For Nine Years He Mistook My Silence for Surrender; What He Never Understood Was That Every Dinner I Didn’t Fight About Was a Day I Stayed Close Enough to Gather What I Needed to End Him

That had always been the smallest and most cosmetic fact about the company, and he had mistaken it for the largest.

Chapter 7 — The Mistress Arrives

“You can’t touch the restaurants,” Roman said, but I could hear the certainty draining out of his voice as he said it.

Lorna slid a second packet across the table to him.

“Notice of an emergency meeting of the company’s members,” she said.

“Tomorrow morning.

Nine o’clock.” And it was exactly then, as if the evening had been staged by someone with a sense of timing, that the doorbell rang a second time.

Sabrina swept in without waiting to be let in, in a scarlet cocktail dress, an overnight bag over her shoulder — she had, I realized, packed to move in.