Not because of him. Because my body was still four months postpartum, my breasts still heavy with milk, my bones still carrying that strange deep ache women learn to walk through when the world expects them to look beautiful before it lets them feel human. The twins had woken at 2:10 and 4:03, and each time I fed them under the soft amber lamp in the suite, the scene behind my eyes kept replaying anyway: Ryan’s hand on my arm, the alley wall cold behind my back, the word useless leaving his mouth like it had been waiting there for years.
He thought he had finally shown me my place.
What he had really done was remove the last emotional excuse I had been using to delay the inevitable.
At 5:46 a.m., my chief of staff answered on the first ring.
Her name was Maris Cole, and she had worked for me long enough to recognize the difference between inconvenience and a threshold being crossed. I did not need to explain much. “Move the board meeting to eight,” I said. “Everyone in person. Legal, HR, compliance, audit, security, and outside counsel. Use the red protocol.” There was one beat of silence, then her voice sharpened into full wakefulness.