Chapter 12

The press conference was Richard’s idea, and I hated it for exactly four seconds before I understood why it was the right one.

“Van Corporation’s announcing their response to the article this afternoon,” he said, sliding his phone across the desk so I could see the notice. “Holloway’s holding it himself. Given that you’re now publicly named as the architect behind their recovery strategy, I think Hale Capital should be represented in that room.”

“You want me to go.”

“I want you to be seen,” Richard said. “There’s a difference. You don’t have to say a word. Your presence says enough.”

I should have refused. I had every reason to refuse. Instead, I found myself in the back of a town car two hours later, wearing the kind of composed, unbothered blazer that cost more than I used to make in a month, riding toward a hotel ballroom to watch Julian Holloway answer for everything in front of cameras.

The room was packed by the time I arrived — financial press, two local news crews, a scattering of Van Corporation board members sitting in a tense, unified row near the front like a jury that hadn’t yet decided which way to lean. I took a seat near the back, close enough to see, far enough to remain unremarkable, and watched Julian walk out to the podium.

He looked better than he had on my sidewalk two nights ago. Not rested — nothing close to rested — but pulled together in the specific, practiced way of a man who’d spent his whole life learning to perform composure on command, regardless of what was actually happening underneath it.

“I want to address the reporting from this morning directly,” he said, and his voice carried the particular flatness of someone reading from a script he didn’t fully believe in. “Evelyn Carter’s contributions to this company’s recovery were significant, and I should have credited her publicly years ago. That failure is mine, and I take full responsibility for it.”

A ripple of murmurs. A reporter near the front raised a hand immediately. “Mr. Holloway, there are also allegations of concealment relevant to shareholder disclosures — that you knowingly presented Ms. Carter’s strategic work as your own in board materials. Can you address whether that constitutes fraud?”

Julian’s jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly. “I’ve directed our legal team to cooperate fully with any review the board deems necessary,” he said. “I won’t get ahead of that process by characterizing it myself.”

Careful. Controlled. Exactly what his lawyers had drilled into him, I imagined, in some conference room at six that morning.

Then a different reporter, younger, sharper, looking for an angle nobody else had taken yet. “Is it true Ms. Carter is now working for Hale Capital, the same firm currently pursuing a hostile stake in your company?”

Julian’s eyes moved across the room before he answered — scanning, almost involuntarily, the way you check a room for the person whose reaction actually matters to you.

He found me.

I didn’t look away. I’d promised myself, somewhere in the back of that town car, that I wouldn’t.

“Yes,” he said, eyes still on me, voice steady despite whatever was happening behind it. “Ms. Carter is employed by Hale Capital. I have no comment on the strategic implications of that, beyond saying that I understand, completely, why she chose them.”

The room shifted slightly — reporters scribbling, a board member leaning toward another to murmur something behind a raised hand. It wasn’t the answer his lawyers would have wanted. It was too honest, too personal, too clearly aimed at one specific woman in the back row instead of thirty journalists waiting for a soundbite.

“One final question,” the same reporter pressed. “Do you have anything you’d like to say to Ms. Carter directly, given she’s here today?”

The room turned, almost as one body, to find me.

I sat very still, every instinct telling me to look composed, unaffected, exactly the woman Richard had sent me here to be. Julian held the podium for a long moment, and I watched him decide something — watched the specific, visible effort of a man choosing honesty over performance, in a room built entirely for performance.

“Yes,” he said finally, looking directly at me across thirty feet of ballroom carpet and several dozen strangers. “Thank you. For five years of work I never once acknowledged. I don’t expect that to undo anything. I just don’t want it to go unsaid again.”

Cameras turned toward me. Flashes, several of them, fast and bright.

I didn’t smile. I didn’t nod. I held his gaze for exactly as long as the moment required and then I stood, smoothly, and walked toward the exit before anyone could ask me to comment on a single word of it.

I made it to the hallway before my hands started shaking.

I made it to the elevator before I let myself acknowledge why.