The number at the bottom of the notice had not changed since she first read it forty minutes ago.
Lily set it on the desk and picked up her coffee.
It was cold but she drank it anyway.
Zara was across from her, watching her face with the careful attention of someone who was still in the process of earning back the right to read it freely.
“That number is not a joke,” Zara said.
“No.”
“So we are going back.”
Lily set the cup down.
She picked up the notice and looked at the figure one more time, the cancellation penalty, precise and unambiguous, enough to push LChen Events back eight months at the exact moment two other clients had already pulled out because of the press leak.
She put it back down.
“We are going back.” Her voice was steady and completely decided.
“We are going to run that gala better than anything they have ever seen and we are going to get paid for every hour of it.
And Ethan Sinclair is going to sit in his boardroom and watch me work and feel every single thing I need him to feel.”
Zara looked at her.
“Are you doing this for the money or for the revenge?”
“Both.” Lily opened her laptop.
“Is that a problem?”
“Um…no..no..Absolutely not.”
Claire arranged this contract.
Lily pulled up the vendor spreadsheet.
She did it deliberately, the timing, the scope, the penalty clause that made it impossible to walk away without bleeding.
And Lily is not sure yet whether she is grateful or furious about that.
Probably both.
She is getting good at holding two things at once.
****
The apartment smelled like garlic and something with lemon when she got home.
Marcus was at the stove, one hand on the pan handle, reading something off his phone and stirring at the same time comfortably.
Theo was at the kitchen table with a sheet of paper and three crayons, narrating something under his breath about a red car that appeared to have a complicated relationship with a dragon.
“Mama.” Theo did not look up.
“The dragon is being unreasonable.”
“Tell the dragon to use his words,” Lily said.
She hung up her bag and kissed the top of his head and he leaned into it briefly before returning to the negotiation.
Marcus looked over his shoulder.
His face lit up when she walked in, not a performance, just a face that was glad to see her.
He was thirty-one and tall.
He had met Lily at a community fundraiser when Theo was thirteen months old and had spent the last two years being exactly what he was, without agenda, without pressure, without ever once asking her to be further along than she was.
“Give me forty minutes,” he said, turning back to the stove.
“I’ll wash up.”
She came back to find Theo explaining the dragon situation to Marcus, who was listening with his full attention the way he always listened to Theo, not indulgently, just genuinely, because Marcus found three-year-olds interesting and had never pretended otherwise.
After dinner she put Theo to bed and came back to the kitchen and they sat across from each other with tea and the particular quiet of two people who were comfortable in the same space.
She told him about the penalty clause.
She told him she was going back to the Sinclair Corp contract.
She said the company name first and watched him absorb it, and then she said Ethan’s name, because she was not going to make Marcus work for information she owed him directly.
He was quiet for a moment.
He turned his cup on the table, one slow rotation.
Then he looked up.
“Is he going to be in the meetings?”
“Probably.”
“And how are you feeling about that?”
“Like I am going to run the best gala this city has ever seen and collect my cheque.”
Marcus looked at her.
His eyes stayed on her face.
“I trust you,” he said.
“I know.” Lily smiled.
She reached across the table and put her hand over his.
He turned his palm up and held her hand and they sat like that for a while.
She looked at his hand under hers and she thought: this is what love is supposed to feel like.
She did not let herself think about why easy felt like it had a small gap in it somewhere.
She was not ready to look at that yet.
****
Sinclair Tower.
Fourteenth floor.
Conference room.
Lily arrived two minutes early.
She always arrived early, it meant she chose her seat, she set the temperature of the room before anyone else could.
She had her portfolio open and her vendor timeline printed in three copies when the assistant opened the door.
Ethan was already there.
He was at the head of the table with papers in front of him, reading.
He looked up when she came in and for a half-second his whole face shifted, he adjusted his posture uncomfortably.
She walked to the table and set her portfolio down two seats from the head.
She gave a professional distance.
She opened her folder and looked at her notes.
“Mr.
Sinclair.” She kept her eyes on the page.
“Shall we begin?”
Three seconds passed.
She heard him exhale through his nose.
“Er…Yes,” he said, clearing his throats.
She began.
She ran the meeting the way she ran all her meetings, tight, purposeful, every item earning its place on the agenda.
She was excellent.
She had always been excellent at this, and three years of building LChen from nothing had made her better, and she did not perform competence for his benefit.
She was simply competent, which was worse for him because there was nothing to argue with.
He watched her work.
She felt it.
He did not interrupt.
He did not try to reassert authority in the room.
He contributed exactly what was required when it was required, nothing more, and she moved forward every time without acknowledging that he had spoken because that was the professional thing to do and professionalism was the only ground she was standing on in this building.
The meeting ended.
The vendors packed up.
She was snapping the clasp on her portfolio when she realised the room had emptied and he had not moved.
She looked up.
Ethan was still in his chair.
His papers were closed.
He was watching her with his hands flat on the table and his jaw doing the thing it did when he was holding something in— that small tension, the muscle just below the ear.
“You look well,” he said.
She picked up her bag.
She held his gaze for exactly one second.
“I am well.” She lifted her portfolio off the table.
“Goodnight, Mr.
Sinclair.”
She walked out.
She heard the conference room silence behind her the whole way to the elevator.
She was in the car when her phone rang through the speakers.
Ethan’s name on the screen, but it wasn’t Ethan’s ringtone that came through the conference room door she had just walked out of.
It was the building’s intercom system alert on the fourteenth floor, audible through the elevator shaft.
His father was calling.
She heard it in the half-second before the elevator closed.
She looked at the lit floor numbers counting down.
Richard.
She stared at the doors.
‘He is calling Ethan right now, tonight, after the first meeting.
The board vote is in sixty-eight hour and I’m with a prosecution file that is not yet ready and a timeline that just got shorter.’
She picked up her phone.
She called Nathan.
“I need the Derek Chow originals couriered tonight,” she said, before he finished his greeting.
“And I need you to find me everything about the board vote procedure.
Every rule, every loophole, every way a vote can be delayed or challenged.
Tonight, Nathan.”
“Lily…,”
“Tonight.”
She ended the call.
She looked at the city going past the window and she thought about Ethan sitting in that conference room with his father’s name lighting up his phone, and she thought about sixty-eight hours, and she did not feel sorry for him.
She almost did.
She caught it and put it away.
It’d help alot and as you read, you’d get to unravel more about Zara and Lily