Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 39

Chapter 39

CELESTE

I stopped on the pavement of Helix and looked at them, all of them, lined up in the early morning light, clapping for me, and something cracked open in my chest in a way I was not prepared for.

I walked down the line. I shook hands. I accepted the hugs. I said thank you, genuinely, to each of them, because they had kept this place alive through years when keeping it alive had seemed like stubbornness rather than strategy.

When I reached Pat she pulled me into a hug so tight I felt it in my spine.

“I don’t know how you did it,” she said, her voice muffled against my shoulder. “I don’t know how, but thank you. Thank you, Celeste.”

I hugged her back. “We did it,” I said. “All of us.”

She pulled back and looked at my face with wet eyes. “Was it Julian? Did he pull strings?”

I laughed. I could not help it. The question was so far from the truth that it came out as a laugh before I could shape it into anything else.

“No,” I said. “It was not Julian.”

“Then how?”

“I promise I will tell you everything. Once everything is in place. The whole story.” I squeezed her hands. But not yet.”

She searched my face for a moment. Then she nodded.

I thought about the day Seraphine had left. I had not been there for it properly, had been too caught up in Julian’s world to see how much it had broken Pat, how much she had absorbed the loss of her colleague and just kept going because there was no other option. Pat had held Helix together in the years of my marriage almost single-handedly, had kept the research moving forward on a budget that should have made it impossible, had refused to let the work die.

Seeing her face this morning was worth every single thing I had done that brought me here.

An hour later, the grants and administration coordinator appeared in the doorway of the meeting room where Pat and I were going over preliminary plans.

“It dropped,” she said.

We both looked at her.

“The money. It just dropped. Into the account.”

Pat made a sound I had never heard her make before. Something between a gasp and a laugh. She covered her mouth with both hands.

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hapter 19

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I excused myself from the meeting.

“Seraphine is in my lobby,” he said when I picked up. “She has been here since this morning and she is refusing to leave. Would you like to come and irritate her a little?”

I looked back through the glass panel at my team, still talking, still planning, still flying.

“With all pleasure,” I said.

P

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