She thought about dahlias and window boxes and a leather notebook and a man who had smiled at a book in the rain and made her believe that staying was its own form of courage.
But the world Vivien had stepped away from had not stopped moving.
In the fourteen months since the church, Derek Weston had done what men like Derek always do when they have traded one woman for another and need to believe the trade was worth it.
He had doubled down.
He had proposed to Camille six months after the altar with a ring larger than the one Vivien had returned by mail without a note.
He had introduced Camille at company galas as his future, his partner, his choice.
But what Derek had not examined in the busy project of justifying himself was the slow and specific way Camille had begun to look at him.
Not with love.
With inventory.
The way a person looks at an asset they have successfully acquired and are already thinking about how to leverage.
Camille Rhodes had not stolen Derek because she loved him.
She had stolen him because he was a door.
A senior acquisitions director at Weston & Crane Real Estate. A man whose access and salary and proximity to power could carry her farther than her own ambition had managed alone.
She had made a calculation.
And the calculation had paid off.
Or so she believed.
Until the morning everything changed.
It was a Monday quarterly review, the kind of meeting that filled the upper floors of Weston & Crane Real Estate with the particular tension of people performing confidence for an audience of people performing confidence back at them.
Derek sat at the long glass table in the main boardroom on the fourteenth floor.
Camille sat two seats to his left.
Both of them were waiting for the arrival of the company’s silent majority owner, a figure so removed from daily operations that most employees had never seen his face, and knew him only as a signature on documents and a name in the company’s founding charter.
The elevator opened.
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