Camila takes another step away from Diego. He notices this time.
“You knew?” she asks him.
He laughs bitterly. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Did you know her father could do this?”
“No.”
“Did you know she put money into the company?”
His silence answers for him.
Camila’s face changes. All at once the glamour cracks and something colder comes through. “So you lied to me too.”
Diego snaps. “This is not about you.”
It is the wrong thing to say to a woman who has just realized she was sleeping with a résumé padded by theft.
She straightens slowly, smoothing a hand over her dress like an actress resetting after a missed cue. “Actually,” she says, “I think I’m done being in rooms where men say that.”
Then she reaches into her designer handbag, pulls out a silver key fob, and drops it on the table.
Diego stares. “What is that?”
“The penthouse key,” she says. “You can tell concierge to send my things wherever your future goes to die.”
For the first time since you entered the room, you nearly laugh.
Camila lifts her chin and looks at you. There is embarrassment there, yes, but also an odd flicker of respect, as though the earth beneath her high heels has shifted and forced her into adulthood one humiliating inch at a time.
“I didn’t know,” she says.
You believe her.
That does not make her innocent, but innocence was never really on offer in this room. Only revelation.
She leaves without another word.
The door closes behind her with a soft click.
Diego watches it for half a second too long, as if one more abandonment might be mathematically unfair. Then he throws the buyout offer back on the table. “I’m not signing this.”
“Then don’t,” your father says. “You still have sixty-two days in the building and perhaps three weeks of investor patience, assuming none of them read too quickly.”
Margaret adds, “The securities disclosure inquiry begins Friday.”
Robles finally finds his voice. “We need time.”
“You have a watch,” your father says.
It would be funny if it were not so precise.
Diego grabs the divorce packet, the buyout offer, anything within reach, gathering papers with the frantic aggression of a man trying to appear in control while losing the luxury of sequence. “This isn’t over.”
You pick up your purse.
At last, you are ready to leave.
“No,” you say. “It is.”
He glares at you. “You think you win because your father can crush people?”
