After Seven Empty Chairs, I Took My Daughter and Left Chapter 30

After Seven Empty Chairs, I Took My Daughter and Left Chapter 30

After the Bentley drove off, the farce outside the club was far from over.

Looking at the surveillance footage looping on the iPad, the alumni who had been so righteous a moment ago fell silent. The video clearly recorded Sloane leaning close to Ava, then falling down the steps by herself like a terrible actress.

The anger on their faces quickly faded, replaced by fearful regret. But they weren’t regretting that they had blindly taken sides and slandered Ava. They regretted Elias Mercer’s cold declaration. It hadn’t been a threat. It had been a sentence.

The elite alumnus who worked at JPMorgan hadn’t even made it home when his phone chimed with a termination notice from HR in the middle of the night. The email was politely worded, citing “potential reputational risk to the company caused by personal conduct.” He was so angry he wanted to smash his phone and curse Sloane out on social media, but just before posting, he remembered the way Noah had shielded her and Elias’s cold face. Both sides were capital he couldn’t afford to offend. He could only accept his bad luck and curse this damned “cancel culture” in a private group chat.

The same thing happened to others. Those at Goldman Sachs, those at top law firms that cooperated with the Mercer family… Everyone who had accused Ava that night was “invited” out of their institutions within the next twenty-four hours for various respectable reasons.

Everyone scattered in disgrace. Back home, they immediately began frantically discussing Sloane’s annual self-inflicted disaster on X and in private Facebook groups. Soon, her reputation in all of Boston society was thoroughly rotten.

Some busybody anonymously sent the surveillance video to a gossip blogger with a large following on TikTok. Overnight, #SloanesStagedFall shot into the trending list. When the wall collapsed, everyone pushed. Before, people had still defended her as the “other woman,” a brave woman pursuing free love. This time, with ironclad evidence, no one sided with the “white privileged victim.” In the comments, she was labeled “Homewrecker” and “emotional manipulator.”

Seeing those viral posts, Sloane was so furious she smashed the penthouse apartment Noah had rented for her, the one overlooking Boston Common, to pieces.

Noah, meanwhile, was in even deeper trouble.

Elias’s words were like the first domino falling. Early the next morning, a major LP in Noah’s company, a fund closely connected to the Mercer family, politely proposed an early withdrawal. Immediately after, several Silicon Valley projects under negotiation began finding excuses to delay, citing “concerns about the Whitaker family’s credibility.” Contracts that had seemed certain to renew flew overnight into competitors’ hands. Noah was overwhelmed. To stabilize the collapsing company, he practically moved into his office in the Financial District.

Sloane couldn’t reach Noah for days. Her calls either went unanswered or were hurriedly cut off. She was already irritable. At precisely this time, her Brooklyn ex-boyfriend Zack began showing concern for her again on Snapchat.

Under the combined influence of Zack’s cheap sweet talk, several glasses of tequila, and a joint, Sloane half-resisted and half-yielded as she fell into his arms.

Afterward, lying on the messy bed in Zack’s apartment, she felt little guilt. In her mind, Noah’s recent neglect was only because the company was too busy and because he hadn’t fully adjusted to the vacuum left by Ava’s departure. He was still that Noah who loved her like his life and indulged her in everything.

With that self-comfort, Sloane’s behavior became even more reckless.

She began spending time with Zack frequently, taking him shopping on Newbury Street, vacationing in Nantucket, and even bringing him back to the penthouse apartment Noah was paying extravagant rent for.

Everything she swiped was charged to the unlimited American Express Black Card Noah had given her.

In his office, tortured to the edge of collapse by bad news, Noah watched one enormous bill alert after another pop up on his phone, his face livid. It was bad enough that Sloane paid no attention to his company’s crisis. At this critical moment, she was still spending extravagantly, as if his money grew on trees.

A fury mixed with disappointment and violence burned in his chest.