LOGINAthenaThe restaurant was the kind of place where the lighting was deliberately soft and the menus had no prices. The staff moved quietly between tables like they had been trained never to exist too visibly. Stellan had chosen a table by the window overlooking the city, and I sat across from him trying to remember the last time someone had taken me to lunch that was not a business meeting.I could not remember.That said something.“The Meridian restructuring proposal,” Stellan said as he set his glass down. “You turned that around in forty eight hours.”“The framework was already there. It just needed someone to see it properly.”“Three senior analysts looked at it before you.” He held my gaze. “None of them saw what you saw.”Something warm moved through my chest that I refused to examine too closely.“Gerald Osei called me this morning,” he continued. “He said, and I quote, whoever put together the Meridian brief needs to be kept very far away from Callum’s department bef
AthenaI was halfway through the Meridian files when my office door opened without a knock.I looked up ready to redirect whoever it was back to Clara.Then I dropped my pen.Tracey stood in the doorway with her mouth open and her eyes moving around the office like she was trying to confirm she had the right room. Then her eyes landed on me and stayed there.“No,” she said. “Absolutely not.”“Tracey…”“Do not speak.” She stepped inside and closed the door and walked toward me slowly, looking me up and down with an expression caught somewhere between shock and pure delight. “What happened to you.”I laughed. “Sit down.”“I am looking at you.” She stopped in front of the desk and stared. “The hair. The suit. The office with your name on the door.” She pressed her hand flat against the desk like she needed something solid. “Athena. I have not seen you since the wedding and you have become a completely different woman.”“The same woman,” I said. “Just in better shoes.”“Those s
AthenaThe silence after the slap sat heavy over the table.Not awkward. Not stunned.Heavy.Like the entire dining room had shifted under everyone’s feet and nobody quite knew how to stand in it anymore.Callum slowly turned his face forward. A faint red mark spread across his cheekbone. His breathing had changed — sharper now, controlled too carefully, the kind of controlled that meant something was boiling just underneath it.Petra looked horrified.Not because Stellan had slapped him.Because Stellan had slapped him for me.I took a long sip of my coffee. Calm enough to make it worse.Across the table Stellan turned another page of his newspaper like none of this had disrupted his morning in the slightest. That was the thing about him. Nothing he did ever looked emotional. It looked decided.Callum swallowed once. Then laughed quietly under his breath. It wasn’t amusement. It was humiliation with nowhere to go.“Fine,” he said, staring at the table. “Let’s talk about t
AthenaBreakfast at the Whitmore table had always been a performance.Stellan sat at the head with his coffee and newspaper, quiet and unreadable in the way only he could be. Callum sat to his left, already scrolling through his phone with the restless irritation of someone looking for somewhere to put his bad mood. I took my seat while Mrs. Delgado moved around the table with the calm efficiency I had genuinely missed.Petra arrived last. She walked in wearing silk, glanced over the breakfast spread, and stopped.“I requested apple pie.”Mrs. Delgado carefully set the juice down beside her. “It isn’t on the breakfast menu, ma’am. Apple pie is usually served later in the day. I can have it ready for lunch.”“I didn’t ask what time you planned on making it.” Petra’s expression hardened. “I asked for apple pie this morning. Or is your hearing failing with the rest of you?”The air shifted.I set my fork down gently.“Petra.” My voice stayed even. “You will not speak to my sta
AthenaI pushed open the bedroom door and my brain stopped working completely.Stellan was walking out of the bathroom with nothing but a towel sitting low on his hips, water still trailing down his chest, hair damp, completely unaware I had just walked into the room.I froze.Every coherent thought I had evaporated instantly.Because this man — this man who moved through boardrooms in tailored suits and spoke in measured sentences and carried himself like someone who had never been caught off guard in his life, looked like something that had no business existing in reality.He was built in a way that made no sense for a man of fifty. Broad shoulders that tapered into a chest that was — I needed to stop looking at his chest. Biceps that shifted with every casual movement like they had been carved deliberately. A stomach that was unfairly, unreasonably defined. The kind of body that announced that whatever hours he spent in that gym he did not waste a single one of them.I stood
Athena“I raised you better than this.”The slap came before I could process the words.The sound of it cracked through the room and my head snapped to the side and for a moment there was nothing, just the ringing silence after it and the heat spreading across my cheek and Petra’s soft intake of breath from somewhere behind my mother.I stood very still.I turned my head back slowly.My mother was looking at me with her chest heaving and her hand still raised and her eyes bright with the particular righteousness of a woman who had never once questioned whether she deserved the anger she carried.“How could you be so cruel,” she said, her voice breaking on it like she was the one in pain. “To your own sister. Your blood. How could you treat her this way?”Behind her Petra pressed her tissue to her mouth and said nothing. Just stood there and let the tears do their work.The irony of my mother’s words lodged in my chest like broken glass.This woman standing in front of me talking about







