COLD CEO SECRET HEIRS

Chapter 10

[The Gala]

The Cole Foundation Annual Gala was in November, and I was informed — via Jordan's impeccably organized calendar notification — that as a primary research partner I was expected to attend.

I was also informed, via Ethan himself, over dinner with three four-year-olds conducting parallel experiments in what happens if you mix peas with rice, that the gala was the kind of event where my current wardrobe would be — he paused, choosing the word with his usual care — 'insufficient.'

'Insufficient,' I repeated.

'It's not a criticism,' he said, with the mild defensiveness of a man who knew he had said something that could be received poorly and was attempting pre-emptive course correction. 'The gala has a specific — context. I have a stylist who works with the foundation. She's very good. If you're comfortable with it.'

I thought about my closet, which contained excellent medical professional clothing and also the grey blazer and very little that would navigate a four-billion-dollar foundation gala without attracting notice for the wrong reasons.

'All right,' I said.

The stylist's name was Dominique and she was approximately as efficient as Mia with better vocabulary. She arrived on Tuesday with a rack of things and took one look at me and said: 'Navy. You are entirely navy. I don't know why no one has told you this.'

The dress was navy, floor length, with a neckline that was elegant rather than complicated and a back that made me look, in the fitting mirror, like a version of myself that I had not previously encountered.

The gala itself was at the Cole Foundation's event space — a converted warehouse in the West Village that was now one of those places where the original architectural bones were preserved and everything else was perfect. Four hundred people, the kind of crowd that contained more individual net worth than several developing nations, all in formal attire with the practiced ease of people who did this regularly.

I did not do this regularly. But I was a physician and I had worked night shifts in hospital trauma units and had spent four years managing three children alone, and none of those things were accomplished by being intimidated by rooms.

Ethan met me at the entrance. He was in a dark suit that was, in the particular way of things made for him specifically, precisely right. He looked at me — a full, slow look that started at my face and moved down and back up — and said nothing for a moment.

Then: 'The stylist was right.'

'She usually is, I imagine,' I said.

Something about his expression in that moment — not the contained professional composure but something warmer, something that was paying attention to me rather than to a room — made my chest do a thing I declined to analyze.

We moved through the gala together with the particular efficiency of two people who had been living in the same space for two months and had, without formal arrangement, developed a fluency in each other's social styles. He introduced me to board members and donors with the specific language of a man who was also, in these introductions, communicating something about how he regarded me. Not 'my wife' — we hadn't had a ceremony, just the legal arrangement — but not 'colleague' either. Something more particular.

The woman arrived at about nine.

She was tall and blonde and wore red the way some women wear red — as a declaration rather than a choice — and she crossed the room toward us with the specific directional efficiency of someone who had decided on a destination.

Her name was Diana Weston. I learned this afterward. What I learned in the moment was that she placed her hand on Ethan's arm with the possessiveness of prior claim and said:

'Ethan. It's been too long. I was starting to think you were avoiding me.'

Ethan's jaw tightened by a degree that I was probably the only person in the room calibrated to detect.

'Diana,' he said. Flat and accurate, like a fact rather than a greeting.

'And this must be—' Diana looked at me with the specific bright-eyed assessment of someone establishing hierarchy while performing warmth. 'The arrangement.' She said it with italics I could hear.

Something in my chest went very still.

'Dr. Zoe Bennett,' I said pleasantly. I extended my hand. 'And you are?'

She shook it. 'Diana Weston. Ethan and I go way back.' She looked at him with a smile that contained something private and pointed. 'Very way back.'

Ethan said: 'We should find our table.' He put his hand at the small of my back, which was the first time he had touched me voluntarily since the handshake in the conference room, and the warmth of it was very specific and I noted this and filed it in the very full file.

At the table, later, when Diana Weston had moved to a different side of the room, I said quietly: 'You should tell me if there's anything I need to know about her.'

He looked at me. 'There isn't.'

'Ethan.'

A pause. Then, quietly: 'She's an ex. From before I built the company. She wanted things then that I couldn't give her. She's been periodically reappearing since the company became what it is.' He said this with the flatness of complete disinterest. 'She doesn't matter.'

I looked at him. He looked back at me with those grey eyes that were, in the gala's light, warmer than their usual temperature.

'She called our arrangement—'

'I heard,' he said. His voice had the cold-metal quality that I now recognized as his version of anger. 'It's not. You know it's not.'

I did know. That was the honest thing. I had known it for weeks. The dinner table and the volcano book and the cancelled board meetings and the way he put his hand on my back in a room that needed navigating and the word continuation spoken in the dark about a dead sister's name.

I knew it wasn't just an arrangement.

That was precisely the problem.