Then I slipped the phone into my pocket and kept walking.

Chapter 25 — No Bruise, No Ring

The following month, Cardinal Systems held its twenty-first-anniversary gathering, and I stood once again beneath blue lights, in a ballroom full of the same people.

A great deal was different.

There was no bruise beneath my sleeve this time, and no wedding ring on my hand, and no man beside me arranging the evening around the shape of his own ego.

The company whose twenty-first year we marked was profitable, honest, and growing, run by an engineer who had quietly killed the vanity project that was bleeding it and used the money instead to reopen the apprenticeship floor.