DON’T STOP (Lila and Darrell) novel Chapter 91

Chapte

Chapter 91

Daisy

The SUV barely moved.

Three blocks. In twenty minutes. At this rate. I make it to the war room sometime next week. I sat rigid in the back seat. my fingers curled tight around my phone, rereading Sarah’s message like the words might rearrange themselves into something less catastrophic. Norman’s name at the bottom of it all like a signature on a grenade.

Twelve percent.

In this economy where every board member was already watching margins like a hawk, where inflation had clients enegotiating contracts they’d signed six months ago, where twelve per cent was the difference between winning and watching a deal you’d built from the ground up walk straight into enemy hands.

My enemy’s hands.

Norman fucking White’s hands.

pressed my fingers to my temple and stared out the tinted window at nothing. At brake lights. The city was crawling along ike it had nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there.

My heart wouldn’t slow down.

needed a strategy. I needed talking points. I needed to walk into that war room with answers, not questions, and absolutely not with this hollow, panicked feeling sitting in my chest like I was twenty-eight again and watching everything I loved slip hrough my fingers.

The thought came before I could stop it – I should call him.

Not to talk. Not to talk talk. Just to yell. Just to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing, undercutting me by twelve per ent and leaking specs to the press like some kind of him. Exactly like him. This was so aggressively, infuriatingly Norman hat I almost wanted to laugh.

pulled up my contacts and searched his name out of pure muscle memory.

However, there was nothing.

Of course, nothing. I’d deleted it. Blocked the number. Done it the same night I’d signed the divorce papers and told myself hat was the last time Norman White would ever make me feel anything. That had been three years ago. He’d probably done he same – deleted me without a second thought and moved on before the ink was dry.

He had Evelyn now, anyway.

I exhaled sharply through my nose and dropped the phone into my lap.

Focus, Daisy.

The California Renewable Energy Initiative was a two-hundred-million-dollar contract. The kind that didn’t come twice. The kind that would position Wright Dynamics as the definitive leader in Al grid optimization for the next decade I had spent months on this bid. My team had barely slept. We had the better technology. I knew we did, but twelve per cent was loud. Twelve percent made boards nervous. That made people who should know better start entertaining conversations they had no business entertaining.

I could not lose this.

1/3

44 am PP

Chapte

would out lose thi

I just needed to get to the office.

The car didn’t move.

I looked up.

We hadn’t moved at all. Not an inch.

My jaw tightened.

“Why aren’t you driving?”

The words came out sharp as glass. The driver’s shoulders stiffened. He turned slowly, like a man who’d learned to be careful with his movements.

“It’s the traffic, ma’am,” he said quickly. “There’s an accident up ahead – the police are rerouting, but right now there’s no-” I was already looking.

I glanced past the headrest at the windscreen and saw it – a wall of brake lights stretching out ahead of us in both directions bleeding red as far as the eye could see. A delivery truck had jackknifed two intersections up. Police lights flickered somewhere in the distance. Someone was honking, pointlessly, the way people do when they know nothing will happen but can’t stand the silence.

We could be here for hours.

The driver was right. Of course he was right. Gridlock in every direction, bumper to bumper, the city locked up like a fist. I followed the line of it, calculating three blocks east, maybe four north, then straight up Meridian to the building.

Seven minutes on foot. Maybe six if I moved.

I quickly grabbed my bag.

“Ma’am-”

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