What Adrian Lost

Adrian's POV

I read the divorce papers four times.

Each time I finished I put them face-down on the desk and poured another drink and told myself there was an explanation — something I was missing, some angle I hadn't considered — because Elise did not do things like this. Elise was quiet. Elise managed the house and attended my events and smiled at my colleagues and never once in seven years had she surprised me.

Except she had, apparently, been doing it the entire time.

My CFO called at nine in the morning.

"The Marchetti account pulled out," he said, without preamble.

I set down my glass. "What?"

"Overnight. Full withdrawal. No explanation given, just a standard termination notice." A pause. "Adrian, the Marchetti account was fifteen percent of our annual revenue."

"Call them back. Set up a meeting—"

"I tried. They're not taking calls."

I hung up and called Brennan, my longest running investor. Straight to voicemail. I called again. Voicemail. I sent a message. No response.

By midday three more accounts had gone quiet.

I sat in my office with the city spread out below me and I tried to find the thread — the logic, the cause, something I could trace back to a source and deal with the way I dealt with problems, directly and with money.

I kept arriving at the same place.

Elise.

Which made no sense because Elise had nothing to do with my business. She was my wife. She stayed home. She attended dinners when I asked her to and smiled at the right people and — I stopped.

She smiled at the right people.

I thought about every event over the past seven years. Every dinner. Every investor lunch she had attended. Every conversation I had assumed was small talk — Elise was good at small talk, people liked her, she had a way of making everyone feel like they were the most interesting person in the room and I had always found it mildly irritating how much time it took up.

My phone rang.

Jade.

"Did you sign them?" she asked the moment I answered, her voice stripped of the softness she used in the office.

"No."

"Adrian." A pause loaded with implication. "You need to sign them. If you fight this it will get messy and messy is bad for—"

"She's Don Victor's daughter," I said.

Silence.

I had said it out loud for the first time and hearing it made it more real in a way I wasn't prepared for. Don Victor Vitale. The name that made boardrooms go quiet and made men who were afraid of nothing become very careful about what they said next.

I had been married to his daughter for seven years and I had slapped her in my office.

"Adrian," Jade said carefully.

"I slapped her," I said. "In front of you. In my office."

Another silence.

"We'll figure it out—"

"Figure it out?" I stood up. "Do you know what Don Victor does to people who—"

"He's one man," Jade said sharply. "He's an old man. You have resources, you have contacts, you have—"

"Had," I said. "Past tense." I looked at the emails stacking up in my inbox — three more this hour, all variations of the same thing. Withdrawals. Terminations. Accounts going dark. "Whatever I had, Jade, I had because of her."

The line was quiet for a long moment.

"So what are you going to do?" she asked.

I looked at the divorce papers on my desk.

I thought about Elise walking out of my office with my handprint on her face and saying nothing. Not crying. Not threatening. Just looking at me with those dark, steady eyes and walking out.

I had always found her composure irritating.

I understood now that I had been afraid of it the entire time and mistaken the fear for irritation because the alternative — that my wife was someone I should have been paying attention to — was something I had not been willing to consider.

I picked up a pen.

I signed the papers.

"I'm going to fix it," I told Jade, and I believed it when I said it, because I was Adrian Reeds and I had never lost anything I decided to keep.

What I did not understand yet — what would take me a long time and cost him everything to understand — was that Elise Vitale had already decided what I was allowed to keep.

And it was nothing.