Because my mother had forged me into the kind of woman who always finds a solution, I had carefully loaded two massive, delicate arrangements into the back of my SUV and battled crosstown traffic. That accommodating nature was precisely how I found myself clutching my car keys so tightly the metal bit into my palm, wearing a dusty linen work shirt stained with the sap of the proteas I had been wrangling all afternoon. I was a ghost in my own life, watching the man I had been married to for three years run his thumb in a slow, agonizingly familiar arc along the jawline of Claudine —the woman I had just elevated to co-owner of my company.
My phone vibrated violently against my palm again. The screen illuminated Thatcher’s lie. “Raleigh traffic is brutal.”
He was thirty feet away. In Charlotte. Sipping a martini with Claudine.
I recognized her posture instantly; I knew it as intimately as my own signature. It was the precise, calculating tilt of her head she deployed when she was reeling someone in—chin dipped slightly, dark eyes gazing upward through a fringe of lashes. For two years, I had watched her execute that exact maneuver at industry mixers and high-stakes client dinners. It was a practiced, hypnotic ease that made the recipient feel like the only person in the room. We used to laugh about it, splitting a bottle of cheap Pinot in the studio on Friday nights. I used to affectionately call her “The Closer.” She was the reason Bloom & Co. had doubled its inquiry rate.
A cold, acidic fury pooled in my stomach. I took one heavy, definitive step toward the bar, ready to shatter their little tableau.
Suddenly, a hand clamped down around my wrist. The grip was like a vice.
I spun around so violently I nearly dropped my keys. A woman stood just behind my shoulder, clad in the crisp, dark blazer of the hotel’s hospitality staff. Her expression was a mask of quiet, deliberate calculation. It took my fractured brain a second to place her. It was Hannah , the senior events coordinator for the hotel’s corporate accounts. We had collaborated on three massive, contracted installations for the property. She had always struck me as a woman who missed absolutely nothing in her periphery.
