Chapter 1
"Elena's the lucky one."
"She married me, so she'll never have to work another day in her life."
Daniel said it with one hand around his wineglass.
The people at our table smiled because he had given them permission to.
I did not.
"You were in finance before you married, weren't you?" a woman from the Foundation asked me.
"I remember seeing your name on a housing report."
Before I could answer, Daniel did.
"Elena was very good at it," he said.
"Then we decided one of us should have a life that wasn't ruled by quarterly reports."
We.
The word landed gently.
That was why no one at the table seemed to hear what he had done with it.
"I still read them," I said.
Daniel touched the back of my chair.
"She does."
"She just knows better than to let them ruin an evening."
The last time Daniel had said something similar, he had kissed my forehead while I shut my laptop and told me we would talk about my next job after Westhaven settled down.
That had been four years ago.
No one at the table knew that.
They only heard a husband describing a comfortable choice his wife had made.
The Hart Foundation gala was halfway through dinner when a board member asked Daniel about Westhaven.
"Are you still selling after the renovation?"
"That is the plan," Daniel said.
"Assuming the return is there."
Westhaven was one of Reed Urban's older apartment buildings.
Two months earlier, Daniel had asked me to read the resident-turnover figures.
He said the board wanted a clean picture before deciding whether to sell.
I had found a problem in the moving budget.
"The return isn't the only number," I said.
"The relocation reserve doesn't cover the tenants the plan assumes will leave."
Daniel looked at me then.
Not with surprise.
With the same small warning he used when I brought up something he had already decided to ignore.
"We are not forcing anyone out tomorrow," he said.
"But the estimate assumes empty units."
"If families have to move, the cost changes."
"Elena helped us look at this from a household perspective."
Daniel smiled at the board member.
"Which is useful."
"It is not the same as running a development company."
I felt the woman beside me turn away.
"I studied finance, Daniel."
"I know."
He gave a soft laugh.
"And this is why I don't let her near the balance sheets."
"She turns a business decision into a feeling."
The laughter that followed was not loud.
That made it worse.
Mara Collins stepped in before I could answer.
She had been seated near Daniel all evening, polished and watchful in a black dress.
"Stable occupancy has value," she said.
"Elena and Daniel are looking at the same property from different sides."
She made it sound reasonable.
She did not give the conversation back to me.
Daniel could have stopped there.
Instead, he lifted his glass.
"We work well together because Elena leaves the numbers to me."
Someone laughed again.
Daniel moved on to financing and construction dates.
He spoke easily now, using the language he had said I did not understand.
I sat beside him long enough to see that he would not look at me again.
Then I stood, collected my coat, and left the ballroom without telling him.
In the lobby, I could still hear his voice carrying over the dinner tables.
He did not come after me.