That was the first moment I believed she might not know the whole truth.
Preston finally spoke. “Those were advance consulting fees.”
Mason looked almost bored. “For reports nobody can locate?”
“They’re confidential.”
“Then you’ll have no difficulty producing them.”
Silence.
The kind that changes careers.
Sloane turned fully toward Preston now. “You told me the payments were equity positioning.”
I watched him close his eyes.
There it was: the small hidden door opening inside the larger room.
“You told me,” Sloane continued, quieter, “that Victoria had signed off.”
A strange stillness settled in me.
Preston had not merely betrayed me with her.
He had used me to deceive her too.
For a moment, Sloane and I looked at each other across the wreckage of the same man’s promises. I did not like her. I would never pretend I did. But I recognized the shock in her face. It was the expression of a woman discovering she had been cast in a story different from the one she believed she was living.
Mason leaned close to me. “You don’t have to stay.”
“I do,” I said.
Preston reached for my hand.
I stepped back before he touched me.
That tiny movement seemed to wound him more than any public accusation.
“Victoria,” he said, his voice lower now. “I made mistakes.”
“Do not make them sound accidental.”
His eyes reddened. “I was drowning.”
The room seemed to fade at the edges.
“Drowning in what?” I asked.
He glanced at Mason, then at Eleanor, then at the bankers who stood like patient shadows near the doors.
“In expectations,” he said. “In your father’s shadow. In the way every room reminded me I was Mr. Victoria Hartwell before I was Preston Hale.”
I heard a few uncomfortable shifts around us, but my focus stayed on him.
“You could have told me that.”