What a team you must have made.”
The silence around us was its own kind of sound.
Gerald opened his mouth.
Chelsea’s face had gone the exact color of her silver dress.
Three hundred people, and the only thing you could hear was the string quartet playing to a room that had stopped listening.
“We were a team,” I said, into the quiet, saving Gerald the way I’d saved him a hundred times before — except this time on my terms.
“Once. I built the engine. He built the company around it.
We’re… restructuring the story to be more accurate.”
A few people laughed, gently.
Margaret grinned.
And my daughter Sophie squeezed my arm and whispered, “Mom. You’re glowing.”
I was.
Not with revenge.
With something better.
I was glowing the way you glow when you finally stop apologizing for taking up the space you earned.
Gerald found me by the coat check an hour later.
