Someday doesn’t show up until it’s dragged into the room by force.
The discovery didn’t arrive with a trumpet. It arrived on a Wednesday night six months before the gala, when Wendell left his laptop open on the kitchen counter and went upstairs to shower. The water ran in the distance like it belonged to another house. Paige walked past on her way to refill her water and noticed a folder on the desktop labeled next chapter. The name stopped her like a hand on her chest. She almost kept walking. Almost told herself it was a business plan. Almost chose peace over truth. But her body wouldn’t let her pass it.
She set the glass down. Pulled out a chair. Sat. Opened the folder.
Inside were documents that dismantled her life in alphabetical order: ownership transfer papers for Paige’s Table reassigning controlling interest from Paige to Wendell and a woman listed as R. Simmons; bank statements from a joint account Paige had never known existed, showing six months of withdrawals routed directly from the company’s operating account; and a drafted divorce petition—formatted, dated—describing Paige as making “no significant financial contribution” to the business she’d built from her own $400 and her own hands.
Her fingers tightened on the edge of the counter until her knuckles turned white. Her vision blurred, then sharpened like a camera focusing.
But the deepest cut wasn’t Wendell’s name.
It was R. Simmons.
Paige searched the company’s public filings online and found it buried in an amendment filed eighteen months earlier: R. Simmons listed as a co-managing partner. A name Paige had never seen on anything she’d signed. A woman embedded in the company’s legal structure like a parasite feeding quietly.
It took Paige less than ten minutes to confirm what some part of her already knew. R. Simmons was Rochelle Simmons, the woman who’d been appearing at company events as Wendell’s “marketing consultant,” the one who smiled too wide whenever Paige walked into the room.
