All Chapters of The Billion Dollar Marriage : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The accounting situation happened on a Monday and Eric was in a terrible mood for the rest of the day and did an extremely poor job of hiding the reason.She'd been on her way back from the printer the second tray was behaving after the maintenance visit, which was a small but genuine improvement in her daily life when one of the men from the accounting department fell into step beside her in the hallway. She knew his face, had exchanged pleasantries with him at company events, knew his name from the internal directory. He was pleasant and professionally unremarkable and had apparently decided, somewhere between the water cooler and the hallway outside her desk, that he was going to ask her to lunch.He did it smoothly enough. Casual, low pressure, the way people asked when they weren't sure of the answer and wanted to preserve the option of treating it as something other than a rejection if the answer was no."I appreciate it," she said, keeping her voice warm and her stride unhurr

She did not go back to the park the following Tuesday. It wasn't a decision she made consciously. She was at her desk at twelve-fifteen with the Singapore revisions in front of her and the Tuesday park lunch sitting in the back of her mind as something she was getting to, and then at twelve-fifty she looked up and the window for it had closed without her choosing to close it. She told herself it was the workload. She told herself this with the same confident efficiency she brought to everything else and went back to the Singapore revisions and didn't examine the telling too closely. At one-fifteen Eric appeared in the doorway of her office with his jacket and his end-of-lunch energy. "You didn't leave," he said. "I had things to finish." "It's Tuesday." She looked up. He was looking at her in the mildly assessing way, not intrusive, just noticing. "I'm aware of the day of the week," she said. "You go on Tuesdays." She held her pen very still. "Not every Tuesday." He looked

Sunday came and neither of them mentioned the interview preparation until after dinner. They'd spent the day in the particular way Sundays had developed separately but in proximity, the penthouse large enough to disappear into but neither of them fully disappearing. She'd read in the sitting room for two hours in the morning. He'd worked in his office, though the door was open, which she'd learned meant something different from the closed door working. In the afternoon she'd reorganized the Morrison files, a task that had needed doing for weeks, and he'd appeared in the doorway at some point and said "Do you need the Q3 reports?" and she'd said yes and he'd brought them without being asked again. Small things. The ordinary accumulation of a Sunday. After dinner, when the table was clear and the kitchen was back to its nighttime order, she brought the notebook she'd been using for preparation notes and set it on the kitchen island. He looked at it. "Now?" he said. "Unless you'd ra

CHAPTER SEVENTEENThe second prep session was on Sunday and she came to it better prepared than the first.She had spent part of Saturday reviewing the notes from the previous session and adding to them, filling gaps she'd identified things they hadn't covered, questions she expected a careful estate lawyer to ask that they hadn't addressed yet. She had a list. She always had a list. The list was four pages and she had trimmed it to one page before bringing it to the kitchen table, because four pages suggested a level of anxiety she wasn't prepared to acknowledge.He was already at the island when she came in, with tea for both of them, his copy of the notes from the first session in front of him. He'd been reading through it. She could tell from the small pencil mark in the margin of the second page he always marked what he wanted to return to."You made notes," she said, sitting down."So did you." He looked at her single page. Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "You star

The morning of the interview she woke at five and lay in the dark for twenty minutes before accepting that she was not going to sleep again.She got up. Made coffee. Stood at the east window in the early quiet and watched the city in the way she had started doing on mornings that required extra steadying. The light was still thin, the city not yet fully itself, and she stood with her cup and let the view do what it always did reduce everything to a manageable scale.The interview was at ten. Marcus Webb, the estate lawyer, would arrive at the penthouse and conduct the sessions separately and then together. She had prepared for every question she could anticipate. She had aligned answers with Eric on every factual matter. She was as ready as it was possible to be.She was also aware, standing at the window in the thin early light, that no amount of preparation covered everything. The questions she'd anticipated were the expected ones. What she had not prepared for was the possibility