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Chapter 611
Chapter 611:
Inside, on a bed of black velvet, lay a necklace. The central stone was a pink diamond of absurd proportions — a vulgar chunk of crystal that glittered with a cheap, desperate light under the office fluorescents. June vaguely recalled seeing it in the news, some record-breaking auction piece with a ridiculous name. The Argyle Legacy. The price tag, a string of numbers that meant nothing, only added to the obscenity of the gesture.
“There is a card,” the Harry Winston representative added, his voice hushed with reverence.
She took it.
Cole’s handwriting. She recognized it from a thousand documents signed during their marriage — the sharp, aggressive slashes of a man who had never learned patience.
𝖸𝘰u𝗋 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝗍 fa𝘃𝗼r𝗂𝗍𝘦 𝗿еа𝗱 𝘪𝘀 on
“I’m sorry p>
Two words. As if they could encompass three years of cruelty. As if they could buy back a child’s life. As if they could restore what he had destroyed.
June stood. She walked to the window and opened it the six inches the safety latch allowed. She reached into the case, her fingers closing around the platinum chain, and lifted the necklace into the gap.
Her phone rang.
She glanced at the screen. Cole’s number. A flicker of cold annoyance moved through her. He must have pressured someone on the board at her cell carrier, leveraged his connections to bypass the block she had explicitly requested. It was so entirely typical of him.
She answered. She did not speak.
“Don’t.” His voice was raw. Broken. She could hear traffic in the background, the distant honk of a horn. He was watching from somewhere below, in the street, watching her window. “June, please. Don’t throw it away. Just — just keep it. Sell it. Give it to charity. I don’t care. Just don’t p>
She held the phone against her ear with her shoulder and turned to the Harry Winston representative. His face had gone pale, his professional composure quietly fracturing.
“Return this to your employer,” she said. Her voice was perfectly clear, perfectly audible through the phone’s microphone. “Tell him I find it contaminated. Tell him I wouldn’t wear his diamonds if they were the last stones on earth p>
She dropped the necklace back into the case and closed the lid with a decisive snap.
She ended the call.
She turned to her computer, pulled up her experimental data, and began analyzing the morning’s cell culture results, her fingers moving across the keyboard with steady precision.
Behind her, the Harry Winston representative stood motionless, his mouth open, his composure in ruins.
She did not look at him again.
The sun was setting over Manhattan, painting the sky in shades of blood and gold, when Cole forced his way past security and into June’s office.
He looked like a man who had been dragged through hell.
His suit was the same one he had worn for three days, wrinkled and stained with coffee and something darker. His jaw was unshaven, the stubble patchy and gray. His eyes were sunken, the skin beneath them bruised with exhaustion, and they fixed on her with a desperate intensity that would have been pitiful if it weren’t so familiar.
June leaned against her desk, arms crossed, and watched him stumble to a halt.
She said nothing.