After They Ate Me Alive, I Fought Back

Chapter 6—Something Rotten at Whitmore

I turned.

The woman standing behind me was young, polished, and completely unfamiliar. She looked at my hand on the door handle like I’d been caught jimmying a lock.

“This is Mr. Cole’s office,” she said, polite but pointed. “Do you have an appointment?”

“And you are?”

“I’m Mr. Cole’s secretary. Tara.”

“New?”

“Yes.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “And where’s the old one? Secretary Sienna?”

“I wouldn’t know.” She blinked. “The secretarial department right now is just me and a Ms. Wang.”

Ms. Wang, I knew—Wendy Wang, hired a year ago when the business expanded. Sienna Park, though. Sienna was mine. I’d interviewed her myself. She’d worked under me for three years, and she was, as far as I was concerned, the one person in this building I could still trust.

And she was gone.

I turned back toward the elevator, and just before the doors closed, I said it over my shoulder, without looking back: “I’m Elena Cole. Mr. Cole’s wife. And the general manager of Whitmore.”

The doors slid shut on Tara’s face, and I watched it go from confused to something like alarm.

She seemed sweet enough. But then, so had my husband. I’d learned my lesson about judging people by the softness of their faces.

---

I called Sienna from the cab.

It rang and rang. I was about to hang up when her voice came through, a little breathless. “Ms. Whitmore.”

“Where are you?” I said, light. “I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop by the office.”

A pause. “Actually, Ms. Whitmore, I’m not at Whitmore anymore.”

“You just said you were at the company.”

“I found a new job.”

“How long ago?”

“About two months.”

I kept my voice easy. “That was sudden.”

“Same job, too long. I was tired.”

“I understand. Just a shame, is all.”

“Ms. Whitmore?”

“I’m coming back to run Whitmore,” I said. “I was going to ask you to be beside me. Two years away, and now everything’s changed.”

Her voice jumped. “You’re coming back? To manage Whitmore?” There it was again—that edge, that eagerness. “That’s—that’s wonderful.”

And in that reaction, I heard it. She knew something. She’d known something for two months, and whatever it was, it had cost her the job she loved, and she’d been keeping it inside ever since.

But she’d also hidden her resignation from me. So asking her straight wouldn’t work.

“I’ve been gone too long,” I said instead. “I don’t know where to start. Come back and help me.”

She went quiet. Then, carefully: “Ms. Whitmore, thank you. But I can’t go back.”

“Why not? I’ll raise your pay. Bonuses. Year-end, too.”

“It’s not the money.”

“Then tell me what it is. Maybe I can fix it.”

Another silence, longer this time. Then she took a breath, like she was steeling herself for something.

“Ms. Whitmore—are you somewhere private?”

I glanced at the driver. “I’m alone in a cab. Go ahead.”

Her voice dropped, low and steady, the way people talk when they’re afraid someone might be listening. “I didn’t leave, Ms. Whitmore. I was fired. Mr. Cole said I made an error on a contract—that it cost the company over fifty million dollars. But I have the email chain, every single one of them, proving I entered it correctly. The contract went through my hands, though, so after I apologized and offered to pay, he let me go. He said he was dropping it for your sake.”

“Fifty million,” I repeated, and I heard how flat my own voice had gone.

“You didn’t know?”

I watched the city scroll past the window, gray and cold. “He never mentioned it. You were the first person I hired after I took over Whitmore. The one person besides him I was closest to in that building. If he hid you from me...”

“...then he’s hidden a lot more,” she finished, quietly. “Ms. Whitmore, I’m an outsider. It’s not my place to judge your marriage. But you should know—Nathan has been running Whitmore his way for two years. Getting your voice back won’t be easy. Prepare yourself.”

“Thank you, Sienna. Even if we can’t be colleagues, we can be friends. Let’s have dinner this weekend.”

“I’d like that. Though Mr. Cole won’t be happy about it.”

“Let me worry about that. He doesn’t control who I eat dinner with.”

We said goodbye as the cab pulled up to my building. I sat for a second after hanging up, letting it settle.

Sienna hadn’t left because she was tired. She’d been pushed out—framed, maybe, or just inconvenient—because she knew too much, or because she was loyal to me and not to him. Either way, it meant Nathan had been cleaning house while I’d been home, quietly trying to grow his baby.

Cleaning the house of anyone who might have warned me.

Noted.

The elevator took me up to the penthouse, and my mood was heavier than it had been walking out of my parents’ funeral. There’s a particular kind of dread you only feel coming home to the place you thought was your safe harbor, once you know it’s actually a cage.

I opened the door.

And stopped.

The living room looked like a bomb had gone off. Cushions slashed, glass everywhere, the painting my mother loved ripped off the wall and smashed. In the middle of it all sat Doris, shaking, and when she looked up and saw me, her eyes went to me like she was going to eat me alive.

I didn’t give her the satisfaction of a reaction. I followed the sound of crying to the master bedroom.

Nathan was bent over the bed—my bed—changing Liam’s diaper, murmuring to him in that soft, patient voice.

The picture of a devoted father. In my house. On my sheets.

Bold. He’s getting bold. Next he’ll be moving the mother in too, and then I’ll be the one sleeping in the guest room.

“Elena—“ He started, caught off guard.

“What’s going on?” I said, flat.

The words barely left my mouth when Liam let loose a perfect, well-aimed arc of pee—

—straight into Nathan’s open mouth.

I watched it happen in what felt like slow motion. The tiny, triumphant fountain. The splash. The look on Nathan’s face as he realized exactly what had just gone down his throat.

I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper.

Oh, thank you. Thank you, universe. If there is any justice left in this world, that was a down payment on it.

I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper.

There, in my own bedroom, the universe had just delivered a baby’s worth of poetic justice straight into Nathan Cole’s open mouth. If I believed in signs, that was the sign.

I kept my face flat. “What’s going on?”

Nathan gagged, bolted for the bathroom, and came back rinsing his mouth, looking vaguely like a man who’d just lost an argument with a garden hose. “It’s just a little—“ He waved a hand. “Baby pee is clean. It’s fine.”

“Maybe.” I kept my distance, and not because of the urine. “But I’m afraid I can’t build a bond with your brother under the current circumstances.”

He glanced at Liam on the bed, then back at me, and launched into it: how he’d told Doris about the divorce, how she’d flown into a rage and torn up the living room, how she’d nearly hurt the baby, so he’d brought Liam in here to keep him safe.