He Signed the Divorce Without Reading Page Nine novel · Chapter 3 of 48

Chapter 3: Page Nine

In Positano, Claire gets a job offer from the rival CEO who held her elevator door, then takes Trevor's panicked 3 a.m. call about the frozen Tea Rose line. At 4 a.m. the rival is at her hotel door.

I walked out of the flagship with a brass scale, a framed photograph and a copy of one signed contract.

On the sidewalk my phone buzzed with a text from Patricia.

Where is your proof?

I typed back, Not by text. When I'm home.

Her answer came in seconds.

Then you will not be gone long.

I looked up once at the glass tower.

I had picked the rose-gold logo, and I had sold my grandmother's farmhouse to keep the lobby lights on.

He put a twenty-four-year-old on the billboard.

I did not look back.

In ten years I had never turned off my phone, because there was always a batch failing or a store manager screaming.

That night I booked a one-way flight to Positano.

Twenty nights on the Amalfi Coast, paid in full, nonrefundable on purpose.

I landed, walked down to the water in bare feet, and posted one photo of lemon trees and blue sea.

Finally have time for myself. It feels incredible.

The first message came in four minutes.

Must be nice. Some of us are working Saturday.

Then another.

Trevor gave everyone bonuses after you left.

Then a third.

Honestly the lab feels so much lighter now lol

Lighter, because the woman who said no to bad ideas was gone.

At the top of my feed was Madison, in my lab coat, posing in front of my bench.

Day one running the lab! Science is sexy. Wish me luck!

Trevor had liked it.

So had half the company.

I put the phone face down and felt nothing at all.

I knew how this went for anyone who got everything they wanted from Trevor.

An unknown number rang while I was rinsing the sand off my feet.

"Claire Winslow?"

It was a man's voice, low and even.

I sat down on the edge of the hotel bed.

I knew it.

"You're the man from the elevator," I said.

"Nathaniel Rhodes." A pause. "I said you were early. I did not say for what."

Nathaniel Rhodes was the CEO of Rhodes Maison, eleven luxury beauty brands in Paris and New York.

Business magazines called him the coldest man in beauty, because he bought whatever he wanted and never explained.

"I have tried to buy the Tea Rose formulas four times," he said. "Trevor told me each time that they were his. I never believed a man who can't pronounce niacinamide wrote them."

I said nothing.

"I want you as my Chief Science Officer. Your own lab. Full creative control. Your name on every product you make. And I will double whatever Trevor paid you."

"Trevor paid me nothing," I said.

The line went silent.

"Then this should be easy," said Nathaniel Rhodes.

I laughed out loud, a real laugh that hurt my ribs.

I hung up twenty minutes later with a meeting on my calendar, a signing bonus I had to read twice, and a lightness in my chest I had not felt since I was twenty-five.

At three in the morning, Italian time, my phone lit up with Trevor's name.

I let it ring out six times.

On the seventh I answered, and his voice came through so loud the speaker crackled.

"CLAIRE. What did you do?"

"I'm on vacation, Trevor."

"Legal called me at nine o'clock at night!" Something crashed on his end, a glass or a chair. "They say we can't manufacture the Tea Rose line. They say we can't sell one bottle."

"Sephora froze our orders. The bankers walked out of the IPO meeting. Seventy-one percent of our sales, gone in one day!"

I lay back and watched the ceiling fan turn.

"Where are my formulas?" he shouted.

"They were never yours."

"I own that company!"

"You own the company," I said. "You just don't own anything inside it."

He was out of breath.

"I signed nothing that says that."

"Page nine, Trevor."

He went quiet.

I heard paper moving and a man's voice in the background, calm and low, reading something aloud.

"Page nine," Trevor said again, and his voice cracked in the middle.

"You signed it twice," I said. "Once at twenty-eight, and once last night with your mistress watching."

"Claire, wait." His voice changed to the warm one, the one he used on investors. "We can fix this. Come home. Name your price."

"My price was page nine," I said. "You already paid it."

"Then I'll bury you," he said, warm no longer. "I'll say you stole it. You'll never work in this city again."

"Try it."

I ended the call and turned off the ringer.

I lay there with my heart pounding, and for the first time in two lives I was not afraid.

Then someone knocked on my hotel room door.

It was four in the morning.

I looked through the peephole.

Nathaniel Rhodes stood in the corridor in a travel-creased suit, holding two coffees.

"I don't make offers like this over the phone," he said through the door.

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