Chapter 1 - The Signing
The conference room on the forty-first floor smelled like fresh coffee and expensive cologne, the kind of room built to make people feel small before they'd said a word.
Floor-to-ceiling windows framed the Chicago skyline, the river cutting silver through downtown far below. Somewhere out there, a city moved through its Tuesday without any idea that a marriage was ending eleven stories above the traffic.
Derek Sinclair sat at the head of the table like he'd been born there, one hand resting on a stack of documents, the other tapping his phone screen every few seconds. His navy suit fit like it had been sewn onto him that morning. His Rolex caught the light every time he checked the time, which was often.
"Let's move this along," he said, not looking up. "We've got a lot riding on today."
I sat across from him in the cream cardigan I'd owned since before Nexora Systems existed, since before black cards and glass towers, since before I was anyone's wife. No rings. No jewelry. Nothing that said I belonged in a room like this — which, as far as Derek was concerned, I never had.
