Chapter 5
Ruth found them the next morning, asleep on opposite ends of the living room couch, where they’d apparently migrated at some point before dawn. A blanket someone had pulled from the hall closet draped haphazardly over both of them. Ren’s feet tucked under Damon’s leg without either of them seeming to have noticed or minded.
She didn’t wake them. She simply stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the scene with the quiet satisfaction of someone watching a puzzle she’d suspected the shape of for weeks finally click into place. Then she went to start the coffee, leaving them exactly as she’d found them for as long as they needed.
When Ren finally woke, disoriented and stiff-necked, she found Damon already awake beside her, watching her with an openness that hadn’t been there in any of their interactions before last night. No careful distance. No measured politeness. Just a man looking at a woman he had apparently, somewhere in the last several hours, stopped trying to keep at arm’s length.
“Good morning.”
“Is it?” Ren rubbed her eyes, taking stock of her surroundings. “I don’t even remember moving in here.”
“You fell asleep talking. I didn’t want to wake you to walk you upstairs, so I just — ” He gestured vaguely at the blanket, at the space between them. “Stayed.”
“That’s very considerate for a man who once told me he doesn’t sleep.”
“I made an exception.”
Something about the small, unguarded smile that followed made Ren’s chest tighten in a way she didn’t fully want to examine yet. Not this early. Not before coffee.
They didn’t talk about what the night had meant. Not directly. Not that morning. But something had shifted in the space between them that neither tried to shift back. Damon started eating breakfast in the kitchen instead of his office. Ren stopped leaving food on his desk like an offering left at a shrine and started simply asking if he wanted to eat with her instead. And he always said yes. Every single time. As though the question itself was a relief he hadn’t realized he’d been waiting for someone to ask.
Damon’s birthday fell on the second Saturday of December. Windmir House hosted a dinner for it every year — a tradition, Ruth explained, that had started with his grandfather and simply never stopped, even after Damon inherited a house he’d never particularly wanted to fill with fifty guests he mostly tolerated rather than enjoyed.
The gifts that arrived were the kind of gifts wealthy people give each other. A first-edition architecture text. A case of wine older than Ren. A weekend at a resort in the Maldives from a board member clearly hoping to be remembered at the next round of funding.
Ren’s gift was a mason jar.
She’d spent two weeks on it in secret, writing out recipe cards in her careful hand. Her mother’s honey cake, recreated entirely from memory. A soup her mother used to make on the worst days — the kind of days when nothing else seemed to help. A dozen more. Some serious. Some silly. One card that just read: Reheat leftover pizza in a pan, never a microwave, and eat it standing at the counter like you’re getting away with something.
Each card was labeled at the top in the same handwriting: For bad days.
She gave it to him quietly after most of the guests had gone, setting it on the desk in his office rather than presenting it in front of the room the way the other gifts had been presented.
“It’s not much,” she said, suddenly self-conscious. “I know it’s not a first edition of anything.”
Damon opened the jar. Read the first card. Went very still.
“You wrote all of these.”
“They’re mostly my mother’s recipes. I thought — ” Ren shrugged, embarrassed now. “I thought everyone should have something to reach for on the days when nothing else is working. You never had anyone leave you anything like that. So I figured I’d start.”
Damon didn’t say anything for a long moment. When he finally looked up at her, his eyes were suspiciously bright, and his voice when it came was rougher than usual.
“This is the best gift I’ve received in thirty-five years, Ren Ashby. I mean that.”
She laughed, trying to lighten the moment before it became too much for either of them to hold. “It’s index cards in a mason jar.”
“It’s the first time anyone’s ever given me something they made instead of something they bought. There’s a difference.” He set the jar down carefully, like it was made of glass thinner than it was. “I didn’t understand the difference until right now.”
Someone took a photograph of that exact moment through the half-open office door. Damon holding the jar, looking at Ren with an expression that had absolutely nothing careful or guarded left in it. The photograph was online by morning. Local gossip site first, then picked up wider.
Windmir Developer Damon Cole Caught in Tender Moment with Live-In Chef. The headline ran. And beneath it, speculation ran the way speculation always does — fast and cruel and entirely unconcerned with accuracy.
Ren might have weathered the gossip alone. What made it dangerous was Camille Voss.
Camille ran a rival development firm and had spent the better part of two years trying to poach the investors currently backing Damon’s biggest project — a mixed-income housing development that would be the largest of his career, and the first one built explicitly for families who couldn’t otherwise afford anywhere near it. Camille needed that deal to collapse. And the tabloid photo handed her exactly the leverage she’d been waiting for.
She began quietly at first. A comment here, a suggestion there, planted with people who would repeat it to other people. That Damon’s judgment was compromised. That a man distracted by an affair with domestic staff couldn’t be trusted to steward an investment this size. That perhaps the board should consider whether Damon Cole’s personal life made him a risk worth reconsidering.
Camille Voss had built her career on a simple, effective principle: patience. She didn’t need to win every deal. She only needed to be positioned correctly when her competitors stumbled. And Damon Cole, in eleven years of watching him from across boardrooms and industry galas, had never once stumbled in a way she could exploit. Until now.
May you like
It reached Ren directly four days later, in the form of a call from an unknown number.
“You should walk away now,” the voice said — Camille’s voice, though Ren didn’t recognize it at the time. “Before you cost him a deal worth four hundred million dollars. People will forgive a scandal. Investors don’t forgive instability. Think about what you actually want for him, Miss Ashby. And then think about whether staying is really it.”
