All Chapters of Worth Every Million: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Daniel shows up on a Friday afternoon without warning. I am in the library when Claire comes to find me with an expression on her face that is professionally neutral in a way that tells me something has happened. She says there is someone downstairs asking for me and security is holding him at the front desk and Mr. Voss would like to know what I want to do. I already know who it is before she says the name. I go downstairs. Damien comes with me. I do not ask him to, he just falls into step beside me in the elevator and neither of us says anything on the way down. Daniel is standing at the front desk with his coat on and his hands in his pockets and the particular expression he wears when he has decided something and come to deliver it in person. He looks at me when the elevator opens and then he looks at Damien beside me and something crosses his face. “I need to talk to you,” he says to me. “Alone.” “No,” I say. He looks at Damien again. “I am talking to my wife.” “We are s

I have been thinking about the woman I was a month ago. Not with sadness exactly. More with the particular disorientation of looking at a photograph of yourself from years ago and not fully recognising the person in it even though you remember being her. I remember being that woman. I remember what she thought about when she woke up in the morning and what she worried about when she could not sleep and what she told herself about her life and the man she had built it around. She thought she had it right. She was so certain she had it right. I sit on the edge of my bed in the morning light and I think about Nora Lawson three months ago. Waking up in the house she had painted herself, in the bed she had made with clean sheets because she wanted everything to be nice when Daniel came home, planning a cake she would spend all afternoon making for a man who was already somewhere else. She was trying so hard. She was giving everything she had to something that was already over and she h

I wake up smiling. I notice it before I am even fully awake, my face already doing something on its own, and I lie there in the white linen of the villa bedroom and I let myself have it without pulling it apart. I know why I am smiling. I do not need to examine it. I get up and shower and go downstairs and Damien is already in the kitchen. He has his back to me and there is something on the pan that smells good and I stop in the doorway. “Since when do you cook,” I say. He does not turn around. “Rosa left everything out. I did not want it to go to waste.” “You could have just left it,” I say. “I was hungry,” he says. “Sit down.” I sit at the kitchen table and watch him move around the kitchen and there is something almost funny about it. This man who has a driver and an assistant and a building that straightens when he walks into it, standing in a tiny Italian kitchen in yesterday’s shirt making breakfast because he did not want things to go to waste. “What are you making,” I

The last morning in Italy smells like rain that hasn't fallen yet.I wake up before the sun comes over the hills. The sky outside the bedroom window is a pale, bruised violet, and the air coming through the open wooden shutters has lost the dry heat of the afternoon. It feels like the air back home right before autumn starts to settle in.Damien is still asleep beside me.I lie on my side for a long time and just watch his face in the gray light. He doesn't look like the man who runs boardrooms or outmaneuvers men like Victor Hale when he is sleeping. The sharp edge around his mouth is gone. His hands are open on the white sheet between us, relaxed, the fingers slightly curled.I think about packing.I think about the bag sitting in the corner of the room, half-full with the blue scarf folded near the top and the ceramic bowl wrapped carefully in three layers of tissue paper from the shop in town. In a few hours, the car will come up the narrow driveway. We will drive forty minutes ba

The storm outside the high windows does not stop when the board meeting ends. It only gets darker, the grey clouds pulling down low over the city until the tops of the surrounding skyscrapers disappear into the fog.We go straight back to Damien’s private office on the top floor.It is a vast, quiet space with grey carpets so thick they swallow the sound of your footsteps, two dark leather sofas near the far wall, and a desk made of black marble that looks like a slab cut from a mountain. The air inside smells like cold glass, expensive paper, and the fresh coffee Claire sets out every morning.Damien closes the double doors behind us and takes off his suit jacket, throwing it over the back of his executive chair. He unbuttons his cuffs and rolls them back twice, his movements fast and precise.“Claire,” he says, pressing the button on the small black intercom on his desk.“Yes, Mr. Vance?” her voice comes through the small speaker, perfectly clear.“Bring the physical ledgers for the