Page 9 of The Breaking Point

“He told you this now?” Grant asks.

I huff a breath, half-laugh, half-cough. “I tricked him,” I say. My eyes flick up to the clock behind the bar, blurry around the edges. “Did that thing where I pretended, I already knew, just to see if he’d confess.”

Grant exhales softly, then leans back. “Matthew Osborne’s favourite move.”

I nod. Of course he knows.

We both learned that trick from the same man. The great Matthew Osborne. Administrative head of Jacky’s, the massive restaurant chain that prints money in nine states. Charming, ruthless, impossible to please. He once called me a “feral genius,” and I haven’t stopped using the phrase since.

Grant and I are both his executive assistants. Well-paid, well-dressed, well-hated by most mid-level managers who think we're just the help. But our actual job? Spotting liars. Cleaning up rot before it reaches the top. At first, we competed for the role, bothof us cutthroat and with something to prove. But eventually, Matthew got sick of the bloodbath and split us up. I handle the East Coast. Grant handles the West. Keeps us both busy and far enough apart to minimize collateral damage.

Most of the time, it’s just logistics and damage control. Finding out which franchise owner is pocketing renovation money or which general manager is sleeping with a supplier. Then writing it all up in a clean report and sending it off to Marx Corp, the parent company with skyscrapers, helicopters, and a zero-tolerance policy for bullshit.

Funny, really. I’ve spent the last decade surgically identifying lies for a living. Rooting them out, wrapping them in spreadsheets and quarterly recaps. I’ve shut down multimillion-dollar scams with a smile on my face and heels that never wobbled.

And yet, I stayed married to a liar for ten years.

My laugh slips out bitter and low. I swirl the whisky, watching the light catch on the slow whirlpool of amber.

“I could always tell when a regional manager was covering up payroll fraud,” I say. “But I didn’t see it in my own house. Didn’t even think to look.”

“You weren’t supposed to,” Grant says quietly. “That’s the point of home. You let your guard down.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

I glance over. He’s looking at me like he doesn’t know what to say. That’s rare for Grant. He always has a quip. Always has a comeback. But not now.

Not tonight.

“Eighteen years,” I murmur, more to myself than him. “Eighteen years of covering for him. Of bending my spine until it cracked, I let him hand me crumbs and called it enough because I thought that was just how it worked.”

“You were raising two kids,” he says. “Finishing school. Running half a continent’s worth of restaurants. You didn’t have time to interrogate your marriage on top of everything else.”

I look over at him, lips pressed into a tired line. “Maybe. Or maybe I was just too scared of what I’d find if I really looked.”

He doesn’t argue. I appreciate that.

“Why do men cheat?” I ask, my voice thick with whisky.

Grant looks caught off guard. Good. I want him to be. I want someone to flinch, because God knows I’ve been holding it in long enough.

“You’re a man,” I say, eyebrows raised. “Tell me.”

He exhales slowly and doesn’t answer right away. The silence stretches, but I don’t fill it. I just sit there, watching him wrestle with the question like he’s trying to decide if honesty is worth it.

Eventually, he says, “I can’t speak for all men.” He shifts in his seat, eyes fixed on the grain of the bar. “But if I ever cheated… it wouldn’t be about the person I was with. It’d be about me. About how small I felt. About not being able to see that I had the world right in front of me, and I let my ego get in the way.”

I let out a short, dry laugh. “That’s a load of bullshit,” I say, wiping a tear off my cheek with the edge of my hand. “But thank you.”

He doesn’t take offense. Just nods once, solemnly.

I tilt my head, trying to shake off the heaviness. “Then again, I guess you’ll never cheat. You’d actually have to stay with a woman long enough for that.”

It’s meant to sting a little. Maybe even amuse. But he doesn’t even crack a smile. Doesn’t fire back. Instead, he looks at me. Really looks.

“Do you want to know why I left England?” he asks.

I blink. “Sure.”

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