Adrenaline that had sustained me through the board meeting began to ebb, replaced by a profound and heavy stillness. We were back at the estate, the sprawling grounds bathed in the soft, bruised purple of a California dusk. The silence here was different than the silence of the penthouse in New York. There, it felt like a pause in a recording. Here, it felt like the breath of a living thing.
I stood on the balcony of our suite, having traded the restrictive charcoal suit for a simple silk robe. The diamonds were back in their velvet-lined box, their job finished. I looked down at my bare hands, then at the gold band that remained. It was no longer a prop. It was a part of me, as real as the skin it rested upon.
