They Wanted Me Gone, So I Became Unforgettable

Anastasia’s POV:“You have paint on your face.”I looked up from the mood board spread across my desk and found Celeste Dupont standing in my office doorway in a cream blazer and reading glasses pushed up on her head, looking at me the way she looked at everything, like she had already figured it out and was simply waiting for it to catch up to itself.“I was testing fabric swatches,” I said, reaching up to touch my cheek.“With your face?”“It was an accident.”“Most revelations are.” She walked in without being invited because Celeste Dupont did not wait to be invited into anything, set a coffee on the edge of my desk, and looked at the mood board with the particular attention she gave things she was deciding whether to respect. “The Harmon project?”“The Henderson account is what I was told.”“The Harmon project,” she repeated, like I had not spoken, and tapped one corner of the board where I had pinned a swatch of deep emerald velvet beside a pencil sketch of an open plan living s

Anastasia’s POV:Simone called at exactly eight forty three the next morning while I was standing in my kitchen in my pajamas staring at the coffee machine like it had personally offended me.“Tell me everything,” she said before I finished saying hello. “And I mean everything. Dean told me Lucas came home last night and sat in his car in the parking garage for forty five minutes before going upstairs and I need the full story behind that information immediately.”“Dean told you that?”“Dean has been calling me every day for two weeks under the guise of asking about you.” A pause. “He thinks he is being subtle. He is not being subtle. Now stop deflecting and tell me about the meeting.”I poured my coffee and sat down at my kitchen table and told her everything. The lobby. The elevator. The conference room. The presentation. The moment Lucas turned around and looked at me like I was something he had lost and only just understood the value of. I told her about the conversation after the

Anastasia’s POV:I had been staring at my ceiling for three hours when my phone rang.Not Simone, who had called twice already and left one voicemail that I had listened to four times without responding to because I did not have the words yet and Simone deserved better than half of them. Not Marcus, who checked in every Sunday with the reliability of a man who needed to feel useful. Not anyone in my contacts at all.Unknown number. Harlow City area code.I stared at it for four rings and answered on the fifth because something in the base of my stomach told me that not answering was not actually an option.“Anastasia Voss.” The voice on the other end was unhurried and smooth in the way that belonged exclusively to men who had never once had to raise it to be heard. “I was hoping you would pick up.”I sat up slowly in the dark of my bedroom with the folder still on my nightstand where I had placed it two hours ago after reading it for the third time.“Who is this?” I said, though somet

Anastasia’s POV:Patricia Haines was not what I expected.I had built a picture of her in my head during the forty eight hours between her phone call and Friday morning, the kind of woman who wore her authority like a uniform, sharp and deliberate and slightly intimidating in the way that people who spent their careers dismantling powerful men’s empires tended to be. I was not entirely wrong. She was sharp and she was deliberate and she had the kind of stillness that came from years of sitting across tables from people who were lying to her and knowing it before they finished their first sentence.But she was also younger than I expected. Late thirties, natural hair cut close, a grey blazer over a burgundy shirt, and eyes that moved over me when I walked into the hotel lobby where we had agreed to meet with the particular assessment of someone deciding very quickly how much of the truth I could handle.She ordered us both coffee without asking and slid a thin folder across the table b

Anastasia’s POV: Lucas drove. I didn’t offer to and he did not ask me to and we did not discuss it because there was nothing to discuss. He was already moving toward the parking structure half a block from the Meridian before his phone had finished the call and I was beside him because standing on a pavement watching him walk away after everything that had just happened was not something my feet were willing to do. We did not speak for the first four minutes. I sat in the passenger seat of a car I had never been in before, a different one from the ones we had owned during the marriage, and I watched the city move past the window and I thought about Victoria Salvatore in a hospital somewhere in Harlow City and the specific cold quality of the words they are saying it was not an accident and I tried to make the pieces fit together in a way that made sense. Vane was in federal custody. He had been in that private dining room when it happened which meant he had not ordered it in