[Annie’s POV]
I close Theo's office door behind me and don't sit down. Sitting is what you do when you're asking for something—I'm here to deliver a business case, and business cases are delivered standing.
"I know about the Reed Capital acquisition." No preamble, no small talk—his eyebrows rise a fraction and I press forward before he can rearrange his face. "You're at eighteen percent, quiet trades, board-adjacent shareholders, below the disclosure threshold. It's textbook, and I need you to stop."
Theo leans back in his chair, arms crossing over his chest. "Interesting opener for a woman on her day off." His tone is light, but his eyes aren't—they're tracking me the way they track a balance sheet with a discrepancy.
"Reed Capital is hemorrhaging talent—three senior analysts gone, the Southeast Asia thesis collapsed." I plant both hands on the back of the chair I'm refusing to sit in. "Jake's running a Latin American infrastructure play that reads like a cry for help."
Every word tastes like battery acid. The part of me that spent five years ghost-running Jake Reed's empire wants to watch it burn—wants to see his face when the board turns, wants the world to know his billion-dollar machine stalls without my hand on the wheel.
But my daughter sleeps under his roof tonight, and the distance between wanting Jake to fail and needing him propped up is exactly the width of a four-year-old who draws dragon-cats under a bed that isn't hers. Wanting is a luxury I surrendered the night I walked out with two suitcases.
"So you came here to review my competitor's earnings." His mouth does the thing it does when I've said something he respects—one corner pulling sideways. But his arms stay crossed, and nothing about his posture offers me an inch.
"I came here to tell you you're lighting money on fire." My fingers tighten on the chair back until the leather protests. "Within two quarters that company won't be worth the filing fees—why spend millions acquiring a sinking ship when you can wait for the wreckage?"
"Because the acquisition isn't about asset value." He tilts his head—the same gesture from Wharton seminar, the one that always preceded a takedown, and my stomach tightens at the familiarity. "It's about control—and you, of all people, should understand the difference."
I do understand it. Control is what Jake exercised over me for five years and control is what Theo is exercising over Jake's empire right now. I'm standing between two men playing chess with companies while my daughter is the piece neither of them can see.
"I understand you're letting ego drive capital allocation." I start pacing—three steps left, three steps right, the same groove I used to wear into penthouse floors at 2 AM building pitches Jake would butcher by nine.
"The public fight will damage Meridian's brand." I turn on my heel and face him. "Your board will ask why their CEO is waging a personal war against a dying competitor instead of building."
"Let me worry about my board." He's not dismissing me—he's parrying, each counter clean and unhurried, a man enjoying the sparring. He's been sharpening these arguments longer than I've been rehearsing mine.
"The market reads hostile acquisitions as instability, Theo." I stop pacing and meet his eyes. "Institutional investors pull back, your valuation takes the hit, and Caroline's family fund starts asking uncomfortable questions."
His jaw shifts at Caroline's name—barely, a millimeter—and I store the reaction without examining why my chest does something complicated in response. This isn't about whatever current runs between us when the office walls close in. This is about Sarah. Everything is about Sarah.
"The fact that you're Jake Reed's wife doesn't mean I should restructure my growth strategy around your personal circumstances." His voice is even, almost gentle, which somehow makes the words cut deeper.
"I'm not asking because of that." My feet stop and I hold his gaze across the desk, my nails biting crescents into my palms behind the chair. "I'm asking because it's a bad business decision, and you know it."
The silence that follows has weight—physical, measurable. Theo studies me the way he used to study case studies at Wharton, every variable being sorted and assigned. I used to find it infuriatingly attractive across a seminar table. Right now it's terrifying, because the variable he's solving for is me.
He stands, rounds the corner of his desk, and closes the distance between us with three unhurried steps. The office shrinks to the size of whatever is happening between his eyes and mine. "You're lying."
Two words, and they empty the room. My throat works once before I can push sound past it. "Every argument I just made is backed by data you can pull yourself."
"Every argument you just made is textbook." He's close now—close enough that cedar and something warm fills the charged air between us. "But you don't care about my Series C valuation, Annie. You've never walked into a room to save someone else's balance sheet."
"You don't know what I—" The protest dies in my mouth because he's still talking, his voice dropping below its boardroom register into something stripped and raw that bypasses every defense I built on the cab ride over.
"I've watched you flinch every time someone says Jake's name." He takes another step, and the gap between us narrows to something that makes my pulse knock against the side of my throat. "I've watched you come to work with hollow eyes and leave with them worse."
"You disappeared for a full day last week and came back looking gutted." He stops close enough that I can see the pulse in his throat—steady where mine has gone ragged and wrong. "Your analysis is flawless. I don't believe a single word of it."
My hands are shaking. I press them harder into the chair back, but leather doesn't absorb tremors—it just gives a front-row seat to the unraveling. His gaze drops to my white knuckles, then returns to my face, and the proximity is doing something dangerous to my ability to maintain the lie.
Tell him. The words press against my teeth—the courtroom, the bought witnesses, the judge who saw exactly what Jake paid him to see. My daughter whispering I'll be good like it's a spell that stops walls from shaking.
But telling Theo hands him the weapon that destroys Jake entirely, and if Jake's empire collapses while Sarah sleeps inside it, my daughter becomes wreckage. I am arguing to protect the kingdom of the man who struck me so it doesn't crush my child, and the irony is so vicious I could choke.
"You just asked me to freeze a multimillion-dollar acquisition on faith." His breath moves the hair near my temple, and my body commits its usual treason—tracking the heat off his chest, the open collar, the quarter-inch between his hand and my arm. "You're going to have to give me more than that."
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out—just the silence of a woman drowning between two impossible choices, and a truth that could save her or shatter every fragile thing she has left.