POV: Jasmine
The conference room smells like vape smoke before he has even opened his mouth, and I read the room first the way I always do.
Strategy before feeling.
Cason Ridge has his sneakers up on the table. He is bored, and enjoying it. The vape is theater. He wants me to flinch, and the small smile at his mouth tells me he has already decided I will.
His manager sits to his left, hands folded too tightly. Afraid. Not of me. Of his own client. The bodyguard at the door is tired of this room, embarrassed to be here while it happens again.
I sit down across from them. Underneath the annoyance I am calculating. How fast does this escalate. How far do I let it run.
"Let's begin," I say, setting my folder on the table. "I assume you've reviewed the brief."
Cason exhales vapor at the ceiling and tilts his chair back. "I read it. I disagree with most of it."
"Which part specifically?" I keep my voice level, the tone I use with investors who have confused opinion with leverage.
"All of it." He taps the folder, dismissive. "Y'all are selling me music that doesn't move. That's why my numbers tanked. Not the DUI. Not the girl. Not the kid at the airport. Music."
The bodyguard shifts forward. I catch his eye and shake my head once. He settles.
"Your last single moved well over a million units in its first week," I say. "Your sales started dropping the day the police report became public. The fan you shoved had a phone in his hand. It was livestreamed. One variable. Not the music."
Cason's jaw tightens. "You're talking to me like I'm stupid."
"I'm talking to you like a client whose contract is up for review in a couple of months," I answer, and I do not look away.
His foot comes off the table. I am cold inside. Focused.
"You know what's funny?" Cason says, leaning forward. "You sit there with your folder and your chart like you're somebody. Like you didn't get this chair the way you got it."
The manager half-rises. "Mr. Ridge —"
Cason waves him down without looking. "No, no, I'm asking. Aren't you the one who slept with her three bosses?"
The room goes still.
Shame — the old kind, hot, automatic, lighting up the place under my collarbone the way it has every time, for years now.
Anger — clean, useful, already sorted into the part I can spend and the part I cannot.
Disgust — at the line, at the fact that all this time later this is still the line men reach for first.
I let the shame burn for a single beat. I refuse it the rest. That's all you get.
I close the folder and stand. "This meeting is over."
Cason spreads his hands, grinning. "I'm not finished —"
"You are." I hold his gaze until the grin drops. "Get out of my conference room."
He laughs, short, performative, but the flash of confusion comes before he covers it. He did not expect to be ended.
"You're firing your top earner over a question?" He stands, still reaching for a version of this where he has the last word.
"I'm ending a meeting," I say, turning toward the door. "Legal will be in touch."
He goes. He has to be steered, but he goes.
The bodyguard pauses in the doorway. "At least the workday is done, ma'am."
"This was my last day before vacation," I tell him, and let myself smile.
He laughs — short, relieved — and follows his client out.
I sit alone with my hands flat on the closed folder. Angry. Proud. Then I pick up the folder and go.
The shame I refused him is still in me on the drive home, low and ugly. I let it run because there is nowhere safer than my car. By the time I pull into our garage, it is mostly gone. The rest I leave in the driver's seat.
Aurora opens the apartment door before I touch it. She is happy in the loud, full-body way only she is happy, and the joy of her hits me so hard I almost stop in the hall.
"Mama, Mama, Mama —" She grabs my hand and pulls me inside. "Papa let me put cheese on the pizza, and I put it on the wrong way but he said it doesn't matter, and there's two kinds, and I picked the music —"
"Hold on, slow down." I am laughing now, getting the door closed because she has my other hand. "Two kinds of cheese? What kinds, baby?"
Aurora holds up her fingers like the answer is obvious. "The yellow one and the other yellow one."
Liam is in the kitchen doorway in a t-shirt I have been telling him to throw out for ages. He looks at me — quick, quiet, reading. He sees the day was hard. He does not ask. He just holds out a hand for my bag.
"How bad?" he asks, taking it without breaking eye contact.
"Done. Over. Walked out of the building done," I say, and the relief of saying it loosens something behind my ribs.
He brushes his thumb across my knuckles. "Done sounds very good on you."
We eat at the low table because Aurora has decided the dining room is for fancy. She narrates the pizza, the music, a story about a bird I am almost sure was a leaf.
Aurora leans against my arm and stops talking. A few minutes later her breathing changes.
"That's her gone," Liam says quietly. "She lasted longer than I thought she would."
He carries her down the hall. The apartment goes quiet the way it only does after she is asleep. He comes back and sits beside me. Close.
I love him so much in that second that my throat tightens.
"The pizza was a war crime," I say, because the love is too big to look at directly.
Liam puts a hand over his heart, mock-wounded. "The pizza was art, and I will not be slandered in my own kitchen."
"The cheese was sideways, Liam," I tell him, turning so my knee presses against his.
He shakes his head, gravely. "That was the artistic choice. You're not artistic enough to recognize it."
I laugh. First laugh of the day. He reaches for my hand — palm up, fingers open. I put mine in it. Safety. That's the word for him.
"Tell me something that doesn't matter at all," I murmur, closing my eyes.
Liam considers this with the seriousness of a man being asked to brief Parliament. "Aurora has decided she does not believe in Wednesdays."
I open one eye. "On what grounds?"
"She says they're not real days." He pauses. "I asked for sourcing. She didn't have any."
"You're raising a litigator," I tell him.
"I'm raising a tyrant," he answers, "but I take your point."
I let my head come down onto his shoulder. He smells like the detergent we have used since the first apartment, like Aurora's shampoo, like himself. My shoulders drop. They have not moved all day, and now they have. He is the reason.
"I love you," he says into my hair.
I press closer. "I love you back. More than is reasonable."
I close my eyes. I am tired. I am safe. I am loved.
"I can't wait," I murmur against his shoulder, already half-gone, "until we're already in Italy."