I glanced at my phone. The ticket confirmation was still on the screen.
I was going home soon.
I couldn't be bothered to argue with him.
“You're right. I was being unreasonable.”
“It won't happen again.”
When he saw my reaction, his expression went blank for a split second.
I figured he'd been bracing for me to do what I always did:
demand to know when we were getting married,
demand to know why he and Eileen Fletcher were still so tangled up,
but the one thing he hadn't expected was me conceding.
After a few seconds of silence, he tossed out a “Suit yourself” and left.
He didn't come home that night.
The next morning I went to work as usual.
I could let go of Ronald, but Panorama Era had every ounce of my blood and sweat poured into it.
Even if I was leaving, I needed to make sure everything at the company was in order first.
Besides, I'd still be collecting steady dividends year after year.
I was in the middle of figuring out who to promote as my replacement on the front lines so I could manage things remotely when Renee Dickerson appeared at the elevator bank, her face drained of color.
She was a company veteran who'd been in the trenches with me through more deals and meetings than I could count.
I had never seen her look this rattled.
“Ms. Whitmore, last night we were sending the pricing proposal to Mr. Hull. Assistant Fletcher said he was asleep and that she'd handle the handoff.”
“But she accidentally sent our bottom-line pricing sheet to the client along with it.”
“Now the client's demanding we cut twenty percent, and our gross margin is only thirty.”
Her voice cracked.
“We've been working this project for six months. If we keep going, we're eating the loss. If we walk away, we lose the client for good.”
I nodded as she spoke and pushed open the door to Ronald's office.
Eileen was lying on her side on the sofa bed while Ronald spooned sugar water into her mouth, one careful sip at a time.
That sofa bed was the same one Ronald had bought for me back when we first started the company,
back when he'd had to force me to rest.
He'd said：“My office is your personal lounge.”
So even when the company relocated and we bought our own building and renovated from scratch,
I'd had that sofa bed moved here with everything else.
Now another woman was stretched out on it, and he was at her side, tending to her like something precious.
Just the way he'd once tended to me.
Something caught in my chest, but strangely, it didn't hurt anymore.
The moment Eileen saw me, she sat up.
“Aria, please don't misunderstand. I felt so guilty that I fainted, and that's the only reason Ronald was giving me sugar water.”
I still remembered that the first time she met Ronald, she'd called him "brother-in-law." Somewhere along the way, it had become just "Ronald."
I didn't acknowledge her. I walked straight to Ronald's desk and slapped the report down in front of him.
“At the client's current asking price, if we want to keep this project, we lose $170,000.”
I swept my gaze over both of them.
“Which one of you is covering that?”
Eileen's eyes reddened instantly.
“It's all my fault. I just didn't want to wake Ronald up because I felt bad about how exhausted he was.”
“I'll go find Mr. Lee right now. I'll beg him if I have to!”
Ronald stared at the file with a deep frown but made no move to stop her.
Renee and I stood right where we were, and neither of us lifted a finger either.
Eileen froze, stuck. She'd backed herself into a corner and had nowhere to go.
I folded my arms and watched her.
“Eileen, crying and begging don't close deals.”
She tossed aside the cashmere blanket and took two steps before crumpling to the floor.
The performance was so clumsy that engaging with it would've been an insult to my own intelligence.
But Ronald, the man hailed as a business genius, bought every second of it.
He helped Eileen up and settled her gently back onto the sofa.
“Aria, you always have to be so aggressive.”
