SORRY EX-HUSBAND, I AM NEVER COMING BACK

CHAPTER 13 - THE CAMPAIGN

NATALIA

I had spent the rest of the weekend doing what I did best when I needed to get my head straight. I worked. I pulled out every report Diamond had produced in the last two years and went through them page by page. I made notes, drew up a restructuring plan for three of the underperforming departments, and drafted a performance review framework that I intended to implement before the end of the month. By Sunday night, my desk at home was covered in organised files and my head was clear in the way it only got when I had poured everything else out of it and replaced it with something useful.

I was not angry anymore.

Anger was loud and consuming and it made you sloppy. What I felt by Monday morning was something quieter and more precise. It had edges to it, and I intended to use every single one of them.

I arrived at Diamond forty minutes before anyone else and was already working when the first staff members began filtering in. I returned three emails, approved a budget amendment, and had spoken to the head of accounts before nine o'clock.

I was in the middle of reviewing a supplier contract when my office door opened and Ciara walked in.

She was smiling and she was carrying two cups of coffee, holding one out toward me as she approached the desk like we were old friends catching up after a long weekend.

"Good morning," she said brightly. "I thought you might need this."

I looked at the coffee and then looked back at my screen.

"I have a meeting in twenty minutes," I said. "Whatever this is, make it quick."

She set the coffee on the edge of my desk and settled into the chair across from me with the ease of someone who believed they were welcome.

"I just wanted to clear the air," she said. "I think we started on the wrong foot and I'd really like to change that. We're going to be working together and I think it would be so much better for everyone if we could just—"

"Ciara."

She stopped.

I set my pen down and looked at her properly for the first time since she had walked in.

"I'm going to say this once," I said. "I don't need the coffee, I don't need the conversation, and I don't need the performance. We are not clearing any air. You work here because I haven't yet decided what to do with the embezzlement files sitting in my drawer, and that arrangement continues only as long as you do your job and stay out of my way."

Her smile had faded somewhere in the middle of that.

"Now," I continued, picking my pen back up, "before you leave, tell Robert that he is no longer welcome in my home. Not for any reason and not under any arrangement my father may have set up. That chapter is finished."

She leaned forward slightly, and her voice dropped into something that was trying very hard to sound unbothered.

"Natalia, honestly, whatever is going on between you and Robert is completely separate from me. I have no interest in coming between the two of you, and if he's been trying to work things out with you then I think that's actually—"

"I said what I said," I told her, and returned my eyes to the contract on my desk.

A beat of silence passed.

Then I heard the chair scrape back, and her footsteps moved toward the door. It closed behind her with a click and I kept reading.

My father arrived forty minutes later.

He walked into my office without knocking, which was a habit I had given up trying to correct. He settled into the chair across from my desk with the air of a man who had already decided how the next ten minutes were going to go.

I looked up at him over my reading glasses.

"I'm busy," I said.

"You're always busy," he replied pleasantly. "That's one of your better qualities." He crossed one leg over the other and looked around my office with the mild, observant expression he wore when he was building toward something. "How are things moving with the new agency project?"

"On schedule," I said.

"Good." He nodded slowly. "I think we should bring Wesley in this week for a proper check in. Go over the Paris campaign logistics in person, make sure everyone is aligned before things move too far forward."

I set my pen down.

"We can do that virtually," I said. "A video call takes thirty minutes and covers everything a physical meeting would."

"I prefer in person for something this size," he said.

"Then you meet with him," I said. "I can review whatever comes out of the meeting afterward and send my notes."

My father looked at me with an expression that was trying very hard to appear innocent and not quite getting there.

"Natalia," he said. "This is your project. You're the one who approved it, you set the conditions, you are the one Wesley reports to on Diamond's side. It would be strange for me to sit in your meeting."

I knew exactly what he was doing and he knew that I knew, and neither of us said so directly.

"Fine," I said flatly. "Set it up."

He nodded, satisfied, and reached for his phone.

I picked my pen back up and tried to ignore the small, traitorous leap that happened somewhere in my chest at the thought of Wesley walking back through my office door.

I was furious at myself for it.

Wesley arrived that afternoon.

He was shown in by my assistant and he took the seat across from my desk.

We went through the campaign framework point by point. Timelines, budget allocations, the partnership structure for the Paris facility, the promotional content plan. I asked questions where the details were thin and he answered them without hesitation, and every time our eyes met I looked back at my notes.

In the midst of the conversation, there was a tension running underneath all of it that neither of us named and both of us felt. I could see it in the slight stillness that came over him when I pushed back on a detail. I could feel it in the extra fraction of a second I spent formulating my responses before I delivered them.

My father sat slightly to the side of the conversation, saying very little, watching everything.

Which was how I knew he was enjoying himself enormously.

Eventually he leaned forward in his chair and set both hands flat on the table with the energy of a man announcing something he had decided well before entering the room.

"The Valentine's campaign needs a face," he said. "Paris is a strong visual and we need someone the audience will connect with. Someone who represents what Carson Group stands for." He looked at me. "You should lead it on the ground. Promotional footage, facility tour, the full campaign."

I looked at him.

"I'll oversee it from here," I said. "The marketing team can handle the on-ground presence."

"The marketing team doesn't have your name," he said simply. "Or your face. Or your story." He paused for exactly long enough to make it deliberate. "This campaign goes to the board as part of your case for group president. You've wanted that position since you were nineteen years old, Natalia. This is the kind of visibility that moves those conversations forward."

The room was quiet.

I hated that he was right. Group president was not a title that was handed to anyone, even a Carson. It was earned through a visible record of leadership, and a campaign of this scale, attached to my name and executed well, would say more than any internal memo ever could.

I looked at Wesley, who was watching me with an expression I couldn't fully read, and then I looked back at my father.

"Fine," I said. "I'll go."

My father smiled.

"But," I said, and my voice came out with an edge that made him pause, "you are going to stop engineering situations and let me handle my work the way I see fit. No more surprise meetings, no more convenient arrangements, no more of whatever it is you think you're doing." I held his gaze. "I am going to Paris for business. That is the only reason I am going and the only lens through which you should understand my decision."

My father raised both hands in a gesture of surrender that I did not believe for a single second.

"Of course," he said pleasantly.

I looked back at my notes.

Across the desk, Wesley said nothing. But when I glanced up a moment later, just briefly, he was looking at me with something in his expression that I didn't examine too closely before I looked away again.

I had work to do and that was all this was.