Two Little Secrets From My Boss

Chapter 68

I spent the rest of the day replaying Archie's words, testing them against everything I knew.

The girls were at school, Xander was at the office, and I had the apartment to myself. I should have been resting—God knows I needed it. Instead, I sat at my laptop with a cup of coffee that had gone cold hours ago, searching for answers I wasn't sure I wanted to find.

Rumors don't form in a vacuum. That was the thought that kept circling back to me as I scrolled through search results and business articles. Rumors need pressure, conflict, and motive.

I looked up Gerald Morrison again, this time with fresh eyes.

His public record was immaculate. Charitable donations to children's hospitals and arts foundations. Board positions at prestigious organizations. Glowing profiles in business magazines that painted him as a titan of industry, a family man, a pillar of the community.

It was too clean. Far too clean for someone with his reputation.

I thought about that man’s hand on my thigh at that business lunch. The man whose eyes had traveled over my body like I was merchandise to be appraised.

That man didn't match the sanitized version I found online. Someone had scrubbed his history, polished his image until it gleamed with artificial perfection. The discrepancy nagged at me like a splinter under my skin.

I switched tactics, searching for older articles—anything from years ago, around the time Marcus Chen had died. The results were sparse. A few mentions of Morrison's early investments, a brief profile in a regional business journal, nothing substantial. It was as if the first decade of his career had been carefully edited, trimmed of anything that might raise questions.

Then I realized something that made my stomach drop.

Xander never spoke about that period of his life either. In all our conversations, all the late nights sharing pieces of ourselves, he had never once mentioned what his life was like in those early years. The years when he was building his company from nothing, when Marcus Chen was still alive, when whatever happened between him and Gerald Morrison first took root.

I'd assumed it was painful. He didn't want to revisit the memories of his friend's death, his mother, his early struggles. I'd given him space to heal on his own timeline, never pushing for details he wasn't ready to share.

But now that assumption felt naive. The absence wasn't accidental—it was intentional. A blank space where history should be, carefully maintained for reasons I was only beginning to understand.

My phone buzzed. A text from Archie: Just checking in. Are you okay? I've been worried since this morning.

I stared at the message for a long moment. His concern felt genuine, but I sensed something else beneath it—a nervousness, a fear of what I might do with the information he'd given me.

I'm fine, I typed back. Just thinking.

That's what worries me, a pause, then: Daphne, be careful, please. The people involved in this—they don't play by normal rules.

I set the phone down, his words settling into my chest like stones. He was worried about what I might do next—enough to reach out, to warn me, to try and pull me back from whatever edge I was approaching.

But I was already too far gone for warnings.

I returned to my laptop, opening a new search. This time I looked for connections—any thread that might link Gerald Morrison, Marcus Chen, and Xander in those early years. Business partnerships, shared investors, mutual acquaintances. Anything that might explain the tangled web of hatred and secrets that had followed them all into the present.

The results were frustratingly thin. Nothing concrete, nothing damning. Just shadows and suggestions, the kind of half-evidence that could mean everything or nothing at all.

I leaned back in my chair, rubbing my eyes. The afternoon light was fading. Soon I would need to pick up the girls from school, start dinner, pretend everything was normal while my mind churned with unanswered questions.

My phone buzzed again. Not Archie this time—Charlotte: ‘Hey, how are you holding up? I've been thinking about you guys constantly.’

I hesitated before responding. Charlotte was my oldest friend, the person who had stood by me through everything. But this felt too dangerous to share, too raw and uncertain.

We're managing, I typed finally. ‘Lisa is recovering, and we're all just trying to find our footing again.’

‘Let me know if you need anything. I mean it—anything at all.’

I set the phone aside and turned back to my laptop, scrolling through one last set of search results. My eyes caught on a phrase buried in an old article about corporate disputes: "allegations quietly settled."

The article was about a different company, a different scandal, but the phrase lodged itself in my brain. Evidence buried, and questions that stopped being asked because someone had the power and resources to make them go away.

Was that what had happened with Marcus Chen? And if so, who had done the settling?

I thought about Bianca's words at the precinct. At the time, I'd taken it as a threat—a desperate woman trying to poison my marriage with doubt. But what if it had been something else entirely?

What if Bianca's words weren't meant as a threat—but as a pointer?

She'd been blackmailing Xander. She'd had access to information, to evidence, to secrets that had nearly destroyed us. What if, in her final moment of spite, she'd been trying to tell me something, to direct my attention somewhere specific, somewhere I hadn't thought to look?

‘You have not fucking idea of what your lovely husband did.’

The words echoed in my mind, taking on new meaning. What else did she know? What else had she discovered in her campaign to destroy him?

I understood now that asking questions had consequences. Especially in this world—the world of billionaires and board rooms, where power was currency and secrets were weapons. Every question I asked was a door I opened, and I couldn't always see what was waiting on the other side.

But I also understood that not asking questions had consequences too. I couldn't protect my family from threats I didn't understand. And I couldn't understand them without asking the questions that everyone seemed so afraid of.

My laptop screen glowed in the dimming room, filled with search results and half-formed theories and the sense that I was missing something crucial. Something that connected all the pieces into a single coherent picture.

The truth was there, somewhere in the spaces between what people said and what they didn't. I just had to find it.

I closed the laptop with shaking hands, the screen going dark. Tomorrow I would pick up the threads again, keep searching, questioning, pushing toward answers that might change everything I knew about my husband and our life together.

But tonight, I needed to be a mother. To pick up my daughters and make dinner and pretend that the ground beneath our family wasn't still shifting, still hiding secrets that might swallow us whole.