ste

ng until I'm back in my r

to get as a kid when she caught me lying about something small and stupid and decided to file it away inste

ng on Ivy not noticing things. It's the one skill I've always been bet

the second I've g

his voice I don't like, thin and fast, the voice of a man who's been standing somewhere w

ter walked in on the end

where 'that's all' is a category of outcome. If Ivy Sterling repeat

in on the ceiling that used to be in her room before she got moved up to the west wing to be closer to her fiancé, close

es

es

d something he can't, "Marcus moved the audit up. Two weeks. Somebody on the board got nervous about early trial data and wants everything reviewed before the next investor call, which means the files I pulle

free hand flat against my knee to st

teen

ublic and everyone else finds out how bad the early trial numbers really are. I think about how none of this was supposed to be complicated - Tobias needed the data buried a little longer to protect his own position at th

ndle it,

d that l

w anything. She's getting married in three months, Tobias, she's picking out flowers, she is not someho

ure for someone who was shaking hard enough ten

ent twenty years learning that the fastest way to survive a conversation with a man w

say instead. "I'l

re he can say

myself on whatever's left of twenty years of being raised as sisters and ask her to just let this go, to not tell her father, to

things directly. I've always been the sister who takes th

at two in the

ff no matter how many times we've done this - the particular electricity of being wanted by the man who's marrying my stepsis

pe back. C

hinking about

, mine or hers, the one everyone in this family thinks is happening in three months or the one I've let myself

out it,

re me. Go to

o can turn his attention on and off like a light switch, and I think about fourteen days, and files that need to disappear back into

here when the knock

den where nobody's supposed to be able to reach without a ladder, and I go so

Deliberate. Someone who knows

on the other side of the glass I recognize immediately and never, not once in fourteen years of knowing him, expec

bi

panes of window I can see that his hands are shaking worse th