Chapter 12:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

The dress was hand-embroidered, with lace at the wrists and a neckline that managed to be both modest and devastating. I’d chosen it myself: no stylist, no consultant, just me and a mirror and the specific pleasure of looking good after months of feeling like a construction site.

Conrad stood beside me in a suit that probably cost more than most people’s cars. He wore it as if the clothes were lucky to be on him. Together, we received guests at the banquet hall entrance, and I caught myself thinking that we looked like people in a magazine. A couple that other couples resent slightly.

Phoebe appeared at the edge of the crowd. I noticed her before she reached us — noticed the white-knuckle grip on her purse, the leather creasing under her fingers, the smile she assembled piece by piece as she crossed the room.

“Who would’ve thought — not only were we friends in college, but now we’ve both married into the Hadley family.” She raised her glass. The smile was holding, but barely. “Congratulations on your sons, Freya. I hope to have the same luck and give birth to a boy.”

She stood there with the glass high, waiting for me to clink mine against it, waiting for the gesture that would say all is forgiven, we are equals, we are sisters now. The moment stretched. Her arm must have been getting tired.

I didn’t raise my glass.

With Conrad beside me, she couldn’t cause a scene. She couldn’t scream or cry or throw things. All she could do was stand there, smile fading by degrees, until the embarrassment forced her hand. She lowered the glass and retreated into the crowd, and something in her posture — the stiffness of her spine, the set of her jaw — told me she understood.

I was done pretending.

* * *

Months passed. Seasons shifted. The twins learned to grip fingers and cry at three in the morning and smile at nothing in particular. Life reorganized itself around their schedules, and the world outside our house kept turning.

Phoebe gave birth to a girl.

When the twins were born, Winston had given me twenty percent of the company’s shares — a staggering gift, delivered with a handshake and a speech about legacy that went on for twenty minutes. But when Phoebe’s daughter arrived, Vaughn walked into the hospital, learned the baby’s sex, and walked out. He didn’t stay for the speech or the handshake. Cecilia drove across town to be there, held the baby, and handled the paperwork. Vaughn sent flowers the next day, generic ones, the sort a secretary orders without asking.

𝗜ո𝗌𝘁𝗮𝘯𝘵 аcc𝘦𝘀𝘴 𝗈ո 𝘨a𝗅ոove𝗹𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝗺
Phoebe called me from the hospital. Not to share the news. Not to make peace.

“Are you satisfied now? I have a daughter and you have two sons. I’ll never be able to surpass you.”

The accusation sat between us like something rotting. I could hear hospital sounds behind her — the beep of monitors, a nurse’s distant voice — and I imagined her in that bed, alone, her newborn daughter somewhere in the nursery, calling me instead of resting.

“Why do you always have to blame me?” I said. “It’s not my fault you can’t have a son. What should I be satisfied about?”

She hung up without answering.

I expected her to call Vaughn next, to rage at him for leaving, to demand what she deserved. She didn’t. Instead, she became more compliant. She cooked his meals, managing his schedule, tolerating his absences. She started taking fertility supplements that weren’t approved, pills she bought online with names I couldn’t pronounce, determined to give Vaughn the son that would finally secure her place.

I heard about it from Cecilia, who heard about it from the housekeeper. I said nothing. Phoebe’s choices had stopped being my concern.

* * *

After my postpartum recovery, I told Conrad I wanted to go back to work.

The conversation went about as well as expected.

“You don’t need to work,” he said, which was his way of saying I don’t want you to work, which was his way of saying I want you where I can see you. We’d been through this before. The pattern was familiar: he’d frame his jealousy as generosity, I’d frame my independence as compromise, and we’d argue until one of us got too tired to continue.

This time, I won. Sort of. He agreed to let me work as his secretary.

“That way I can keep an eye on you,” he said, as if this were a reasonable thing to say to a grown woman with two degrees and a software patent.

“You’re aware that’s deeply unhealthy.”

“I’m aware.”

“And you’re doing it anyway.”

“I am.”

I took the job. Conrad had moved the entire company to the country for me, though he’d never admit it out loud, and refusing the offer felt petty when the alternative was another year of baby talk and afternoon television.

My first day, I walked into the corporate building in heels I hadn’t worn in over a year, carrying a briefcase that felt foreign in my hand, and ran directly into Phoebe.

She stopped. I stopped. We stared at each other across the lobby with the mutual surprise of two people who’d been given the same bad directions.

She was working there — had been for almost a year, apparently. Climbing. Grinding. After the daughter, after the fertility pills, after Vaughn’s indifference, she’d thrown herself into work with the same ferocity she applied to everything. And in a year, she’d made it to manager. Mid-level. Respectable.

Then she saw my badge. SECRETARY TO THE PRESIDENT.

The pen in her hand cracked. She looked at the broken halves, then back at me.

“Freya, why you?”

The bitterness in those three words was oceanic. She’d spent a year climbing, and I’d walked in on day one and landed next to the top because the man at the top happened to love me.

I understood her anger. I did. But understanding isn’t the same as accepting, and the pity I might have felt was buried under years of destroyed rooms and boiling water and staircase math.

Why me? Because I entered a prestigious university at seventeen. Because at nineteen I built software that three companies tried to acquire before I’d finished my thesis. If I hadn’t fallen for a man who confused love with ownership, I’d be sitting in the president’s chair myself — not beside it.

I didn’t say any of this. I walked past her without a word, my heels clicking on the marble, and let the silence do the talking.

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