Chapter 3 The Crown Nobody Wanted To See Her Wear

Vivienne Kingston had learned, in the six months since her father died, that grief and boardrooms did not mix well. Grief wanted you to sit still. Boardrooms wanted you sharp, dressed, unshaken, by nine.

She gave them unshaken. It was the only thing she had left to give.

Her father's office was still her father's office, technically, though her name was on the door now, freshly etched, the paint around it not yet faded to match the rest. She hadn't been able to bring herself to move the chair, the pen set, the small framed photo of the two of them at her graduation, him beaming like she'd hung the moon instead of just finished a business degree he'd already taught her twice over at the dinner table.

Richard Kingston had built Kingston Holdings from a single shipping contract into something that touched half a dozen industries. He'd also, apparently, believed he had another twenty years to teach his daughter how to hold it. The heart attack took that assumption away from both of them in the space of an evening.

Vivienne still remembered the hospital corridor. The particular color of fluorescent light. The way nobody would look directly at her, like grief was contagious and they didn't want to catch her eye and catch it too.

She'd buried him on a Tuesday and sat in his chair on a Thursday. There hadn't been room for anything softer in between.

"You understand," her uncle Marcus said now, leaning back in the chair across her desk like he already owned it, "that the board has concerns."

"The board has concerns every quarter, Uncle Marcus. It's practically a hobby."

"Don't be smart with me, Vivienne." He smiled when he said it, the kind of smile that had a blade folded up inside it. "I'm on your side. I'm family."

Family. Vivienne had come to hate that word almost as much as she used to love it. Family, in this building, meant people who called her "sweetheart" in meetings and then voted against her the moment she left the room. It meant her cousin Derek, who'd wanted the CEO seat since he was nineteen and had never once hidden it well. It meant aunts who sent flowers on the anniversary of her father's death and, in the very same week, quiet emails to shareholders questioning whether a twenty-eight-year-old woman with no real operational experience should be running a company this size.

Wolves, all of them. Just dressed for dinner instead of for the hunt.

"The Okoye acquisition," Marcus continued, sliding a folder across the desk. "The board wants it fast-tracked. I want it fast-tracked. Your father would have wanted it fast-tracked."

"My father," Vivienne said evenly, "would have read every page of that folder before he let anyone use his name in a sentence about it."

Marcus's smile thinned. "You're not him, Vivienne."

"No," she agreed. "I'm not."

I'm the only one of you who actually misses him, she didn't say. The rest of you are just missing the version of me you thought you could push around.

He left eventually, the way they always did — never quite defeated, just reloading. Vivienne sat alone after the door clicked shut, and for one unguarded moment let her face do what it wanted to do, which was nothing composed at all. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until the sting passed.

There was no one to call. That was the part nobody warned you about, losing your only parent young — not the grief itself, which everyone expected, but the specific, echoing loneliness of having no one left whose love for you wasn't tangled up with what they could get from you. Her father had never wanted anything from her except her company on Sunday mornings and someone to argue business strategy with over eggs.

She missed being someone's daughter more than she missed being anyone's boss.

That evening, driving home later than she should have, she told her driver to take the long way — past the smaller streets, away from the glass towers, through the part of the city that still felt like it had people in it instead of just employees. She wasn't sure why. She told herself it was to clear her head.

She didn't let herself think about who she might see.

She almost didn't recognize him at first — Lucas, crouched by the open bonnet of a stranger's car, not fixing it, just helping the owner hold a torch steady while the man cursed at his engine, the two of them laughing about something in that easy way men had with each other over broken machinery. Lucas's sleeves were rolled up. There was a smudge of grease on his jaw. He looked, for just a moment, lighter than she'd seen him — like a man briefly let out of a room he usually kept the door shut on.

Then he glanced up, scanning the street out of habit the way tired parents do, checking his surroundings, and their eyes caught through the car window for exactly as long as a red light lasted.

Neither of them waved. Neither of them looked away fast enough to pretend they hadn't seen.

The light turned green. Her car moved on.

Vivienne sat back, her heart doing something unfamiliar and irritating, and thought, absurdly, of her father — of the one piece of advice he'd given her that she'd never quite known what to do with. You'll know the real ones, Viv, by what they don't ask you for.

She didn't know Lucas Okon. She had no reason to think of him at all.

But two days later, when her assistant mentioned, in passing, that the east wing's plumbing contractor had cancelled last minute and they needed someone fast for the charity gala setup, Vivienne heard herself say, before she'd fully decided to say it:

"Get me the plumber from Maple Heights. The young one. Lucas Okon."

Her assistant blinked, surprised at the specificity, but didn't ask.

Vivienne didn't examine too closely why she'd asked either. Some doors, she was learning, were easier to walk through than to explain.