Chapter 2 - The Aftermath and the Anonymous TipBy noon, the digital grapevine of Lawson & Vance Enterprises was practically melting down.
I sat at the marble kitchen island of our suburban home—a house I had designed down to the last custom floor tile—sipping green tea while my phone buzzed incessantly against the granite surface. Missed calls from Ethan. Frantic text messages from mutual friends who had heard garbled rumors about a screaming match in the North Tower lobby (though, ironically, there hadn't been a single raised voice). And emails from unknown corporate accounts trying to fish for gossip.
I ignored them all.
Instead, I opened my laptop and pulled up the hidden folder containing the digital receipts I had quietly compiled the night before. Ethan had been careless. Arrogance does that to men who spend years believing they are the smartest person in any room. He had synced his company laptop to our home cloud network, leaving a digital breadcrumb trail of airline receipts, romantic weekend getaways charged to corporate expense accounts under "client entertainment," and text transcripts that would make an HR compliance officer physically sick.
My phone rang again. This time, it wasn't Ethan.
The caller ID flashed Unknown Number.
I stared at it for three seconds before sliding my thumb across the screen and pressing it to my ear.
"Mrs. Lawson?" a smooth, professional, yet deeply unsettling voice asked.
"Who is this?" I asked, keeping my tone perfectly neutral.
"That doesn't matter right now," the voice replied. "What matters is that you just dropped a nuclear bomb on the executive floor. Ethan’s supervisor, Marcus Vance, is holding an emergency risk-assessment meeting behind closed doors right now. But you should know something else... Lila Parker wasn't just an intern. She was handpicked and placed into Ethan’s department by someone on the board of directors. Her uncle is Arthur Sterling."
My eyebrows arched. Arthur Sterling—the ruthless senior partner of Sterling Capital and one of Ethan’s most formidable business rivals.
"Go on," I prompted quietly.
"Lila wasn't just having an affair with your husband for fun," the anonymous caller continued. "She was gathering proprietary data on Lawson & Vance’s upcoming municipal transit bids. Ethan thought he was playing the charming mentor, but he was actually handing his corporate secrets straight to Sterling Capital on a silver platter. Your little stunt in the lobby today didn't just ruin his marriage, Mrs. Lawson. It blew up an industrial espionage ring."
The line went dead with a sharp click.
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I sat staring at the blank screen of my phone, the chilling reality of what Ethan had risked setting in. He hadn't just betrayed our vows; in his arrogance, he had compromised his entire professional existence for a girl who was using him as a pawn in a corporate chess game.
And if Ethan thought he could crawl back home tonight and apologize his way out of this, he was about to learn a very hard lesson about collateral damage.
