Chapter 9: The File Under the Door

Hayes's POV

I had kept my promise for three hours, and it was the hardest thing I had ever done in a room full of people.

Four hundred guests looked at me while a recording told them what my company had done.

I stood in a sound booth doorway and said nothing at all.

Camille left the stage on a security guard's arm, with the dog clutched to her chest.

My wife left through the kitchen with Fred, and she did not look back at me once.

I let her go, because she had told me to say nothing and I had said nothing.

By midnight the ballroom was empty and the hotel manager was asking me politely to sign for the damage.

By one I was in my office on the executive floor, in the dark, with my tie in my pocket.

I had not eaten since breakfast.

I sat at my desk and called up the thirty-eight calls on my laptop and played the first one.

It was her voice, patient and low.

"Hayes, it's Lena. I know you're at the launch. Something's wrong at the ranch. Call me back."

I played the second.

By the tenth call her voice had stopped sounding patient.

By the twentieth it was not even a voice.

It was only the sound of someone breathing and trying not to let me hear how scared she was.

I stopped at twenty-six.

Then I turned off the screen and sat there.

I remembered the dinner with sixty guests, and my own voice saying that my wife sees an emergency in every cloud.

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