Chapter 7

The private dining room's door opened. A tall man with chestnut-brown hair and a sharp, handsome face stepped in.

He took in the scene in a single calm sweep and spoke in his easy accent.

"I heard someone invited my wife to join them for a drink. She hasn't come back. I hope no one minds if I crash the party."

People exchanged confused glances. Whose husband was this?

Only Sebastian felt something impossible beginning to dawn on him.

He watched me walk over and tuck my hand under the man's arm.

"Everyone, this is my husband, Leon. We have somewhere else to be. We won't keep you."

At the door, I turned back to Madison.

"Oh, almost forgot. When my father moved to London, his business took off. He's been running his own firm for years now. We're doing well."

"Since you all seem to enjoy calling me Princess, I'll let the manager know to put twenty percent off the table."

Madison's face crumpled. I took my time enjoying it.

Tonight wasn't me tagging along with Leon. It was Leon tagging along with me.

My parents weren't getting any younger. I had already started taking over the family business before Leon and I were even married. This boutique hotel, the Ashford Park Boston, was one of the smallest things we owned.

Later, someone told me Madison had confessed to Sebastian again.

The person who told me had been the class president. She was the one who had told the TA to skip my row with the papers, the one who had watched the whole class freeze me out for months and done nothing.

She and her crowd were nothing but smiles to me now. They talked to me like we had always been best friends.

When you're powerful, everyone around you is suddenly kind.

Sebastian turned Madison down. Ten years ago he had turned her down because he loved me. Ten years later he turned her down because he blamed her for losing me.

He had erased ten years of their friendship the same way he had erased ours in high school.

So Madison attempted suicide. She went live on Instagram and cut her wrists in front of a camera, threatening Sebastian that if he didn't marry her, she'd finish the job.

Madison had always told me she despised girls who pulled the crying-screaming-threatening routine. But now that routine was what finally closed the deal on the crush she'd been carrying for a decade.

After they got together, Madison lost her job at the bank. The firm decided they'd rather pay her a severance than keep an unstable analyst on payroll.

Without work, everything Madison had flowed straight into Sebastian, chain after chain of invisible pressure.

Who called you just now? A three-minute call, who was it from?

You got home twenty minutes late. Who were you with?

Why does the new junior analyst always come to your desk to ask questions? Is she into you?

Three months of honeymoon became three months of interrogation.

Sebastian asked for a divorce. Madison took his employee keycard, climbed up to the rooftop of the corporate tower, and announced over the edge that if he divorced her, she'd jump. She also demanded the firm fire the junior analyst who kept "hanging around" him.

The CEO practically got on his knees begging Sebastian to handle it quietly. A man like that does not want to be famous for something like this.

The junior analyst ended up in tears, surrounded by people, frantically explaining that she was only assigned to Sebastian's desk and only asking him questions because she was new. She had consulted several people, not just him. But if Madison jumped, her career would never recover.

Sebastian didn't divorce her. Sebastian also lost his job at the bank.

Madison became notorious. After that, every major firm on Wall Street quietly took Sebastian's name off their hiring lists.

The two of them fight in that apartment every day. They have so much time now to tear each other apart.

None of that belongs to me.

I don't need closure. I don't need to start over. I started over the moment I walked out of that high school.

Leon and I are about to welcome our first child.

He or she might grow up to be a professor like her grandmother. Or a businesswoman like me. Or an artist like her grandfather.

But never, under any circumstance, someone who bullies another person with a cheap joke and calls it fun.

That alone is enough.