Julian's POV
The flight back from France had been a vacuum of silence, a pressurized cabin of forced isolation that I desperately needed. But the world I returned to was anything but quiet. The moment the wheels of the Windsor private jet touched the tarmac at Teterboro, my phone had become a live wire, a constant vibration of notifications that felt like a physical assault. Lawyers were demanding statements, PR managers were drafting "clarifications," and there was digital vitriol in my voicemail that I didn't even have to listen to to understand.
I ignored them all. I wasn't in the mood for the theater of damage control.
I was back in my Manhattan office, the eighty-third-floor sanctuary that usually felt like the cockpit of the world. I stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass, staring ou
