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C5
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2026-08-24 00:34:10Chapter 5
A Room Full of People Who Already Decided
The boardroom smelled the way it always did, coffee and old carpet. That hadn't changed. Everyone sat in the seats they always sat in. Edmund at the head of the table, near her father's usual chair, close enough that Ivie noticed and hated that she noticed. Her aunt was two seats down. Faces she knew her whole life, arranged the way they'd always been arranged, except today none of them would quite look at her.
"Thank you all for coming on short notice," Edmund said, once she'd taken her seat. He kept his eyes on the table when he said it, though the words were plainly for her too. "I know it's an unusual time for this."
Ivie set her folder down in front of her. She'd prepared for this the way she prepared for anything, notes, figures, a clear sense of what she'd say if she got the chance. She didn't know yet that the chance wasn't really coming.
"I'll get to it," Edmund said. "The past few days have put the family and the company in an uncomfortable position. I don't think anyone here enjoys discussing it."
Nobody answered that. A few people looked at their folders instead.
"The press has a version of events," he went on. "Whether that version is accurate isn't something I'm in a position to judge. But it exists. And Sterling Holdings has to respond to what exists, not to what we wish existed."
"I can tell you what happened," Ivie said. "If anyone actually wants to hear it."
"We do." Edmund's voice was gentle in a way that suggested otherwise. "But we also have to be honest that the timing is difficult. There's a licensing deal closing in six weeks. Two board members got calls from the press yesterday. We're in the middle of something, whether we like it or not."
"So am I," Ivie said.
That got a small silence. Her aunt shifted slightly in her chair.
"Of course," Edmund said. "Nobody's forgetting that. This isn't about blame."
"It sounds like it's about blame."
"It's about stability." He folded his hands on the table. "I'd like to propose that you step back from day-to-day operations for a short period. Not permanently. Just until things settle and the company stops being a headline every morning."
"Step back from what, exactly."
"Meetings. Client-facing work. Anything with your name attached to a public decision. You'd still be informed. We'd just handle the visible parts for a while."
Ivie looked around the table. Nobody was quite meeting her eyes. A man near the end cleared his throat and checked his phone.
"I've worked here for six years," she said. "I know this company better than most people at this table."
"Your ability isn't the issue, Ivie," Edmund said.
"Then what is?"
He didn't answer that directly. Instead he looked at her aunt in a small motion, like he was passing her the next part of the conversation.
"Ivie." Her aunt's voice was careful, practiced. "You've had a terrible week. Nobody expects you to be at your best right now. That isn't a criticism. It's just true."
"So the answer is to take my job away."
"Nobody's taking your job away." Her aunt said it fast, the way people say things they've already decided on before they walk into the room. "We're asking you to let us carry some of it. For now."
Ivie opened her mouth, then didn't. She looked down at her folder, at the notes she'd made that morning, the numbers she'd checked twice, and felt something tighten in her chest that had nothing to do with anger yet.
"I came here to talk about the business," she said finally. "Not about how I'm doing."
"We know," Edmund said. "And I promise you, that's exactly why we're doing this. So you can come back to it once things have calmed down, instead of defending yourself in every room you walk into."
It sounded almost kind, said like that. That was what made it hard to answer.
"For how long," she asked.
"We'll review it."
"That's not a length of time."
"No," Edmund said. "It isn't."
Someone at the far end shifted papers, a small restless sound. Nobody spoke for a second.
Then a man Ivie recognized, one of the older board members, cleared his throat. "I want to say, for the record, are we doing this based on a gossip article? That seems like a strange thing to build a board decision around."
Ivie looked at him gratefully. It was the first real crack in the room.
"It's not about one article," Edmund said, calm, unhurried. "It's about the pattern of the last week. The article is a symptom. I'd rather we deal with the actual situation than pretend the coverage doesn't exist."
The man nodded slowly, like he wasn't fully convinced but didn't have the next thing to say. He didn't raise the point again.
"I'd like to hear from the board," Ivie said, looking around the table now, at faces that had watched her grow up in this building. "Not from Edmund. From you."
A woman near the middle, someone who'd known her father for thirty years, looked at her own folder instead of at Ivie. "I think Edmund's suggestion is sensible, given the circumstances."
A man beside her nodded, briefly, and said nothing at all.
Heat climbed into Ivie's cheeks. She kept her hands still in her lap. She didn't trust them not to shake. She'd been raised to keep her voice even, to never be the one who made a scene in a room full of people who mattered. She'd learned that at every dinner table her father ever sat her down at.
"I can still do this job." Her voice came out quieter than she meant it to. "I've always been able to do this job."
Nobody answered that either.
"Let's vote," Edmund said, not unkindly, like he was moving the meeting along rather than closing an argument he'd already won. "For a temporary reassignment of Ivie's operational responsibilities, pending review."
Hands went up around the table, one after another. Ivie watched them go up and counted without meaning to. She didn't need to finish counting to understand.
Her aunt's hand went up last, and even then, without hesitation.
"Motion passes," Edmund said.
Ivie sat still. Nobody looked pleased with themselves. Nobody looked ashamed either. They simply closed their folders and began gathering their things.
"Thank you all," Edmund said, and the room began to move, chairs pushing back, folders closing, the ordinary sounds of a meeting ending.
Ivie gathered her things without really seeing them. She walked out ahead of most of the room, because she needed to be somewhere else before her face did something she couldn't control in front of these people.
