Chapter 3
The child's name is Wren.
My hand shook when I gave her that name.
Because I knew that from then on, only one person would keep that name alive.
Me.
No one ever told me what it looks like for a woman to hold up a child alone.
It's sitting alone at the payment window on the day of a checkup, swiping your card three times before it clears.
It's the first time in the ultrasound room, hearing that thud, thud, thud, and covering your mouth alone, crying so hard the nurse thought something was wrong.
She asked me, "Where's the family?"
I said, "I'm the family."
It's lying awake alone at night on that creaking bed, staring at the ceiling.
What if I can't provide for her.
What if I don't last long enough to see her grow up.
That kind of fear, no one can carry for you.
You just swallow it, alone, and stand back up.
I took the shares he'd signed over without a glance, that scrap of a stake in some worthless offshore shell, and registered a fund so small no one would look at it twice.
Vale.
That first year, I carried Wren, still in swaddling, to meet investors.
It was the hardest anyone ever looked me up and down in my life.
One man leaned back in his chair, swirling his coffee.
"A divorced woman with a kid." He laughed. "What makes you think I'll believe you can hold it together?"
"You couldn't even hold your own marriage together."
I didn't argue.
I moved Wren to my other arm, and I laid out the plan I'd stayed up three nights building, page by page.
When I finished, he pushed it back across the table.
Without reading a word.
Just like five years earlier, when another man pushed a divorce agreement at me.
That night, I sat on the cold floor of the rented flat, holding Wren as she ran a low fever.
I didn't cry.
I spread that rejected plan across my knees and revised it, line by line.
Until dawn.
Wren fell asleep in my arms, her tiny hand curled around one of my fingers.
Fine, I thought.
You don't believe in me.
Then I'll grow into exactly the woman who makes you take those words back.
The first night Wren spiked a real fever, I remember best.
A hundred and four.
I held her alone in the hospital corridor, from the dead of night until dawn.
I didn't dare sleep.
I was afraid that the second I closed my eyes, she'd be gone.
Near dawn, her fever broke a little, and she opened her eyes, half awake, and looked at me.
"Mommy," she said.
"Why is it only you in our family?"
"All the other kids have a daddy."
I held her, pressing my face into her burning forehead.
I didn't answer.
It was the first time I hated myself for not having an answer to give her.
And that was the night I told myself.
Elowen, you don't get to fall.
If you fall, there's no second person in this world who'll sit up till dawn for this child.
That's how the days went. Ground out, one at a time.
The first round of funding fell through.
The second, they buried a trap in the contract, meaning to swallow me whole, principal and interest.
Soren was the one who spotted it for me.
He didn't make the decision for me.
He just pointed at the trap, then took a step back.
"The cards are in your hand," he said. "My only job is making sure no one gets to cheat you."
I turned that money down.
I'd rather grind out another year than hand Vale to people who'd scheme against me.
Because the taste of being pinned to a table in front of everyone, not even allowed to finish a sentence, I'd had it once.
Once was enough for a lifetime.
I still remember the first time I walked into the Thorne Group boardroom.
As Mrs. Thorne.
They seated me at the very end of the long table.
No one poured me any water.
When I spoke, not one head lifted.
As if the chair held a piece of furniture.
Five years later.
When I walked into a boardroom again,
it was my own.
The second I pushed the door open.
The whole room stood up. All at once.
From that end to this one.
Not one of them dared to sit first.
What stood between then and now wasn't five years.
It was countless nights I sat up alone until dawn.
Countless plans pushed back at me.
It was a woman the world forced, inch by inch, to grow her own bones.
That year, the Thorne Group's stock dropped like a cut string.
Debt came in like a tide, over his ankles, over his knees.
In the whole city, only one firm could still save him.
Vale Capital.
My company.
The day the news reached my desk, I stood at the window a long time.
Five years.
He was finally coming.
He just didn't know yet who it was he'd be coming to beg, on his knees.
I glanced down at the old watch on my wrist.
A watch he'd handed off five years ago without a thought, and long forgotten.
I wore it not because I couldn't let him go.
I wore it to remember where I'd climbed up from, one step at a time.
I picked up the intercom.
"Tell the Thorne Group," I said.
"I want to see him."