I destroyed her,Dean thought, staring at the projection.I served her up to these vultures and smiled while they picked her bones clean.
The room was looking at him expectantly. Twelve faces waiting for the punchline, the funny story about his wife's reaction to learning she'd been performing for strangers.
"She left me," Dean said quietly.
The laughter died like a switched-off radio. The account still glowed on the screen.
"My wife left me. Over the account."
Uncomfortable glances ricocheted around the table while Fiona's private moment continued to loom over them. Someone cleared their throat.
"Oh," Melissa said, but her tone suggested this was merely an inconvenient plot twist. "Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but honestly? If she couldn't handle a little harmless?—"
"It wasn't harmless." Dean's voice cracked as he looked up at the screen. "It was cruel. It was a sustained campaign of public humiliation."
Dean's voice was getting louder, steadier, even as Fiona's vulnerability blazed on the wall behind him. "I took the kindest person I've ever known and I served her to you like meat. I turned my wife's vulnerability into your entertainment. I let you laugh at her while she sat at dinner tables thinking you were her friends."
The silence was deafening. The account still filled the screen—a monument to his betrayal.
"The account was the work of a sociopath. And anyone who thinks it's 'genius' is exactly the kind of soulless parasite who shouldn't be in charge of a fucking stapler, let alone client relationships."
Richard scrambled for his laptop, finally closing the presentation.
The promotion was gone. Had been gone the moment he'd chosen to stand up for his wife. For once.
Good,Dean thought.You don't deserve success. You deserve to lose everything she lost, and more.
"The quarterly projections look great," Dean said, standing up. "I'll be in my office if anyone needs me to explain the difference between marketing and sociopathy."
Dean satin his office with the door closed, staring at his computer screen without seeing it. Outside, the hallways hummed with their usual urgency—people rushing to meetings, chasing deadlines, building careers. Inside, everything felt hollow.
His phone had been silent for two hours. No meeting invitations. No urgent emails asking for his input. No casual drop-ins from colleagues wanting to bounce ideas around.
Word traveled fast in an office this size.
He'd torched his reputation in a single conference room meltdown, called his boss and half the senior staff sociopaths to their faces. The promotion he'd been angling for—the one that would've meant corner office, bigger clients, influencer parties—was gone. Permanently.
They wouldn't fire him. Companies like this didn't fire people for having personal breakdowns. They just... redirected them. Gave them the accounts nobody wanted. The clients who complained about everything and paid late. The projects that were thankless slogs with impossible deadlines and microscopic budgets.
Dean almost laughed.
It was exactly what he deserved.
He leaned back in his chair and looked around his office. Sleek furniture, expensive art prints, awards lined up on the bookshelf like little golden soldiers. The view that had once made him feel like he was on top of the world. All of it paid for by his ability to read rooms, to give people what they wanted to hear, to turn everything—even his own marriage—into content that served his ambitions.
The worst part wasn't losing the promotion. It wasn't even the professional humiliation.
The worst part was realizing how relieved he felt.
For the first time in years, he'd told the truth. Messy, career-destroying, brutal truth. And it had felt like breathing after being underwater.
He thought about the money. He didn’t need a promotion to have enough money to make sure Fiona lived a comfortable life.
He opened a new browser tab and, almost without thinking, typed in @missfionasays.
Dean's chest tightened. Even in her pain, even while struggling to rebuild from the wreckage he'd made of their life together, she was helping people. The comments were full of support, encouragement, people sharing their own stories of starting over.
She was creating something beautiful from the ashes of what he'd destroyed.
