She could have detonated not just his business myth but his entire personal life, on a stage, in front of every investor he’d spent months courting.

And she had chosen, deliberately, to correct only the one lie that was actually the committee’s business — the ownership of the company — and to leave every private wound unspoken.

It was not weakness that stayed her hand.

It was the opposite.

A person who cannot hurt you has no choice but to be kind; a person who can level you and declines to is showing you exactly how much power she has decided not to use.

Crispin would spend weeks, she suspected, waiting for the other blow to land — the leaked story, the pointed interview, the public accounting of what he’d done to her.