Chapter 6

The Conversation He Didn’t Want

Marcus’s POV

I waited until the office had emptied.

Most of the executive floor left by six-thirty. Daniel stayed later when he wanted people to notice how hard he worked. Tonight he was still in his glass office with the lights on, phone pressed to his ear, laughing at something that probably wasn’t funny.

I stood in the hallway for a moment and watched him through the glass. The same easy posture. The same practiced charm. Four years of watching him move through the company like the rules were suggestions had taught me exactly when the performance was for show.

Tonight it was for himself.

I didn’t knock.

He looked up when the door opened, the laugh cutting off mid-breath. For half a second his face showed the calculation — how much did I know, how angry was I, how carefully did he need to play this.

Then the easy smile slid back into place.

“Marcus. Didn’t expect you down here.”

I closed the door behind me and didn’t sit.

“We need to talk about the photos.”

Daniel set the phone face-down on the desk. The smile stayed, but it thinned.

“Legal’s handling it. Most of the links are already down. It’ll be old news by the weekend.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He leaned back in his chair, the picture of a man who had nothing to hide if you didn’t look too closely.

“What do you want me to say? I made a mistake. It got out. I’m dealing with it.”

“You made a mistake that put Natalie in the middle of a company-wide spectacle.”

Something flickered behind his eyes at the sound of her name. Annoyance, maybe. Or the first real awareness that this conversation wasn’t going to stay surface-level.

“Natalie understands these things happen. We’ve been through worse.”

I felt my jaw tighten. The muscle jumped once before I forced it still.

“Have you?”

Daniel’s fingers drummed once on the arm of the chair. A small tell he had never quite trained out of himself.

“What is this really about, Marcus? You’re acting like I burned the building down. It’s a personal matter. It doesn’t touch the company.”

“It touched every person in that satellite branch who had to watch her sit at her desk while the pictures circulated. It touched the board members who are already asking for a statement. And it touched her.”

I kept my voice even. The same controlled tone I used in negotiations when I wanted the other side to know I was not bluffing.

Daniel stood up. He was still shorter than me by two inches, but he had always known how to fill a room with sheer certainty.

“Since when do you care this much about my marriage?”

The question landed exactly where he meant it to. A direct hit at the thing I had spent years refusing to name.

I didn’t answer it.

“I’m asking you to stop treating this like a PR problem that will disappear if you ignore it long enough,” I said. “Natalie is an employee of this company. She is also the mother of your son. The way you’re handling this is reckless.”

Daniel laughed once, short and sharp.

“Reckless. That’s rich coming from the man who called my wife in the middle of the workday to check on her feelings.”

So he had heard about the call. Of course he had. Nothing stayed quiet in this family for long.

I kept my face still.

“Someone needed to.”

The air in the office changed. Daniel’s smile was gone completely now.

“Stay in your lane, Marcus. You’re CEO. You’re not her husband. You’re not her therapist. And you’re not the moral authority of this family just because Dad left you the title.”

There it was. The old wound, still raw under the polish. The thing he had never forgiven — that the company had gone to the older brother who actually wanted the responsibility instead of the younger one who had always assumed it would be his.

I took one step closer to the desk.

“I’m not trying to be any of those things. I’m telling you that if you keep minimizing this, you’re going to lose more than a few headlines.”

Daniel’s hands curled into loose fists at his sides.

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s an observation.”

We stared at each other across the polished wood. Four years of carefully avoided conversations sat between us like a third person in the room. Every time I had watched him take credit for her work. Every time I had seen her smile tighten in a meeting. Every time I had chosen silence because speaking felt too close to admitting what I actually felt.

I could have said more. I could have told him I knew about the concept he had presented as his own. I could have told him I had watched her shrink in real time while he collected the praise. I could have told him that the only reason I hadn’t interfered sooner was because I didn’t trust my own reasons for wanting to.

I didn’t say any of it.

Not yet.

Daniel broke the silence first.

“I’ll talk to her tonight. Properly. We’ll handle it as a family.”

Family. The word he used when he wanted the conversation to end on his terms.

I nodded once.

“See that you do.”

I turned and walked out before I could say the things that would turn this from a confrontation into a war.

The hallway outside was quiet. The glass walls of the other offices reflected the city lights in long, broken lines. My reflection looked calm. Controlled. Exactly the way a CEO was supposed to look after a difficult conversation with his younger brother.

Inside my chest, something was still burning.

I pulled out my phone as I walked toward the elevator. No new messages from Natalie. I hadn’t expected any. The call yesterday had already been more than she was ready for, and I had no right to expect more.

I stopped at the elevator doors and stared at the dark screen for a long moment.

Four years of silence. Four years of watching and waiting and telling myself that staying out of it was the responsible choice. That interfering would only make everything worse. That my feelings were the problem, not his behavior.

Tonight I had finally pushed a little.

It wasn’t enough.

I already knew it wouldn’t be enough.

The elevator arrived with a soft chime. I stepped inside and pressed the button for the garage level. The doors closed on the empty hallway, cutting off the last of the executive floor lights.

As the car began to drop, one clear thought settled in the center of the anger and refused to move.

If Daniel kept treating her the way he had treated her in that satellite branch — the same way he had treated her for years — then staying in my lane was no longer an option.

I just hadn’t decided yet how far out of it I was willing to step.

And the fact that I was already asking the question told me the answer was going to be further than I had ever let myself consider before.