant CEO to keep the cover. Someone he can move around the board without resistance. That is why Summer had to go. Not because she would have looked at the books. Because he needed someone in your ear who was loyal to him, so he could keep you doing his bidding. Sonny couldn't move you while Summer was still in the picture. He needed her out so Cheyenne could move in. So that the woman in your ear would be a woman on his payroll. So that when the time came for him to ask you to look the other way at something you would already be the kind of man who looked the other way as a matter of habit."

My wife was targeted for removal because she was making me into a man my father couldn't manage.

The Bennets spent five years telling Summer she didn't belong. Too common. Too loud. Too much. The real reason they wanted her gone was the opposite. She was making me whole, and a whole son is harder to use. With her gone I would soften. I wouldseek approval somewhere else, and Cheyenne would be there to give it.

"There's one more thing." Dom moves to face me. Direct. Unflinching. "And this is the part that's going to be hard in a different way."

"All of this is hard."

"Different hard." He pauses. "The drugging is on Cheyenne. The conspiracy is on your father. But the emotional affair you actually had with Cheyenne was on you."

My breath stops.

"You let her in. You chose her attention over your wife's. You stayed late. You cancelled plans. You called her at midnight while Summer was asleep on the couch. You told her things about yourself that you should have told your wife. You almost kissed her. You went to a celebration on the Saturday night your wife had told you to think about your marriage, and you went because your father asked you to. The drugs are Cheyenne's crime. The hotel is Cheyenne's crime. But the door was open because you opened it."

I want to argue. To say I was manipulated. Engineered. The whole thing was a setup.

All of that is true. It isn't the whole truth. Manipulation only works when it finds something to exploit. And what they exploited was a weakness that already existed. My need for approval. My willingness to prioritize the person who praised me over the person who loved me. My choice, made cleanly and without anyone drugging me, to spend Saturday night at a bar with my colleagues instead of in the car driving to my wife.

Summer stood in the bedroom the morning she left with a suitcase in her hand and she told me. It's like you don't even know you're losing me. You're losing me right now.

And then I went to a celebration.

"I know." My voice is gravel.