MasukLisa watches Elizabeth Hart walk away.The practiced warmth on her face holds — it always holds — but underneath, very quietly, something arranges itself into satisfaction.Twenty years of research. Twenty years of patience.Claire Tan.Just a name. That's all it took.She lifts her champagne glass and takes a slow sip and scans the room for her next move.
I find the rooftop terrace through a door marked Staff Only that someone has propped open with a folded cocktail napkin, which is exactly the kind of detail I file away and appreciate.The November air hits me like a clean break.Below, through the glass walls, the party continues — crystal and champagne and the specific, exhausting performance of everyone being exactly who they need to be for exactly the right audience. I can see Vivian, changed into something that is actually hers, moving through a cluster of people with the ease of someone who was born knowing how to fill a room.Beside her: Tyler Nash, who I recognize from the selection round, now apparently doing promo work for Apex. He's laughing at something she said.George Smith is inside talking to Liam. Their body language is comfortable, the ease of men who have decided to trust each other's interests more or less. I watch Liam say something that makes George's mouth curve and think: whatever I'm worried about down there, i
The room is doing what these rooms always do.Champagne towers catching chandelier light. Buffet stations lined with food no one will fully eat. The specific, practiced hum of people performing wealth at each other across beautifully appointed tables. Half the guests are from Apex Entertainment circles. The other half are the city's financial and social infrastructure — families who received an invitation with a Hart Industries letterhead and rearranged their schedules accordingly.This is not my birthday party.This is a network event hosted in my name.I know this. Liam knows this. We move through it together anyway, because it is still my name on the invitation, and I have decided that whatever Lisa is planning is not going to happen to me — it's going to happen at me, and I intend to be facing the right direction when it does.I greet people. I smile. I say the correct things in the correct order and accept birthday wishes
I'm staring at him again.I don't mean to. It just happens — Liam driving, the city sliding past in gray November light, and my brain doing what it does now, which is cataloguing the specific way he holds the wheel with one hand, the angle of his jaw, the quiet competence of him in motion.A year ago today, I think.November eleventh.Singles' Day.A year ago today I was sitting on the floor of my old bedroom at the Brooks house, picking apart a ten-year relationship in my head and telling myself the sky had fallen. A year ago today, I had absolutely no concept of what was coming."You're staring," Liam says. "Is it the jacket? You've been looking at the jacket since we left.""I'm not looking at the jacket.""Then what?""Nothing." I turn to the window. "You're just very pleased with yourself lately. I'm observing it.""I am not pleased with myself.""You buttoned your own collar this morning and then looked at me like you expected applause."The corner of his mouth moves.We've been
We're getting dressed when the knock comes.I open the door.Vivian.She's in a silk robe, hair perfectly arranged for someone who claims to have just woken up, eyes doing a rapid sweep of the room the moment I step back. Her gaze lands on Liam — buttoning his cuffs, unhurried, in the middle of my childhood bedroom at seven-thirty on a Sunday — and something moves across her face before she locks it down."Brother-in-law." Her voice is warm enough to frost glass. "Mom made fish soup noodles. She wants you both downstairs for breakfast."Liam walks toward the door.He stops beside me."Can you—" He tips his chin toward his collar, where the top button has come loose. "I can never get that one."I turn.He's already done everything else — the shirt perfectly pressed from Secretary Fang, the jacket ready on the chair. Just the collar. Just this one button.I reach up and do it.It takes
The shirt never fully dries.I know it the moment I walk into the bathroom the next morning, still warm from sleep, and pick it up from where it ended up in the sink — crumpled and slightly damp and deeply, irreversibly wrinkled — and I stand there holding it with the specific expression of a woman reconstructing the sequence of events that led to this outcome.The sequence is: I was washing the shirt. Liam came in. The shirt went into the sink.The rest of the sequence is not relevant to the shirt."It's ruined," I say, when I walk back into the bedroom.Liam is sitting up against the headboard, the quilt pooled at his waist, watching me with the unhurried contentment of a man who slept well and is in no particular rush to begin the morning. There is something criminally unfair about how he looks right now — the morning light through the curtains, the particular dishevelment that happens when someone sleeps hard — and I hav
Something about Vivian was… off.
“Oh? An actor confessed to you, and you turned him down?”“I don’t like him.”Allie could barely breathe. Liam’s gaze burned through her, dark and unreadable.He tilted his head slightly, studying her. “You’re sure?”Her heart pounded. “Yes.”Liam leaned in, his voice a whisper against her lips. “G
Julian Ford leaned back in his chair, casual as ever, with a smirk dancing on his lips. “She met you first, so I guess I have to accept my fate. But Mr. Hart, if you don’t treat your wife well, I won’t hesitate to steal her away.”Liam, standing beside me, didn’t even flinch. His voice, as cool and
The conference room buzzed with restless energy, cameras flashing as reporters murmured among themselves. Everyone was waiting for the moment to pounce.Allie Brooks arrived fashionably late, stepping through the doors with a calm that masked the storm within. Every pair of eyes turned to her, jud







