I offered him a faint, polite smile that never reached my eyes.
“Daniel, I was never difficult,” I said softly, my voice carrying cleanly through the crisp winter air. “I was useful. You just spent twelve years confusing the two.”
He scoffed, turning his back on me to kiss Vanessa’s cheek. He had signed the two-hundred-page decree in forty-five seconds while texting his caterers, completely ignoring the complex corporate annexes and debt-assumption riders attached to the very back of the document.
I walked down the steps, slipped into a waiting black town car, and headed straight to O’Hare International Airport.
Two hours later, I was seated in a commercial transit lounge during a brief layover, sipping a cup of unsweetened black coffee. My phone chimed softly on the marble table.
It was an encrypted message from my lead corporate attorney, Miriam.
*“Daniel’s wedding to Vanessa starts in three hours in the grand ballroom of the Halberg Hotel. The high-definition broadcast has over four hundred venture capitalists, board members, and tech journalists logged on. The trigger is set.”
