I couldn’t believe she was doing this.
My stepmother was on television.
She must have been very desperate to discredit me with the fact that she was not making her usual statement or making a chide quote buried in a shareholder thread.
She was putting her actual face out there, in a studio interview that someone had arranged quickly enough to tell me it had been planned before we boarded a plane.
She was dressed in something careful and understated and she spoke like someone who had practiced every word she was saying.
“Sloane had always been a troubled child.” She said with teary eyes and a shaky voice.
“And to be fair, it’s not easy to grow up without a mother figure.
She acted up often and now, this.
To stage a whole marriage, I am quite worried for her, having taken the huge responsibility of being her mother, I have to do this.” She continued, this time bursting into tears.
What was she even saying?!
And to think people were actually believing this nonsense.
She deserved Oscar for this performance.
Maya had sent the link at six AM with one message beneath it: Call me when you’ve seen it.
I watched it, standing in the kitchen, with Zane standing somewhere behind me, and I didn’t sit down once in the seven minutes and forty seconds it ran.
I stood there just baffled at what i was watching.
Veronica was indeed a psychotic bitch.
“I mean I knew she hated me and really wanted to take the company from me but honestly i didn’t think she would go to this lengths to discredit me.” I said, unable to hide my surprise at how low people would go to get what they wanted.
“It’s business, Sloane, I am always expecting people to do literally anything.” Zane answered me.
Veronica, when she wanted to be, was quite immaculate.
She didn’t scream or accuse.
She just sat across from the interviewer with her hands folded and her expression grieved.
Grief she’d clearly rehearsed and continued to say the things she’d spent years saving.
“Sloane has always been transactional.
Her father raised her to see relationships as leverage.
I tried to be a mother to her and she never allowed it,” she continued “So no, I’m not surprised she married a man she’s barely spoken to in a decade.
I’m just worried about the people who are going to get hurt when this falls apart.” The interviewer leaned forward.
“Do you believe the marriage is genuine?” Veronica held the pause long enough to let it answer itself.
“I believe Sloane is very good at making things look like what they aren’t.” I put my phone face down on the counter.
The kitchen was very quiet.
“I need to go home,” I said, storming towards the bedroom.
“No.” Zane’s voice came from the doorway.
“But she’s -” “I know what she’s doing.” He crossed the room and turned my phone back over, looked at the screen once, set it down.
“And leaving now is exactly what she wants.
You go home, you confirm every word she just said.” “She called me transactional on national television!” I exclaimed, exasperated at the situation.
“She implied it.
There’s a difference.” He corrected with the raise of a finger.
I don’t know why that singular motion distracted me for a second but I snapped out of it.
“Zane,” My voice came out wrong.
I needed it to be firm but it came out shaky.
“every time I build something, she finds a way to make people question whether I deserve it.
She’s been doing this since…” I stopped myself from saying more than I should have.
He was watching me closely I hadn’t meant to say that.
The words just came out, carried by bad sleep and seven minutes of watching her dismantle me on a screen.
I looked away.
“Forget it.” I muttered.
“She’s been doing this since your father died,” he stated plainly.
“Before that, she has been doing this my entire life.” I said, and then said nothing else.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then: “We handle it from here.
Together.
Can you do that?” I looked at him.
The word together sat in the room between us reassuring me in a way that was new and strange to me.
I hadn’t heard it directed at me that way in a very long time.
It sounded like it was settled and wasn’t a question at all.
“Yes,” I sighed.
We spent the next four hours working, doing damage control and handling the crisis.
My phone was buzzing back to back.
Maya on one line, my PR lead on another, my lawyer on hold while Zane coordinated simultaneously with his own people, both of us moving through the crisis with the efficiency of what we were, CEOs who built empires and knew exactly what to do in a PR crisis.
We divided the moves without discussing it, showing we were in sync.
I handled the media response and he the shareholders.
When his assistant called with information that directly fed my legal team’s argument and Zane simply handed me his phone without being asked, I felt something shift.
There was a quiet, unsettling recognition that working beside this man felt less like work and more like bonding.
By mid-afternoon, the first honeymoon post had climbed to two hundred thousand likes.
The second one was trending and comments were running in our favor although not universally, but then again the internet was never unanimous.
People wanted to believe what they saw.
And what they saw was two people who looked, in every photograph, like they were exactly where they wanted to be.
The images were working.
“Good job, Sloane.” He smiled at me I smiled back and the look we exchanged, lingered for a moment.
I caught myself staring at his lips and him doing the same.
I hated that I was getting too comfortable with him.
Sloane, focus, you can’t let another man break you.
I had to caution myself.
We were treading on dangerous territory.
I blamed it on the close proximity this honeymoon had caused.
“Erm, I will see you later at the beach event?” He asked after clearing his throat a couple of times.
“Yeah, of course.” I answered as he left, willing my heart to stop beating faster.
The resort’s beach event started at sunset.
String lights strung between poles, a bar set up on the sand, orchestrated for their guests to fraternize.
Zane had mentioned it in the afternoon and I’d gone because the alternative was sitting in the villa thinking about things I’d said in the kitchen that I couldn’t unsay.
It was fine for the first hour.
Then the women found him.
I don’t know when it started, exactly.
I was talking to a couple from the next villa over random stuff, half-listening, when I became aware of a cluster at the bar that had reoriented itself.
“Haha.
You are so interesting.” the woman again laughing at a joke he supposedly said.
Since when was Zane a comedian?
He never made me laugh.
Three of them, beautiful like they had both money and time to just be beautiful and they were all facing Zane.
One of them had her hand on his arm.
He was smiling.
I didn’t like the feeling in my chest after seeing that.
He’s performing.
It’s good for optics.
That was what I told myself.
I turned back to my conversation and laughed at something the woman from the next villa said, and I stayed in the conversation for a few more minutes before I looked back at the bar.
The hand was still on his arm.
He hadn’t moved away from it.
I was not jealous.
I was not jealous because I didn’t have the right to be.
What we had was a contract and a PR strategy and a near-kiss that a wave interrupted.
None of it added up to jealousy.
I put my drink down and walked to the other end of the event, talked to two more people and watched the lights on the water.
At nine o’clock I went back inside.
The long way, around the side of the resort, past the garden path we’d walked yesterday.
While I did, I saw them through the gap in the hedging.
Zane was with a woman not the same one who’d had her hand on his arm, a different one, dark-haired.
They were standing close with his head angled toward her.
She said something and he responded but I couldn’t hear a single word from where I was standing.
I stood there for a few seconds.
Then I turned and walked back to the villa, quickly, without looking back.
It was nothing.
It had to be.