Chapter 4

She didn't want to go. Two days after her accounts froze, with Denise still working through emergency motions that moved slower than Ivy's patience could stand, Adrian informed her over breakfast that the Whitfield Foundation gala was Friday, and that she'd be attending as his wife, the same as every year.

"People will ask questions if you're not there," he said, not looking up from his coffee, as though the last week hadn't happened at all. "Let's not give anyone a reason to speculate.”

She'd almost said no. But Denise's voice was still in her head, calm and professional, warning her not to give Adrian anything to use against her in the divorce filing they hadn't submitted yet. “Play the part a little longer. Just until we have leverage of our own…”

So Friday came, and Ivy stood in front of her mirror in the dark green dress Adrian had always liked. She smiled at exactly the right moments, and she let him rest his hand at the small of her back for the cameras at the entrance like nothing between them had cracked open at all.

The Whitfield Foundation gala took up the entire ballroom of the Ashford Hotel, chandeliers doing their slow, indifferent glitter over a room full of people who mostly knew each other's net worth better than they knew each other's names.

 Ivy was two glasses of champagne in, half-listening to a conversation about a hospital wing donation when the room changed.

It wasn't loud. Nobody announced anything. But Ivy felt it; a slight recalibration in the air, heads turning by fractions of an inch toward the entrance.

She turned too.

Xavier Cross walked into the room like a man who had never once, in his entire life, had to wonder whether people would notice him.

Ivy hadn't seen him in eleven years. Somehow, she still would have known him instantly, in any room. 

He was so tall even at twenty-one, but there was nothing left in him now of the boy she remembered, the one who used to laugh too easily and talk with his hands.  

"Cross," Adrian muttered beside her, and Ivy glanced over in time to catch something flicker across her husband's face, and for the first time all evening, his easy, practiced charm finally slipped.

You know him?" Ivy asked, though she already knew the answer.

Everyone in this city knew who Xavier Cross was.

"Everyone knows Cross Holdings." Adrian's jaw had gone tight. "He's been circling Vance Enterprises for two years, trying to poach half my board out from under me. Do not engage with him if he comes over."

Ivy didn't answer. She was watching Xavier move through the room, then his eyes found hers.

For one long, suspended second, eleven years folded up and disappeared, and she was twenty-two again, sitting across from him at her mother's kitchen table, laughing at something so unimportant she couldn't even remember it now, before her father had ended the whole thing with a phone call neither of them had been given the courtesy of hearing directly.

 Xavier's expression didn't change, nothing so obvious as surprise crossing his face. 

Then someone said his name, pulling his attention away, and the moment closed as quickly as it had opened.

Ivy told herself she'd imagined the whole thing. She was frightened, underneath the practiced calm, but she hadn't imagined the note.

It arrived nearly an hour later, while Adrian was deep in conversation with a state senator about a zoning bill, delivered to her elbow at the bar by a young woman in a sharp black blazer who set it down beside Ivy's glass without a word and disappeared back into the crowd before Ivy could even ask who'd sent her.

Four words, handwritten, with no signature.

The terrace. Five minutes please.

Ivy stood there holding the little card for longer than she should have, turning it over once as if the back might explain itself. Then she folded it into her clutch, told Adrian she needed air, and didn't wait to hear whether he'd actually registered what she said.

The terrace was colder than the ballroom. Xavier was already there, leaning against the stone railing with his back to the skyline, hands in his pockets.

"You look so good," he said when she stepped outside.

Ivy almost laughed. It was such an absurd thing to say, given everything underneath the surface of her life right now.

 "You didn't ask me out here to tell me I look well, Xavier."

Something shifted across his face at the sound of his name  

"No," he agreed. "I didn't."

"Then say whatever it is you have to say."

"I know about Lauren," he said finally. "I know there's a child, and I know your joint accounts were frozen a few days ago."

The cold from the railing seemed to travel straight into Ivy's chest. "How could you possibly know any of that?"

"Because I've spent two years waiting for exactly this kind of opening, and I wasn't about to let it pass by without saying something."

"An opening for what?"

"To end him. I have the resources. I've had them for a while now. What I haven't had is a way inside Vance Enterprises.” He said.

Then, Ivy understood this conversation was about to become something far larger than she'd braced herself for. "And you think I'm your way in?"

"I think you're the only person alive who has something I need and no reason left to protect the man who has it too." He didn't blink when saying it. 

"Your marriage settlement includes family shares in Vance Enterprises. Shares tied to your name specifically, that Adrian can't touch without your signature. With those, I could be inside his boardroom within a month."

She went quiet. "So this was never about Lauren or helping me because you actually cared about what happened to me." She heard the bitterness rise in her own voice and didn't bother stopping it. "You're just another person who wants something from me, same as everyone else in my life this week."

"You could say that," Xavier said, and didn't flinch saying it, which she found, unwillingly, more honest than anything.

 "But unlike your husband, I'm telling you exactly what it is before I take it, and it benefits you a lot"

"And what exactly are you proposing I do? Hand my shares over out of the goodness of my heart?"

"No." He held her gaze without wavering. "I'm proposing marriage."

Ivy stared at him. For a moment the noise of the party behind the glass doors seemed to fall away completely.

"I'm sorry," she said slowly. "What?"

"Divorce Adrian and marry me instead." He said it evenly.

 "I'll help you take apart everything he has. Every account, every asset, every board seat he thinks he's untouchable in. I'll make sure your father's company survives whatever comes after. And in exchange, once we're married, your shares become mine to use."

Ivy couldn't find a single word to answer him with.

"You can't be serious."

"I don't say things I don't mean, Ivy. I never have." His voice dropped slightly

"I'm not asking you to decide tonight. I'm asking you to go home and actually count up what you have left to lose by saying yes."

Ivy stood on the terrace, the wind lifting the hem of her dress. A few days ago, she'd been swept along by everyone else's decisions. Not anymore. Whatever happened next would be because she chose it.

"I need time," she said finally.

"Take it." Xavier reached into his jacket and held out a card, plain, cream colored, with a phone number in dark ink. "But not too much of it. Adrian isn't going to sit still while you decide, and neither, frankly, am I."

She took the card after a few seconds of reluctance. 

He was already turning to leave, already halfway back toward the glass doors when she looked down at what he'd handed her and found, beneath the phone number, something that had nothing to do with any business proposal at all.

“I never stopped watching, Ivy.”