Chapter 7: The Morning After the Gala
By 8:00 a.m. the first messages from Julian had already arrived.
They came through a secondary number I had not blocked, carefully worded and stripped of the arrogance he had worn on stage. He asked to speak privately. He described the previous night as a terrible lapse in judgment amplified by stress and champagne. He claimed Sienna had initiated the kiss without warning and that his reaction to me had been instinctive, not intentional. He used the phrase “private marital matter” twice in a single paragraph.
I forwarded every message to the general counsel without reply.
At 9:30 a.m. my father convened a short procedural call with the board’s executive committee. I attended from the study, documents open in front of me, the bruise on my arm photographed and already entered into the incident file. The committee reviewed the sequence: the public kiss, the shove, the recorded instruction to “know your place,” the immediate suspension of the CEO appointment, and the preservation orders already in effect. No one suggested that the matter could be resolved with an apology and a quiet return to the prior arrangement. The optics and the governance issues were now inseparable.
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Julian’s interim access remained revoked. Sienna Sterling’s administrative leave was confirmed pending the internal investigation. A third-party review of executive communications and expense patterns related to both of them was authorized before the call ended.
I ended the day the same way I had ended the night: without offering Julian a private door back into the structure he had publicly attempted to dominate.
