Chương 8
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Yes.”
“How well?”
Darius answered. “I hired her.”
Sienna’s jaw moved.
Darius continued. “She was good. Better than the title they gave her. Trevor noticed.”
“You make it sound like I slept my way into the job.”
“I make it sound like Trevor turned every useful relationship into a private asset.”
Sienna looked at Naomi. “He told me you knew the marriage was over.”
Naomi felt Lenora’s attention shift toward her, ready to intervene.
She did not need it.
“What did he say I knew?”
“That you lived separately in the apartment. That you hadn’t been intimate in two years. That the public marriage was useful to both of you.”
“Did you believe him?”
“At first.”
“And later?”
Sienna looked at the bruise reflected faintly in the dark conference room window.
“Later, believing him was part of the price.”
It was not an apology.
It was closer to one than Naomi expected.
Sienna admitted she knew Trevor was moving marital money. She had encouraged him to do it gradually. She claimed she did not know that the funds originated in fraudulent vendor payments.
“What did you mean when you wrote, ‘Neither am I’?” Naomi asked.
Sienna’s attorney began speaking, but Sienna interrupted.
“I meant I wasn’t spending two years helping him build a new life and then walking away with nothing.”
“You had eight months.”
“I worked for him for four years.”
Naomi understood then that Sienna considered the affair a promotion from one kind of unpaid labor to another.
That did not make her sympathetic.
It made her familiar.
Sienna brought one fact the others did not have. Trevor planned to blame Harrow Lane on Naomi if the accounts drew scrutiny. He had described Naomi as the beneficial owner who handled “family-side investments.”
“Did he say that before or after you began sleeping with him?” Ellis asked.
“Before.”
Naomi turned toward her.
Sienna lowered her gaze. “He asked me to prepare a vendor profile. I saw Naomi’s name. I asked why his wife owned a marketing company no one had heard of.”
“What did he say?”
“That she preferred to stay private.”
“And you accepted that?”
“I had a mortgage and a father in assisted living. People accept what their employers need them to accept.”
Darius leaned back. “Until the employer starts taking them to hotels.”
Sienna’s attorney slapped his palm lightly on the table. “That’s enough.”
“No,” Sienna said. “It isn’t. He’s right.”
The bruise came from walking into a glass cabinet door, she said before anyone asked. Naomi did not believe her, but Trevor had never struck Naomi and she would not invent a violence she had not seen.
Sienna offered to cooperate with ValeRow’s board and investigators if her attorney could negotiate protections.
Ellis made no promises.
After the meeting, Naomi stood in the hallway while Sienna waited for the elevator.
“You laughed with him,” Naomi said.
Sienna turned.
“At the rooftop bar. You made him laugh.”
Sienna’s expression changed in a way the legal questions had not managed.
“He laughed at everyone in the beginning.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No.” Sienna put on her glasses. “It’s what I have.”
The elevator arrived.
Before entering, she said, “He doesn’t love me.”
Naomi pressed the call button for the second elevator.
“That isn’t the comfort you think it is.”
That afternoon, ValeRow’s board formed a special committee. Its lawyers contacted Ellis and requested an interview with Naomi. Trevor was placed on temporary leave, though the company’s public statement described it as a voluntary absence for personal reasons.
The news spread through the social circle Naomi had maintained for him.
Three investors’ wives sent messages asking whether she needed anything.
Two asked whether the rumors were true.
One wrote, I always felt there was something off about Darius.
Naomi deleted that one.
Trevor released his own statement through a public-relations consultant. It said he was cooperating fully with an internal review prompted by “misappropriated confidential materials obtained during a private marital dispute.”
He did not use Naomi’s name.
Everyone knew it.
A photograph of Naomi leaving Ellis’s office appeared on a financial gossip site. The headline called her Trevor Mercer’s Estranged Socialite Wife.
Naomi had never been a socialite. She once spent forty minutes removing candle wax from rented table linens to avoid a cleaning fee.
The article described her as unemployed.
That word remained on the screen longer than the affair photographs had.
At the next legal meeting, Naomi lost her temper.
“I helped build the company.”
Lenora closed the article on Naomi’s phone. “Then we document that. We do not argue with anonymous commenters.”
“They think I sat in the penthouse and spent his money.”
“Some people will continue thinking that after receiving sworn evidence to the contrary.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“It bothers me professionally. Personally, I don’t know them.”
Naomi stood and walked to the window.
Lenora waited.
“I know them,” Naomi said. “I sent their children birthday gifts.”
“Yes.”
“I sat with Martin Hale’s wife during her biopsy.”
“Yes.”
“She didn’t even text.”
Lenora’s voice softened. “That is not a legal injury.”
“I know.”
“It is still an injury.”
Naomi sat again.
The special committee interviewed her for six hours over two days. The lawyers asked repetitive questions in slightly different forms. When had she first heard of Harrow Lane? Who told her Elaine Porter was dead? Why did she photograph company papers? Had Darius encouraged her to search Trevor’s office?
Naomi answered carefully.
At one point, a lawyer named Benton Reese suggested she had copied the files to improve her position in divorce negotiations.
Naomi looked at Ellis before replying.
He gave a small nod.
“My husband used my identity on a company receiving money from his business. I copied the documents because I was afraid he would remove them.”
“Did you consider calling him?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
May you like
“Because the messages showed he had spent months planning to hide money from me.”
Benton adjusted his glasses. “You were angry.”
