Chapter 2

2: 2

I had overestimated how much sense they had.

I'd barely reached the office when Adrian Lawrence started to say something, then stopped.

I pressed my fingers to my temples.

"What's with all the hemming and hawing? Say it."

He lifted his chin toward my office.

"Ms. Fox, there's a young woman at your office door calling herself your stepmother, making a scene. We won't let her in, but we can't just drag her out either."

She stressed the point.

"She's pregnant. We didn't dare lay a hand on her."

The woman from the photo came back to me at once.

I narrowed my eyes.

"Where's Noel Lambert?"

It took Adrian a moment to work out that the man I'd called by his full name was my father.

"I've already contacted your fa—"

He read my expression and corrected himself on the spot.

"No, Manager Lambert. He's signing a contract today. He's already on his way back."

I nodded.

"Fine. When he gets here, let him clean up his own mess."

"For now, take me to the spare office. I need to rest."

Three days running nonstop had worn me down to nothing, and right now I badly needed sleep.

But the second I reached the office door, a shrill voice went off behind me.

"Iris Fox, where do you think you're going!"

I didn't slow down. I pushed the door open and went in.

A clown like that wasn't worth a second of my time.

The woman wouldn't let it go and came after me.

Adrian blocked her and said something I couldn't hear, and she went quiet.

Once it was silent outside, I sank into a deep sleep.

The nap lasted a full half hour.

When I woke, Adrian's call came through.

"Chairwoman, Manager Lambert is here with Ms. Millicent Lawrence. They'd like to see you. Do you have time?"

I turned him down without thinking.

"No."

"Have Noel Lambert take her straight—"

Before I could finish, the office door was shoved open.

Millicent Lawrence came in with her big belly out front, my father trailing meekly behind her.

Adrian wiped the sweat from his forehead and apologized to me.

"I'm sorry, Chairwoman. I couldn't stop her."

I waved a hand.

"It's fine. You can go."

The door closed, and Millicent slapped a hand down on my desk.

"You're Iris Fox, aren't you. I'm your stepmother!"

"I came here to tell you that a little girl like you isn't fit to run a company this big. All of this is going to be my son's from now on, so get out of the company, now!"

I twirled my pen. For the first time, I found something genuinely novel.

All my life, no one had ever dared call me unfit.

My mother was a genius. My grandfather took her under his wing to study at eight; by fifteen she was working on the company's projects, and by twenty she'd won over the company's old guard by sheer force and built it into something big and strong.

And I had surpassed her.

Perfect marks on every test from childhood, abroad by fifteen, a business PhD from a top-tier university by eighteen, and by twenty-two, when I took over, I'd doubled the company's size and quintupled its profits.

Not one of those uncles ever spoke of me without a thumbs-up. No one had ever put me and the word unfit in the same breath.

Today was novel indeed, that someone should call me unfit just because she was about to birth a boy, and order me out of my own company on top of it.

I said nothing. I only smiled and looked at my father, waiting for him to show his hand.

My mother had warned me plainly while she was still lucid.

The moment my father's outside woman came making trouble, I was to watch his attitude.

If he'd already lost all sense of right and wrong and sided with the outsiders, then I was to strip him of every duty and send him back to the countryside.

My father met my eyes and gave me a little smile.

"Iris."

Just as I thought he was on my side, he dropped his usual humble, doting act and produced a share-transfer document.

"Iris, your aunt here is right. You're a woman. You'll have to marry someday, and it really isn't proper for you to be out in the world showing your face."

"Look at your mother. It was all that exposure, too much yin and not enough yang, that turned on her, and now she's bedridden with a grave illness. You can't follow the same path she did!"

He pushed the document a little further toward me.

"Listen to your father and sign the share-transfer papers. Think of it as a gift for your unborn little brother. He'll thank you for it one day, and he'll be the one to care for you in your old age and see you off when the time comes."