All Chapters of The Billionaire's Biggest Regret : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

JadeI had been standing in that corridor for less than two minutes when I heard footsteps.I knew it was him before I turned around. I don’t know how. Something in the quality of the silence that came just ahead of the sound, something in the way the air in that corridor seemed to change the moment he entered it. I had spent enough months being aware of Hayes Calloway from across rooms to recognize the shift his presence made in any space he walked into.I straightened my back against the wall and turned to face him.He had followed me.That surprised me enough that for a moment I forgot I had been humiliated. He had just publicly reduced me to nothing in front of half a dozen people with four words and a patient, empty stare, and now he had set down his drink and walked away from his own gala to follow me into a side corridor. I did not know what that meant. I did not know what any of this meant anymore.He stopped a few feet in front of me. The corridor was narrow enough that a few

JadeThree years had a way of building things.I had learned that. I had learned it the hard way, the only way that actually sticks, through early mornings and late nights and a hundred small decisions made in the direction of something instead of someone. Ellis Noir had grown from a label that existed mostly in my own head into something real and visible and mine. We had a showroom now on West 14th Street. A waiting list. A feature in Vogue that I had read three times with my door closed before I let myself believe it was real.I had built all of it carefully, one piece at a time, the way you build something when you know the cost of watching it fall apart.Hayes Calloway was a chapter I had closed, filed away, and stopped returning to. Three years was enough time for that. Three years was enough time for almost anything.I was in the middle of reviewing fabric samples for our spring collection when my phone rang. Brooke’s name lit up the screen.“Tell me you haven’t forgotten,” she

JadeI had already decided I was leaving.I had the excuse ready before Lena even opened her mouth. Early morning. Spring collection deadlines. My phone was already in my hand, so the departure looked natural and planned rather than what it actually was, which was the most controlled exit I had ever engineered in my life.I had spent the last forty minutes sitting eight feet from Hayes Calloway, managing every breath I took and every direction my eyes moved and every muscle in my face that wanted to do something I could not afford to let it do. Forty minutes of that was my absolute limit. I was done. I was going home.Then Lena turned to me with that warm, guileless smile of hers and said, “You’re coming to The Sterling with us, right?”I looked at her.She meant it genuinely. That was the thing about Lena that made the whole situation so much more complicated than it needed to be. She had no idea. She was sitting next to Hayes Calloway at a dinner she had arranged, glowing with happi

JadeI told myself I had forgotten about it by Monday.I told myself that on Saturday morning when I woke up earlier than my alarm and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling. I told myself that on Sunday when I worked through the spring collection notes I had used as an excuse to leave the dinner and found I could not concentrate on a single line of them. By Monday I had told myself enough times that the telling had started to feel like a full-time job.I got up at six, made coffee, and was at the Ellis Noir showroom on West 14th by seven fifteen. The space was mine in a way that nothing else was. I had signed the lease on it two years ago with hands that shook slightly from the weight of the number, and I had filled it slowly and with every version of the work I believed in. Fabric samples and mood boards and the particular organized chaos of a creative space that was actually being used. Walking into it in the early morning before anyone else arrived was the closest thing I had to a

JadeI arrived at the Meridian Tower at ten fifty on Wednesday morning.I had been awake since five. Not anxiously. Not in the way that keeps you staring at the ceiling. Just awake, the way I was always awake before something that mattered, my mind already running through the materials and the numbers and the questions I anticipated and the ones I didn’t. I had done everything I could do to prepare. The rest was the meeting itself.The same receptionist from Tuesday smiled at me from behind the desk. The same assistant came down to escort me up. I rode the elevator to the forty-second floor with my portfolio case in one hand and my coat folded over my arm, and I kept my breathing even and my posture straight, and I was ready.The boardroom door opened.Three people sat on the far side of the glass table.Diane Collis. Marcus Webb. And Hayes.I did not break my stride. I walked to the presentation end of the room and set my portfolio case down and connected my laptop to the display sys