She was almost to the elevator when she heard her aunt's voice, low, coming from the alcove near the water station. On the phone. Ivie slowed without deciding to.
"Yes, it's done," her aunt was saying. "Better than I expected, honestly." A pause. A short laugh, quiet, satisfied. "This works out better than we could have planned."
Ivie stopped walking.
Her aunt turned slightly, phone still at her ear, and saw her standing there. Whatever she said next, she said it while moving away, do
wn the far end of the hall, her voice dropping until Ivie couldn't make out anything at all.
Último capítulo
The Vows we broke C7
Chapter 7Maria’s WarningArchive.Ivie sat with the scrap between her fingers. The study stayed quiet. Her father’s chair was still too big under her, the way it always had been.She stayed until the light outside had gone. She turned the paper over once, then again, as if the blank side might give her something the other hadn’t. It didn’t. Eventually she folded it small and slipped it into her coat pocket.She left the house and took a cab to Sterling Holdings. She didn’t go inside. She asked the driver to leave her in the underground garage and sat for a while, looking up at the building, wondering if the answers were somewhere behind those walls.Her phone buzzed as she got out of the car. A text from a number she didn’t recognize.Can we talk? Somewhere quiet. Not inside.She almost ignored it. Then another message came through.It’s Maria. From records. It’s about your father.Ivie stood by the elevator, the cold
The Vows we broke C6
Chapter 6 Her Father’s HandwritingHer aunt’s voice faded as she moved down the hall. Ivie waited until she couldn’t hear anything at all, then left the building without speaking to anyone.In the car she sat for a moment before she told the driver where to go. “The house,” she said and the driver took her to her father's house The study smelled like him. She hadn’t expected it. Nearly a year, and no one had aired the room out or packed away what didn’t need to stay. The leather chairs still held the shape of him. The cologne was mostly gone, but not completely. She stood in the doorway longer than she meant to before she made herself walk in.She hadn’t come looking for anything. The rest of the house felt like it belonged to other people now. This room still felt like his.His photograph sat on the corner of the desk the way it always had him on the terrace in Cornwall, squinting into the sun, one hand half raised as if he’d been
The Vows we broke C5
Chapter 5 A Room Full of People Who Already DecidedThe boardroom smelled the way it always did, coffee and old carpet. That hadn't changed. Everyone sat in the seats they always sat in. Edmund at the head of the table, near her father's usual chair, close enough that Ivie noticed and hated that she noticed. Her aunt was two seats down. Faces she knew her whole life, arranged the way they'd always been arranged, except today none of them would quite look at her."Thank you all for coming on short notice," Edmund said, once she'd taken her seat. He kept his eyes on the table when he said it, though the words were plainly for her too. "I know it's an unusual time for this."Ivie set her folder down in front of her. She'd prepared for this the way she prepared for anything, notes, figures, a clear sense of what she'd say if she got the chance. She didn't know yet that the chance wasn't really coming."I'll get to it," Edmund said. "The past few
The Vows we broke C4
Chapter 4 The Story They Told FirstIvie saw it before she meant to. Her phone lit up on the desk while she was still staring at the redacted line in the calendar, and a name flashed across the screen a gossip account her cousin followed, the kind that posted three times a day and somehow always knew things first.She almost didn't open it. Then she saw Damien's name in the preview text and picked the phone up anyway.The post had gone up forty minutes ago.There was a photo from the party Damien and Sophia standing close together near the bar, taken from an angle that made it look like the middle of an ordinary conversation. Under it, a caption written like it was doing her a favor.*LIvie Sterling's engagement party took an unexpected turn last night when the bride-to-be reportedly accused her fiancé and her closest friend of an affair, based on a private business conversation she misunderstood. Sources close to the couple s
The Vows we broke C3
Chapter 3 The Morning After Doesn't Ask PermissionThe building looked exactly the same. That was the first thing Ivie noticed, and it annoyed her a little, that it did.She walked through the lobby the way she always did, heels loud on the marble, phone in one hand, scrolling through the morning's messages like they might tell her nothing had happened. Security nodded at her. The coffee cart sat in its usual spot. Somewhere above her, Sterling Holdings was doing exactly what it did every Tuesday.She held on to that. The sameness of it.She'd barely slept. Lying awake, she told herself coming in today mattered that if she stayed home, if she let one bad night keep her out of her own building, she'd be handing them something. She didn't know exactly who "them" was yet. She just knew she wasn't giving it to them.The elevator opened onto the fourteenth floor, and the first thing she registered was how fast two assis
The Vows we broke C2
Chapter 2 The sound a room makes Sophia didn't move. Neither did Ivie.For a moment nobody said anything. Party noise drifted down the hall and filled the space where words should have been.Then Damien turned and saw her too.Neither of them flinched. That was what she noticed first."Ivie." He set the glass down on the desk, careful, unhurried, like he had time for this. "How long have you been standing there?""Long enough." Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to."Okay." He said it the way you'd talk to someone who'd misread a text message. "Okay, before you…""Before I do what?" She stepped into the room. The door swung wider behind her. "Before I ask what you meant by playing house? Before I ask what the Sterling assets have to do with either of you?""You're taking this the wrong way.""Then tell me the right way." She waited. Actually waited, some part of her still hoping he'd say something that made this stu
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