Chapter 4 - The Plea
I walked out of Conference Room A, leaving Charles Carlisle collapsed in a chair with his attorney frantically calling emergency restructuring advisors.
When I reached the ground-floor elevator bay, I saw Evan.
He was standing near the massive marble fountain in the center of the lobby, holding a dying bouquet of yellow roses. He was dressed in the same suit he had worn the night before, unbuttoned at the collar, his hair disheveled. He looked small under the eighty-foot ceilings of the Halcyon Tower.
When he saw me step off the private elevator, his eyes lit up with a pathetic mixture of relief and panic. He dropped the roses onto a marble bench and ran toward me.
"Maya!" he shouted.
Two heavy-set security officers instantly moved to step between us, but I raised a single finger, stopping them in their tracks.
"It's fine, Marcus," I told the lead guard. "Give us two minutes."
Evan stopped three feet away from me. He looked at my charcoal suit, my tailored posture, the diamond stud earrings that had replaced the simple silver wire hoops I usually wore around him. He looked like a man waking up in a completely different universe.
"Maya... please," Evan breathed, his voice trembling. "Look at me. It's me. It's Evan."
"I am looking at you, Evan," I said calmly.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he pleaded, stepping closer, his hands outstretched. "Why didn't you tell me who you were? For six months... six months you let me take you to cheap diners! You let me pay for twenty-dollar meals! You let my family think..."
"I let your family show me who they were when they thought I had nothing," I corrected him sharply. "And I let you show me who you were when the people you loved were tearing me down."
Evan flinched as if I had thrown cold water in his face. "I was shocked! I didn't know what to do! My mother... she's controlling, you know how she is! I was going to talk to her after dinner, I swear to God I was!"
"You stood there, Evan," I said, my voice dropping into a razor-thin whisper. "Your sister recorded me. Your mother tossed my dress—the dress I bought when my mother was working two jobs to keep us from being evicted—onto a chair like trash. And you stood there like a man holding a bucket of water while your family burned my dignity to the ground."
"I was scared!" he cried out, tears welling in his eyes. "I didn't want them to cut me off! I didn't want them to ruin us!"
"Ruin us?" I let out a soft laugh. "Evan, my personal net worth is three times larger than your father's entire company. I didn't need your family's money. I didn't need their approval. I just needed a man who would stand beside me when the room got cold."
"I love you, Maya!" he sobbed, stepping forward and reaching for my hands. "I love you! We can fix this! Forget the company, forget my father's deal! Just come back to my apartment! We can start over!"
I pulled my hands back before his fingers could touch my sleeves.
"You don't love me, Evan," I said softly, looking him dead in the eye. "You love the idea of a quiet, agreeable girl who would make you feel important while you bowed to your mother. And now you're terrified because that quiet girl holds the key to your family's execution."
"Maya, please..."
"The security guard will escort you out now, Evan," I said, turning my back on him. "Don't come back to this building."
May you like
"Maya!" he screamed behind me as the heavy security guards stepped in, wrapping their massive arms around his shoulders. "Maya, please! They're going to lose everything! My mother will destroy me!"
"She already did, Evan," I said without looking back. "She raised you."
