My Rival Co-CEOS

Chapter 14

The woman who barely slept knows exactly what she saw, and no amount of pillow-repositioning or ceiling-staring will rearrange the image into anything kinder.

Sunday morning. Five seventeen on the clock. The estate is still wrapped in the disciplined silence of old money at rest, and I am already dressed — linen pants, bare feet, the white blouse from yesterday because choosing fresh clothes requires a clarity I surrendered somewhere around three in the morning when I stopped pretending I was going to sleep.

I find Theo in the garden.

He stands near the stone bench beneath the pergola, coffee in hand, his linen shirt untucked in a way that reads less like casual and more like a man who dressed without checking the mirror. The morning light catches the shadows beneath his eyes, and I take small, petty comfort in the evidence that I wasn't the only one who lost a night to this house.

"We need to talk," I say, and the steadiness in my voice surprises me because the rest of my body feels like a building whose foundation shifted overnight.

He turns. His gaze moves across my face with the quick, assessing sweep of a man already calculating how much damage control this conversation will require. "Wren, it's barely dawn. Can this wait until after breakfast?"

"No." I stop three feet from him, close enough to hold a conversation, far enough that touching isn't a temptation either of us can fall into by accident. "What were you and Camille discussing on the terrace last night?"

The question lands cleanly. I watch him receive it — the micro-adjustment of his jaw, the slight narrowing of his eyes, the nearly invisible recalibration of his posture from relaxed to managed.

"She wanted closure," he says, and each word arrives with the measured pace of a man selecting stones from a riverbed, testing their weight before placing them. "I gave it to her. It's done."

"Done." I repeat the word and let it sit between us in the cool morning air. "Was it done two years ago, Theo? Because from where I was standing in that hallway, it looked remarkably undone. Or is closure just another word for leaving a door unlocked in case you want to walk back through it?"

"That's not fair."

"Fair would have been telling me about her before I watched you stop breathing when she walked into a gala on your brother's arm." My voice doesn't rise. I keep it level, conversational, the tone I use when presenting quarterly reports that contain numbers no one wants to hear. "Fair would have been looking at me — once, in six years — the way you looked at her on that terrace last night."

His coffee cup lowers. His hand tightens around it, knuckles whitening against the ceramic. "What are you talking about?"

"You smiled at her, Theo. Not the boardroom smile, not the family dinner smile, not the version you assemble for donors and legal teams and the woman you asked to pretend she's yours. You smiled at Camille like you'd forgotten you were performing, and I have never seen that expression on your face directed at me. Not once. Not in three years of standing beside you, not in six years of — "

I stop. The confession almost escapes, and I catch it by the throat before it can ruin what's left of the ground I'm standing on.

His composure cracks. Not dramatically — Theo doesn't crack dramatically, he fractures in hairline patterns that only someone who has spent years studying the surface would notice. His shoulders pull back. His chin lifts. His voice drops into the register I've only heard him use when a deal is collapsing and he's decided to cut losses rather than negotiate.

"You're being irrational. This arrangement has clear terms, Wren, and none of them include vetting my past relationships. I'm allowed to have a history. I'm allowed to speak to someone I used to care about without submitting a transcript for your approval."

The words arrive cold and precise, and I watch the regret follow each one — a half-second delay, visible in the softening around his mouth, the flicker behind his eyes that says I didn't mean it like that without ever actually saying it. But he doesn't take any of it back. He stands there holding sentences he knows drew blood and lets them dry in the air between us.

"I agreed to play your girlfriend," I say, and my calm is worse than any volume could be because calm requires control, and control in this moment is the most expensive thing I own. "Not your backup plan. Not the woman who keeps your schedule and your cover story and your grandfather's approval while you stand on a terrace with the one you actually wanted and pretend the door is closed."

"Wren — "

"I have spent three years making your coffee wrong." The sentence comes out quieter than everything before it, and the quietness is what gives it weight. "Black with sugar. Every morning. Handed to you in that grey mug you keep on the second shelf. And every morning I drink the same wrong cup because you have never once asked how I take mine, and correcting you felt like admitting that I wasn't important enough to be known."

The garden goes silent. Even the birds seem to hold their breath.

Theo's face changes. Not the managed shift of a man adjusting his expression for strategic purposes — this is involuntary, unfiltered, guilt moving through his features like a crack spreading through porcelain. His lips part. His brow pulls inward. His eyes search my face with the desperate recognition of a man who just realized he's been holding a broken thing and calling it whole.

He opens his mouth. I see the word forming — my name, probably, followed by an apology assembled from the same careful architecture he builds everything from, load-bearing walls of sincerity designed to hold the weight of what he just heard without actually changing the structure.

I don't wait for it.

I turn and walk back toward the house, my bare feet steady on the cool stone, my spine carrying the particular straightness of a woman who said the truest thing she's ever said and doesn't need to hear the response to know it won't be enough.

The rest of Sunday passes in the careful orbit of two people who can feel each other's gravitational pull and are choosing, deliberately, not to fall toward it. Theo and I circle the estate without touching — brunch, the library, an afternoon walk along the east grounds where we maintain two feet of distance and a conversation composed entirely of logistics.

Julian watches. I catch him once from the garden, a still figure framed in a second-floor window, his posture unreadable against the morning glare. He doesn't come down. He doesn't approach me at brunch, doesn't engineer a hallway encounter, doesn't appear in a garden at the precise hour my defenses are lowest. The restraint is so unlike him that it registers louder than any provocation could.

By midnight, I have given up on sleep with the weary resignation of a woman who knows the ceiling has no answers and the pillow has chosen sides.

The kitchen is dark except for the under-cabinet lights casting a warm amber glow across the marble. I expect emptiness.

Julian sits at the island, a glass of whiskey beside his hand, bare feet resting on the lower rung of the stool. His t-shirt is worn soft at the collar. His hair is uncombed. He looks like a man who wasn't waiting for anyone and isn't surprised that someone showed up.

He sees my face. He doesn't ask what happened.

He reaches for the bottle, pours a second glass with an unhurried precision that suggests he's been sitting here long enough to have made peace with the quiet, and slides it across the counter toward me.

"Tell me about Ohio."