His Sons Girl

The Boardroom

Sterling Industries’ offices at nine o’clock at night felt like a different building entirely — the sleek, humming efficiency of daytime replaced by a hushed, half-lit quiet that made the click of my heels across the lobby marble sound obscenely loud.

Julian met me at the elevator himself, which told me more about the state of things than anything he could have said. In eight months I had never once seen him without a tie fully knotted, a jacket fully buttoned, some final layer of armor between himself and whatever room he was entering. Tonight his collar was open, sleeves pushed back, the particular disheveled look of a man who had spent the entire day fighting a fire he couldn’t fully see the size of.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, and then, before I could answer, pulled me into him with a kind of urgency that had nothing performative in it at all — not the controlled charm of the gala, not even the raw honesty of the terrace. Something closer to a man checking that something real was still standing after a day spent watching everything else threaten to collapse.

“Tell me what happened,” I said, once we were in his office, the door shut against the empty floor outside.

“Three board members called for the emergency session. Officially, it’s framed as a governance concern — questions about leadership judgment, conflicts of interest, whether my personal conduct creates exposure for the company.” He said it flatly, pacing the length of the window with his hands shoved into his pockets, the skyline behind him doing nothing to soften the tension in his shoulders. “Unofficially, one of those three board members has wanted my seat for two years and has apparently decided my son’s heartbreak is the most useful leverage he’s had in that entire time.”

“Can they actually remove you over this?”

“No. Not directly, not for something legal and consensual between adults that happened outside the company.” He stopped pacing, turning to face me fully, something exhausted and honest in his expression that made my chest ache. “But they can make the next six months miserable. They can slow every initiative I care about, question every decision, use this as the wedge to peel off exactly enough support that I spend my energy managing my own board instead of running my own company. Reputational damage doesn’t need to be fatal to be effective, Harper. It just needs to be persistent.”

“And Vivian?”

“Furious. Not at you, not entirely at me either — furious at the position this puts her in, having to defend a decision she warned both of us against from the very beginning.” He exhaled, dragging a hand through his hair. “She’ll stand with me tomorrow. She always does. That doesn’t mean she’s not right to resent having to.”

I sat down slowly in the chair across from his desk, the full scale of what I’d walked into finally settling in with a clarity I hadn’t let myself feel until right now, standing in the actual room where the actual cost of this was about to be decided. “Julian, if this is going to cost you the company—”

“It’s not going to cost me the company.” He said it with a flash of the old certainty, the boardroom voice, before something more uncertain crept back in underneath it. “But I won’t lie to you and pretend it isn’t going to cost something. It already has. My son isn’t speaking to me. My sister is exhausted in a way I haven’t seen since the divorce. Tomorrow morning I’m going to stand in front of nine people who’ve spent thirty years watching me build this company and explain a personal decision I’m not remotely ashamed of in language careful enough not to hand my rivals a weapon.”

“Do you regret it?” I asked, quietly, needing to hear the answer even though some part of me was terrified of what it might be.

He crossed the room and knelt in front of my chair, taking both my hands in his with a gentleness that undid something in my chest all over again. “I have asked myself that question every single hour since Ethan walked out of that library, and the answer has not changed once. I regret the pain. I regret every version of this that could have been handled with more honesty, sooner, before it had the chance to detonate the way it did. I do not, for one single second, regret you.” His thumb traced once over my knuckles, the same gesture from the terrace. “But I need you to understand what tomorrow is going to look like, because it’s not going to be private anymore. Once this reaches the board, it reaches the press within a week, maybe less. Your name is going to be attached to mine in places neither of us can control, and I need to know you’re prepared for that before I walk in there tomorrow and stop hiding from it.”

The weight of what he was actually asking landed slowly, fully, a question underneath the question — not just could I survive scrutiny, but whether I was choosing this, publicly, permanently, with everything it was about to cost both of us.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, and meant it with a certainty that surprised even me.

Something in his face broke open with relief, and he kissed me there in his office, slow and grounding, both of us clinging to the one steady thing left standing in a day that had otherwise come apart at every seam.

We were still tangled together when his office phone rang, shrill and insistent in the empty quiet, and I felt him go rigid against me a half second before he pulled back to answer it.

“Sterling.” A pause, his face draining of color in a way that made my stomach drop instantly. “When?” Another pause, longer, his hand tightening hard enough around the receiver that his knuckles went white. “Who leaked it?”

He set the phone down slowly, and when he turned to look at me, whatever careful composure he’d been holding together for the last hour had completely, visibly, shattered.

“It’s already out,” he said. “Someone leaked it to the press three hours before the board session. There’s a reporter outside the building right now asking for a statement, and Harper—” He stopped, his jaw working once before he could finish it. “They have photos. From the terrace. Someone was watching us last night.”