I studied her carefully. “Why did you take the microphone?”
Her face colored. “Because he kept delaying. He said after the gala. After the investors. After the foundation announcement. There was always another after. I thought if I forced the truth into the room, he would finally stand beside me.”
“And he didn’t.”
“No.”
The words seemed to cost her.
For the first time all evening, I felt no desire to wound her. She had wounded herself on the same blade I had simply learned to stop holding.
Sloane reached for a clutch on the windowsill and removed a small flash drive.
“He asked me to keep backup files,” she said. “Invoices, projections, correspondence. He said it was safer if certain things were not on Hale servers during the expansion review.”
My heartbeat changed.
“What things?”
“I didn’t understand all of it. I told myself that was normal. Big deals are complicated.” She laughed without humor. “That was convenient, wasn’t it?”
She held out the drive.
I did not take it immediately.
“Why give this to me?”
“Because Preston told me tonight that if I loved him, I would say the consulting fees were my idea.”
The room seemed to grow colder.
“He asked you to take responsibility?”
She nodded.
“And would you have?”
Her eyes met mine. “Before tonight, maybe.”
I believed her.
That unsettled me more than if she had lied.
I took the flash drive. “Eleanor will review it.”
Sloane held my gaze. “There’s something else.”
Of course there was.
In stories, betrayal arrives like lightning. In life, it arrives in layers, each one revealing the shape of the one beneath.
“What?” I asked.
“There were emails about a property in Connecticut. Not Westbridge. A private estate.” She frowned, trying to remember. “Grayhaven, I think. He said it was being purchased through a holding company.”
I went still.