Chapter 7
The funding vote was scheduled for the following Tuesday. Five days. One hundred and twenty hours. Damon spent most of them on the phone, in meetings, or staring at documents Ren couldn’t read and didn’t need to understand. She understood the shape of it well enough from the set of his shoulders, the length of his silences, the way he drank his coffee faster and forgot to eat lunch.
She didn’t ask him for updates. She simply kept the kitchen running, left food in his office at regular intervals, and made sure he slept at least a few hours each night. The way he had done for her on the kitchen floor, counting breaths until the panic receded.
On Sunday evening, he came into the kitchen with a folder. He set it on the counter.
“Camille Voss has been under federal investigation for the last eight months,” he said. “Wire fraud. She was funneling money from her development accounts into personal holdings and hiding it through a shell company. The investigation was sealed. The only reason I know is that one of my former partners works for the agency handling the case.”
Ren set down the knife she had been using. “You’ve known this for months?”
“I suspected. I didn’t know for certain until two days ago.”
“Then why didn’t you use it sooner?”
“Because I didn’t want to win a fight I’d started by destroying someone else.” He opened the folder. “But I’m not the one who started this fight. And I’m not going to let her use you as collateral.”
The document inside was a sworn affidavit, prepared by Damon’s legal team, detailing the timeline of events. The photograph. The gossip campaign. The phone call to Ren. It included a request for a temporary restraining order barring Camille from contacting Ren or any member of the Windmir House staff.
Ren read it twice. “You’re taking her to court.”
“I’m taking her to the board first. The affidavit will be presented at the funding vote. The investors will see exactly what she did, and why she did it. Then they can decide whether a woman who attempts to destroy a competitor’s personal life to win a contract is someone they want to partner with.”
“And if the board sides with her anyway?”
“Then I find other investors.” He closed the folder. “The project is too important to let die because of one person’s ambition. I’ll build it slower if I have to. I’ll build it smaller. But I will build it.”
Ren looked at him standing in her kitchen, this man who had spent his entire life expecting nothing from anyone, now fighting for something that wasn’t just for himself.
“You’re going to win,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. Because you’re not fighting for yourself anymore. And that makes you dangerous.”
The funding vote took place on Tuesday morning. Ren was not in the room. She was in the kitchen, making bread from scratch because kneading dough was the only thing that kept her hands from shaking. She had no way of knowing what was happening inside that boardroom. No way to influence it. No way to do anything except wait.
The call came at 2:47 p.m.
“We won,” Damon said. His voice was hoarse. “Unanimous. Every single board member.”
Ren’s knees gave out. She sat down on the kitchen floor, still holding the phone, laughing and crying at the same time.
“Say that again.”
“Every single board member. Camille’s seat on the board was suspended pending the investigation. The project is fully funded. Construction starts in March.”
“You did it.”
“We did it.”
She didn’t argue. She didn’t have the breath.
Damon came home that evening to a kitchen that smelled like honey cake and roasted chicken and something that might have been the first real meal they had shared as something other than employer and employee. He stopped in the doorway, looking at the table she had set — two plates, two glasses, a candle she had found in a drawer and lit because it felt like the kind of night that deserved a flame that was chosen rather than accidental.
“You didn’t have to,” he said.
“I know. I wanted to.”
They ate dinner at the dining room table. The long one, the one that could seat sixteen, with the empty frames watching from the walls. They sat beside each other instead of across, because the distance felt wrong now. And when they finished, Damon pulled her chair back, took her hand, and walked her to the wall of frames.
He pulled a photograph from his pocket. The one from the birthday party — the two of them, the mason jar, the unguarded smile. He placed it in the second frame.
“One down,” he said. “We have a lot of empty frames to fill.”
Ren looked at the wall. Two photographs now. A family that was not a family yet, but was becoming something.
May you like
“Give it time,” she said.
They stood together in the quiet house, the Atlantic wind pressing against the windows, the candle still burning on the table behind them. And for the first time in nineteen years, Windmir House did not feel empty.
