Down the corridor. Past Andrew’s office, where Andrew was standing in his doorway with an expression that said he had heard everything through the thin walls and was deciding whether to intervene and choosing, with visible effort, not to.
Into the elevator. She pressed the lobby button. The doors closed, and the moment the metal panels sealed her from view, she pressed her back against the wall and her hands over her face and the tears came, not gentle, not relieved, but angry and burning and thick.
She had loved Adriana. She still loved Adriana. That was the cruelest part; the love didn’t evaporate in the face of betrayal but remained, persistent and unwelcome, aching beneath the anger. She loved the woman who had wept in her bed and laughed in the conference room and brought her oat milk coffee and kissed her in a parked car with fifteen years of loneliness behind it. And that woman had been sitting on a three-year-old memo that proved she had prioritized money over justice and silence over truth.
Dani was in the lobby. She didn’t ask what happened. She didn’t ask if Sienna was okay. She put her arm around Sienna’s shoulders and walked her to the car and drove her home to Echo Park, and neither of them spoke because there was nothing that words could do that Dani’s presence wasn’t already doing.
At Sienna’s apartment, Dani walked her inside, made tea she didn’t drink, and sat beside her on the couch where Adriana had sat three weeks ago with a legal folder and a flimsy excuse and a face that said she hadn’t come for the interview protocol. The chamomile smell reached Sienna anyway, sweet and useless.
“What do you need?” Dani asked. Her voice was quiet, gentle, the voice of a woman who had been Sienna’s person through every crisis and heartbreak and late-night editorial decision of the last ten years and who was not leaving this couch until Sienna told her to.
Sienna pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. The apartment was dark. The city moved outside the windows. Through the wall, someone was playing music, a guitar and a woman’s voice, indistinct and melancholy. Everything looked like home and nothing felt like it.
“I need to finish the documentary,” she said. Her voice was rough from the tears, but the words were clear. The conviction underneath the pain was the same conviction she had carried since the gala, since the parking structure in Burbank, since the very first source had sat across from her and said,I’m here, aren’t I?The conviction had not changed. The landscape around it had. “Without her.”
Dani nodded. She put her hand on Sienna’s knee and left it there, warm and steady and uncomplicated in a world that had just become very, very complicated. They sat in the dark together while the city hummed and the night settled and the guitar played through the wall and the future rearranged itself into a shape that did not include Adriana Lovett.
Or so Sienna told herself. The love said otherwise. The love, stubborn and persistent and unwelcome, whispered that the story was not over. Sienna pressed her hands harder against her eyes and waited for the whisper to stop.
It didn’t.
18
ADRIANA
The office was quiet, but the quiet had nothing to do with sound. It was the quiet of aftermath, the stillness that fills a space after an irreversible act occurs in it.
Adriana sat at her desk. The door was closed. The blinds were drawn. The white orchid on the credenza stood in its ceramic pot with the same blank indifference it had maintained for the years Adriana had been using it as a symbol of control, and this evening the symbol felt as hollow as the control it represented.
Andrew knocked once and entered without waiting for permission, which was a protocol he reserved for moments when the usual courtesies were inadequate. He was carrying two cups of coffee. He set one on Adriana’s desk, took the chair across from her, and waited.
“I’m fine,” Adriana said.
Andrew put his coffee down. He looked at her with the unflinching attention of a man who had spent nine years learning the difference between what Adriana said and what Adriana meant, and who was not going to honor the gap tonight.
“You’re not fine,” he said. “You just lost the person who matters most to you because of a decision you made three years ago, and you’re sitting in a dark office telling me you’re fine becausefineis the word you use when the truth is too expensive to say out loud.” He paused. “I know you’re not fine. You know I know. Can we move past that part?”
Adriana’s jaw tightened. Her hands, resting on the desk, curled into fists and then released. The small movement was all the acknowledgment she could manage.
“What needs to happen,” she said, “is a formal withdrawal from representing Burty Howarth. Tonight. Before the morning news cycle. I want the letter drafted, filed, and delivered to Burty’s office by seven AM.”
“I’ll draft it now. Grounds?”
“Irreconcilable conflict of interest. Keep it clean, keep it legal, and don’t give him anything he can use to challenge the withdrawal.” Adriana’s voice was the voice she used in court. The emotion was there. She was choosing not to give it airtime. “The retainer termination needs to be ironclad. I want Burty’s access to our systems revoked by morning and our obligation to preserve his confidential files fulfilled to the letter. We’re going to do this right.”
Andrew set his coffee aside and opened his laptop. His fingers moved across the keyboard with the practiced speed of a man who had been preparing for this moment longer than either of them had admitted. He had the template already. Adriana understood now that Andrew had drafted the withdrawal letter weeks ago and had been waiting for her authorization to finalize it. The knowledge that her partner had been that far ahead of her was humbling, and Adriana’s ego would normally have resisted it, but tonight she accepted it as deserved.
The withdrawal letter was two pages, stripped of emotion. It cited irreconcilable conflict of interest without specifying the nature of the conflict, which was legally sufficient and strategically necessary. Andrew signed it as co-counsel, his signature beside hers, his name beside hers, the visible evidence of a partnership that had survived everything the industry had thrown at it and was about to survive one more test.
She signed it. The pen moved across the paper with the hand of a woman who had signed thousands of documents in her career and had never signed one that severed the financial artery of her own firm.
She reached for her coffee. It had gone cold. The bitterness of it sat on her tongue, flat and slightly stale. She finished it anyway.
“It’ll make the front page,” Andrew said.
Adriana set the pen down beside the signed letter.
“I know.”