She asked why he had never once tried to contact her after their partying. Rowan considered her for a long moment before he answered. You made a very clear choice. Respecting that choice was the last thing I could still do for you. His honesty undid her more than anger would have, and so she offered her own honesty in return.
She confessed that Prescott had told her Rowan would be quietly driven out of the industry if she did not end their relationship, that her leaving had been in part a shield she believed she was holding over him. Rowan refused to accept the excuse. He told her she could have simply spoken the truth and let the two of them face it together as equals. Instead, she had decided on his behalf that he was too weak to withstand the storm and had chosen his fate for him without ever asking. That, he said, was what had wounded him most deeply, not the leaving itself, but the assumption underneath it.
Sloan sat with that for a long moment, and then she gave him the truest thing she had. I wasn't only afraid you would lose your career. I was afraid that if I chose you, I would never find out how far I could go on my own. Rowan looked at her and said, "Simply, then at least this time you told me the truth." Gideon, meanwhile, did not wait quietly.
He sent Sloan a steady drip of documents, suggesting that Hail North was short of the capital needed to complete and secure the acquisition. He proposed that she provide him the list of Rowan's private investors, and in exchange, he would help her seize back control of Whitmore Meridian. It was the same bargain she had accepted 7 years ago. Dressed in different clothes. But something in her had changed, and instead of taking his hand, she decided to reach into his pocket.
She agreed to meet Gideon without telling Rowan because her true intention was to gather proof that Gideon had deliberately engineered the company's collapse into default. As she walked into the restaurant where they had agreed to meet, a photograph of her arriving beside Gideon was captured and sent directly to Rowan's phone. At the meeting, Gideon treated Sloan exactly as he had always treated her. As the ambitious woman, he believed he understood completely. He told her with an air of shared confidence that Rowan had only bought Whitmore Meridian to prove he had risen above the woman who once abandoned him.