RUIN ME QUIETLY

Wren Ashford had learned, over the last three years, exactly how much a person could carry before the weight of it stopped being noticeable and simply became part of how they walked. She thought about that as she stood in front of her closet at six in the morning, staring at three blazers like the choice actually mattered, like the wrong one might tip the scales of a plan she'd spent three months building. The navy one had been her mother's, taken in at the shoulders. The gray one still had the tag half-attached, because she'd bought it two days ago with money she didn't have to spare, because she needed to look like someone who belonged in that building, not someone who'd spent the last three years learning which grocery store marked down its bread after seven. She picked the gray one. Her apartment was small enough that she could see the kitchen from the closet — a single window facing a brick wall, a stack of unopened mail on the counter that she still sorted by which envelopes had the university's letterhead and which had her father's. Both stacks were thinner than they used to be. Her father didn't write as often anymore. Some days she told herself that was just old age. Most days she knew better. She'd been eleven the first time she saw the Ashford Textiles building — sixteen floors of blue glass in the garment district, her father's name on a brass plate by the door that he used to let her touch on her way in, like it was good luck. She'd been nineteen the last time she saw it standing. By then it belonged to someone else, and the brass plate was gone, and her father had stopped being the kind of man who touched things for luck. She knew the story the way everyone in her family knew it — in pieces, softened at the edges, never all at once. A merger that wasn't a merger. A loan that came due faster than promised. A board seat her father hadn't realized he'd signed away until it was already gone. And somewhere in the center of all of it, a name that appeared in every version of the story like a splinter that never worked its way out: Vance. Callum Vance had been twenty-six when Ashford Textiles became a subsidiary of Vance Holdings. Wren had spent the better part of a year memorizing the shape of that sentence — twenty-six, the same age she was now, old enough to have understood exactly what he was doing and young enough that people called it ambition instead of what it actually was. She didn't know all of it. That was the problem. She knew the outline, the way you know the outline of a scar without remembering exactly how you got it. She wanted the rest. And some mornings, brushing her teeth in a bathroom too small to fully turn around in, she was honest enough with herself to admit she wasn't sure anymore whether what she wanted was the truth, or something closer to revenge wearing the truth's clothes. Either way, it started today. The Vance Holdings building didn't look like it belonged to a person. It looked like it belonged to an idea — all glass and cold symmetry, forty-two floors of a company built on the bones of smaller ones. Wren stood across the street for a full minute before she made herself cross, her reflection stretching and warping across the lobby windows as she approached, a woman in a gray blazer who had rehearsed this moment so many times it barely felt real anymore. Executive Assistant to the CEO. She still didn't fully understand how she'd gotten the interview, let alone the job — her resume was good, but not this good, not "leapfrog forty applicants with more experience" good. She'd told herself it was luck. She'd told herself a lot of things. The elevator ride to the forty-second floor took ninety seconds and felt longer than the three years that preceded it. The floor was quiet in the specific way expensive places were quiet — no clatter, no raised voices, just the hush of carpet and glass and money. A receptionist glanced up, said something pleasant Wren only half-heard over the sound of her own pulse, and pointed her down a hallway toward a door with no name on it, because apparently men like Callum Vance didn't need their names on doors. Everyone already knew. She found the assistant's desk exactly where she'd been told it would be. He was already sitting in it. "You're in my chair," Callum Vance said, without looking up from his phone. For a moment Wren just stood there, absorbing the fact that the man she'd spent three months building a case against was, in the flesh, both more and less than she'd expected — younger-looking than his photos somehow, and colder, the kind of cold that didn't come from a bad mood but from something worn smooth over years of practice. "I was told this was the assistant's desk," she said. "It is." He looked up then, and it was worse than the photos — the photos hadn't prepared her for the fact that he'd look at her like he already knew something she didn't. "You're just sitting like you're waiting for a bus." She straightened. Rookie mistake. She filed it away, the way she'd been filing everything away for months — every article, every court filing, every name that came up twice in different documents. "Wren Ashford," she said, and held out a hand he didn't take. "I know who you are." Her stomach dropped an inch. "My resume—" "Wasn't hard to find." He set the phone down, unhurried, like her presence was an inconvenience he'd already decided to tolerate. "Neither was your last name."