For once, I didn’t defend myself.
Brielle did not need a speech from me.
She needed to hear Graham answer his own sentence.
She looked at him for several seconds.
“Did you use her analysis?”
He glanced toward the window.
“Parts of older work were incorporated into later material.”
“Did she approve that later material?”
Silence.
Then he said, “It’s complicated.”
“No,” I said quietly. “That part isn’t.”
Graham turned toward me.
“You have no idea what happens if this gets blown out of proportion.”
“I know exactly what happens when warnings get treated like inconveniences.”
His mouth tightened.
“People work for that company. Families depend on it.”
There it was.
The old trick.
Make my refusal responsible for the consequence of his decision.
I had fallen for that kind of pressure for years.
Fix this because employees are waiting.
Check this because the meeting is tomorrow.
Stay up because nobody else understands it.
Don’t make this harder.
Don’t embarrass me.
Don’t force the issue.
This time, I was holding our daughter while he tried it.
It did not work.
“I didn’t create the discrepancy,” I said. “I just refused to pretend it wasn’t there.”
Brielle looked back down at the pages.
Her face had changed.
Not dramatically.
She wasn’t screaming.
She wasn’t crying.
She was reading.
That seemed to bother Graham more.
Then her phone vibrated inside the small bag she had carried from the wedding.
She ignored it at first.
It vibrated again.
Graham’s phone followed seconds later.
He checked his screen.
The color left his face slowly enough that I could see him trying to control it.
Brielle noticed.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Her expression hardened.
She took out her own phone.
I watched her eyes move across the message.
Once.
Then again.
She looked at Graham.
“The investment review has been paused.”
He stepped toward her.
“Let me see that.”
She moved the phone away.
“They want the original supporting material.”
Graham’s attention snapped to me.
I did not smile.
There was nothing funny about it.
There was also nothing left for me to threaten him with.
The process he had been trying to prevent had already started before he entered my room.
That was what I meant when I told him he was too late.
He had assumed the NDA was the last door he needed to close.
He never considered that I had stopped waiting for him to decide which doors I was allowed to use.
Brielle lowered the phone.
“Did you know this could happen today?”
Graham looked at her.
“Your father is being cautious. That’s all.”
“Did you know?”
“I knew there were questions.”
“And you left our reception to get her signature.”
He said her name softly, almost like a warning.
“Brielle.”
She looked down at herself then, at the wedding dress, the lace, the perfectly arranged fabric that had probably been photographed from twenty different angles two hours earlier.
Then she looked at my daughter.
For the first time since she entered, her expression toward me held no competition.
Only disbelief at the situation all three of us were standing in.
“Did you ask her to sign this before today?” she asked him.
“We tried to resolve it privately.”
“That means yes.”
Graham reached toward the folder again.
Brielle closed it before he could take it.
“No. I want to read the whole thing.”
He stopped.
The room suddenly felt very small.
I was exhausted enough that the edges of everything seemed too bright—the white sheets, the metal bed rail, the pale wall behind Brielle’s shoulder.
A nurse had told me earlier that I needed rest.
I finally understood that rest was not only something my body needed.
It was something I was allowed to choose.
“You both need to take this somewhere else,” I said.
Graham stared at me.
“We aren’t finished.”
“I am.”
Two words.
That was enough.
Brielle looked at him before I did.
“She’s just had a baby.”
His eyes finally moved toward the child in my arms.
Really moved toward her.
