Chapter 1
The day my father, Ethan Hayes, showed up at the conference room in person, every single person in there froze solid.
Tucked behind him was a girl in a cream knit dress, her gaze timid, her fingers twisted tight in the hem of her skirt from nervousness.
My father rested one hand lightly on her shoulder, and his gaze held a soft warmth I had never seen before from him. "Yara Hayes, this is Vera Lane," he said. "Her father was an old friend of mine. He asked me to look after her before he passed. She will be your new assistant from now on. Show her the ropes."
I lifted my eyes and locked gazes with my father.
And suddenly, a memory hit me. A year earlier, I had crashed and burned after three straight months of nonstop overtime, had ended up in the hospital, and had asked him to let me hire an assistant.
Back then, he had slammed my water glass down right there onto my hospital room floor, his face hard as granite as he stared me down. "Yara. You are such a disappointment to me. A little setback and you already want to throw in the towel?" he roared. "A daughter of the Hayes family is never this flimsy and useless."
After that, I never breathed a word about hiring an assistant again.
Once I checked out of the hospital, I went right back to pulling all-nighters drafting proposals. I did not slow down, either. I kept grinding through negotiations, drinking potential partners under the table like I did not care if I killed myself in the process.
I dragged the dying branch my father had all but given up on from the gutter and turned it into the biggest subsidiary in the entire group.
Everyone in Norchester knew me. I was the Hayes family heiress who lived and breathed work, who would work herself to death before she took a break.
Every single person in the company knew it too. The light in my office was always the last one off in the whole building, no exceptions.
I dropped my gaze, my voice steady and even when I answered. "Sure. I will have someone show her around and walk her through our workflow first."
My father looked pleased by how agreeable I was being. Before he left, he turned to Vera and said earnestly, "Vera, just do what your older sister tells you and learn well from her."
I called over my most trusted coworker to take Vera off my hands.
Truth be told, I had never hired an assistant before, so I had long since gotten used to handling every single thing myself. But if this was what my father wanted, I could suck it up and adjust.
I thought that would be the end of it.
But that night, when I got home just after midnight after finishing up last-minute work, I found my bedroom door wide open.
Two maids were scrambling to shove all my things into boxes.
My bed was already gone, my dresser stood completely empty, and even the beat-up old bedside lamp I had had for years had been taken off its stand.
Rick, our housekeeper, stood with his hands clasped at his waist just outside the door. When he spotted me, his face flushed with awkwardness. "Miss, the master gave orders to knock down the wall between your room and Miss Lane's guest room to turn the whole space into her walk-in closet," he said.
I stood in the doorway for two whole seconds.
It was not that I cared that much about the room anyway. I had been held to strict standards my entire life, after all. My feelings, my hobbies, my personal space – none of those were things a daughter of the Hayes family was allowed to have. So where I slept, how big my room was – none of that made any difference to me.
But I suddenly remembered how uncharacteristically serious my father's tone had been when he talked about Vera that afternoon.
I turned my head to look at the housekeeper. "Rick, do you know which old friend of my father's Vera's father was?" I asked. "Have I ever met her before?"
The butler's body went rigid instantly, his gaze snapping straight down to the floor. "I... I do not know anything about this," he stammered.
I walked straight to the storage room, dragging out a twenty-eight-inch suitcase.
I never had many belongings here anyway, and I had already planned to pack a few things for my upcoming business trip when I came home that night. But once I actually started packing everything away, I was still quietly surprised. All my belongings combined did not even fill the twenty-eight-inch case to the brim.
When I pulled the suitcase out and walked past my father's study, a sliver of warm light leaked through the gap in the door, and I caught faint, happy laughter drifting out – his and Vera's.
I did not stop. I just kept walking as I pulled out my phone and shot my father a quick text.
Yara: [I am leaving on a business trip tomorrow. I will just move into my apartment near the company permanently.]
Even through the closed study door, I heard the familiar chime of a text message notification.
Vera sounded surprised first, then her voice softened into that sweet, wronged lilt. "That is a text from Yara, right? She says she is moving out," she said. "Did she get mad because we turned her room into my walk-in closet?"
And then my father, who had always prided himself on being just and impartial, just huffed like it was no big deal. "Let her move," he said. "One less thing to annoy me every time I come home, anyway. It is just a closet. Tomorrow I will have the new seasonal clothes and jewelry sent straight over to you..."
The rest of his words drifted away into the quiet night.
