If Marcus goes down and it comes out that the man who found the evidence is having dinner at the CEO's apartment, I understand. Ryan said, "I've got a kid. I understand better than anybody how it looks." "Yes." Something softened in her. "I imagine you do," said he.
He almost didn't go. He stood in his apartment at 8:30 that night with Emma finally asleep and the babysitter, Mrs. Okafor from two doors down settled on the couch with her knitting and a paid week's promise. And Ryan looked at the address on his phone and thought, "This is a mistake.
She was his boss. She was a billionaire. He was a widower with a kid and $40 in checking until payday and a wife in the ground." And whatever this was, it could only end in one of two ways. Both of them bad.
Either it was nothing, in which case he was humiliating himself, or it was something in which case he was risking the one job that kept his daughter breathing on the whims of a woman the whole building called the ice queen. He went anyway. He went because of the way she'd said, "I don't have anyone to ask." He went because he knew that sentence from the inside. He went because four years ago he'd stood in a hospital hallway and learned that the things you don't do, the words you don't say, the doors you don't walk through, those are the things that haunt you, not the risks you take.
The regrets that had teeth were always the ones about the moments he'd been too scared to move. So he drove across town and he gave his name to a doorman in a building where the lobby alone was worth more than everything Ryan had ever owned. and he rode a private elevator up and up and up. Victoria opened the door herself. She wasn't in the suit.
That was the first thing he noticed and it did something to him he wasn't prepared for. She was in dark slacks and a soft gray sweater. No shoes and her hair was down and without the armor, she looked younger and more tired and more real. And Ryan stood in the hallway for a second, just adjusting to it the way your eyes adjust coming out of a dark theater into daylight.
You came, she said, she sounded surprised. I genuinely wasn't sure you would. I almost didn't. That's honest.
You said you wanted honest. I only really know how to do the one thing. She stepped back to let him in, and Ryan walked into the apartment, and he stopped. He'd expected luxury.
He'd braced for it the marble, the art, the cold, expensive perfection that would remind him exactly how far apart their worlds were. And there was some of that sure in the bones of the place. But that wasn't what stopped him. What stopped him was that the apartment was empty.
Not empty of furniture, empty of life. There were no photographs on the walls, no mail on the counter, no coat thrown over a chair, no shoes by the door but her own. No coffee mug in the sink, no plant, no clutter, no evidence that a human being actually lived here instead of just sleeping here between the hours she couldn't be at the office. It was the apartment of someone who had stopped years ago expecting anyone to ever come over.
It looked Ryan thought exactly the way the empty side of his own bed felt. You can say it, Victoria said watching his face. Everyone thinks it. They just don't come up here to see it.
It's not. Ryan stopped. How long have you lived here? 6 years.
6 years. He turned in a slow circle. Victoria, there's nothing here. There's me here.
She said it lightly, but it didn't come out light. She moved past him toward the kitchen. I have wine. I have I actually don't know what I have.
I had groceries delivered this afternoon in a small panic because I realized I couldn't remember the last time I had a guest. I bought cheese. I don't even like cheese. I panicked and bought cheese like a person in a movie.
She was talking too fast. She stopped herself, gripped the edge of the counter, and laughed at herself. And this time it was real. I'm nervous.
Isn't that ridiculous? I sat across from 11 men this morning who wanted my job, and I wasn't nervous. and I'm standing in my own kitchen and I'm nervous. I'm nervous, too. Ryan said, "If it helps, it helps a little." He came and sat at the counter the way Emma sat at his counter every morning, and Victoria poured two glasses of wine with hands that weren't quite steady.
And for a minute, neither of them said anything, and it wasn't comfortable, but it wasn't unbearable either. It was two people who'd forgotten how to do this, both remembering at the same time that they'd once known Tell me about him, Ryan said. And Victoria Sterling put down her wine and she told him. His name was Daniel Whitmore, she said.
And Ryan's whole body went cold. Whitmore, he said. The merger, Whitmore Sterling. The deal that fell through Wednesday was with his family's company.
Yes. She turned her glass slowly on the counter. That's the part nobody knows. That's the part that made this week.
You have no idea, Ryan. When that deal came across my desk 8 months ago, and I saw the name Whitmore on it, I nearly threw up in my own boardroom. I pursued it anyway. For 8 months, I sat in rooms with his father and his brothers and I negotiated and I smiled and I pretended I'd never that I didn't.
Her voice caught. She pressed on. And Wednesday it fell apart. And everyone thought I was upset because I lost a merger.