A murmur rolled through the ballroom, low and building, five hundred people recalculating everything at once.

Rupert’s face twitched.

But Cressida leaned in and whispered something quick in his ear, and I watched his confidence come flooding back, because a drowning man will grab any rope, even one held by the person who pushed him in.

“That trust is inactive,” he announced, to the room now, playing to it.

“Cecilia signed away operational authority when we married.

It’s a formality.

She has no standing here.”

I almost smiled.

He had finally said it out loud, in front of five hundred witnesses and every camera in the room — the lie I had been waiting eight months for him to commit to publicly.

“No,” I said.