CHAPTER 3: The Phone in Her Palm

A month earlier, Grace’s father had asked her one question across a private dining table in Boston.
“Are you ready to stop protecting him?”
She had not answered then.
Love is not always destroyed in one betrayal. Sometimes it is buried under a thousand small humiliations until the person carrying it forgets how heavy it has become.
Grace had loved Grant before the towers, before the magazine covers, before his name began opening doors faster than character ever could.
She had believed ambition could be honorable if the person carrying it still remembered where home was.
Grant forgot.
Then he resented her for remembering.
Now, in the glass boardroom, with her lip cut and every director pretending not to see it, Grace slid her thumb across the phone hidden against her thigh.
One call.
Not to police yet.
Not to a lawyer yet.
To the man Grant had laughed about for years.
The retired old investor in Boston.
The father Grace never used as a threat because she had never wanted her marriage to become a battlefield.
Tonight, Grant had chosen the battlefield for her.
Grace had not been hiding because she was afraid of power.
She had been hiding because she was tired of discovering who only respected her after learning her last name.