Chapter 3: Glass Walls
Chapter 3: Glass Walls
His office on the forty-second floor hadn’t changed.
Floor-to-ceiling glass. Steel skyline. Controlled silence.
But everything in it felt wrong now.
Because I noticed what I hadn’t before.
A second chair angled slightly too close to his desk.
A drawer that wasn’t locked anymore.
A scent that wasn’t mine.
Vanessa’s presence was everywhere without her being there.
Adrian closed the door behind us.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said softly.
“I own fifty-one percent of this company,” I replied.
That landed.
Not loudly.
But precisely.
His jaw tightened.
“Not in this form,” he said. “Not like this.”
I looked at him.
Really looked.
The man I married didn’t used to flinch when I spoke about numbers.
Now he avoided them entirely.
“I was slapped in your company pantry,” I said. “For holding your bottle.”
He exhaled through his nose, almost amused.
“This is what happens when assistants get emotional.”
That word.
Assistants.
It didn’t come from confusion.
It came from habit.
From repetition.
From a system that had already rewritten reality too many times.
I placed my phone on his desk.
Turned the screen.
The bracelet photo.
His eyes dropped to it.
For the first time, something cracked behind his control.
“You shouldn’t have that,” he said.
It wasn’t denial.
It was recognition.
A mistake had been made somewhere.
Not by me.
By him.
“Where is the rest?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
That silence told me everything.
A notification buzzed on his computer.
A financial alert.
Then another.
Then another.
His expression changed instantly.
He turned slightly away from me, typing fast.
Too fast.
I saw the numbers reflected faintly in the glass.
Frozen vendor accounts.
Flagged transfers.
Audit triggers.
Someone had opened the ledger.
And they had opened it wide.
“Who authorized this?” he muttered.
Not to me.
To himself.
That’s when I knew.
The company wasn’t just being mismanaged.
May you like
It was being actively rerouted.
And I was no longer the only one watching.
