The Jealousy Clause

His uncle spent a whole summer hunting our secret. Now he is done hunting. He is staging.

The examination has a date. The gala has been moved up a week, and the host is the man who wrote the questions. My best friend has been handed a script. His ex has been handed a retainer. Every person standing near me was placed there, like furniture, by the chairman of the board.

And the man I love, the most controlled man in New York, is starting to fray. A seating chart quietly changed. A transfer order at dawn. A hand at my back that steers instead of asks. He was raised in ballrooms, trained from age twelve to manage a room, and his uncle has built a room designed to make him manage me, in front of every camera in the city.
He begged me for one promise: if the choreography takes him, call the tune false. On the spot. In the open. In a word.
We have a word. I chose it myself, from my own pen, a spring ago.

On the marble stairs, in front of four hundred witnesses, I say it.

What he does next is the truest thing any camera has ever caught, and his uncle owns the film, and the examination is still nine days out, and none of it, I will learn on the last night, was ever the real move at all.

The Jealousy Clause is book four of The fortieth floor, a seven-book billionaire romance serial.