Because I trusted his judgment more than I trusted people with titles who had never once caught an error before it became a crisis. She said the admission cost her something in front of a room that valued hierarchy over competence. But she watched two more board members lean back in their chairs recalculating and understood that honesty for once was working in her favor rather than against it. The vote that followed was closer than Celeste would have liked, but it did not need to be unanimous to end the fight. She retained her position as chief executive.
Roland Mercer's firm came under formal investigation within the week, his intermediaries unable to withstand the scrutiny that Malcolm's forensic trail had made unavoidable. Vivien Cross was terminated before the sun set on the same day. her betrayal thorough enough that criminal referral followed shortly after the internal proceedings concluded. The friendship Celeste had trusted for 15 years reduced to a name in a legal filing. Celeste did not celebrate that part of it. There was no satisfaction in watching someone she had once loved as family lose everything, even when the loss was entirely deserved.
But when the boardroom finally emptied and she stepped out into the hallway where Malcolm still waited exactly where he had told her he would be, something in her chest finally loosened all the way. "Malcolm," she said, and he looked at her, unhurried as always. "If I asked you that question again today," she said. "The one from the party, what would you say?" He smiled slow and real and did not answer right away, letting the question sit between them the way he let every important thing sit before he touched it. They met again that evening on the same rooftop terrace, where they had first spoken the week the Bell Haven project began, before either of them understood what the other would come to mean, the city spread out beneath them, in the same restless glow it always wore, indifferent to the small human dramas unfolding above it. though tonight the noise of it seemed farther away than usual.
Celeste asked him the question one more time, softer now, without the performance that had shaped it the first time. She had said it in front of a room full of strangers. "Are you good in bed?" she asked, and this time the words carried none of the challenge they once had. They were simply a question between two people who had earned the right to ask each other anything. Malcolm laughed low and genuine, a sound she had come to recognize as rare and therefore valuable.