Lawrence's gaze turned ice-cold.
"Since when do you care so much about her?"
The moment those words dropped, the entire room went dead silent.
Harrison's fingers tightened around his glass.
Since when?
He couldn't even say for sure.
Maybe it was seven years ago at that medical innovation pitch.
Back then, Wren hadn't married Lawrence yet.
She stood on stage in a simple white blouse, pitching her cardiac assist model to a room full of skeptical investors and experts.
She looked too young.
So young that half the crowd barely took her seriously.
But ten minutes into her presentation, every whisper of doubt died down.
Lawrence had been there that day, too.
He was sitting dead center at the judges' table, looking completely unbothered, barely paying attention.
When Wren finished, someone in the audience threw out a brutally tricky question just to trip her up.
She didn't panic.
She actually smiled, dismantling the flaws in their question point by point.
Harrison had been sitting right next to Lawrence.
He remembered it perfectly.
In that moment, Wren's eyes were practically blazing.
She wasn't trying to suck up to anyone.
She wasn't trying to prove a point.
She just stood there, utterly convinced of the value of what she had built.
After the pitch wrapped up, Wren stepped off the stage.
People swarmed her to swap business cards.
She handled them politely, but her eyes kept drifting back to Lawrence.
Harrison saw it right then.
She was completely head over heels for Lawrence.
It was such a pure, radiant kind of affection.
So radiant that Harrison felt like an absolute creep for even looking at her twice.
So for years, he kept his distance.
He called her his friend's wife.
He kept polite boundaries at all the Langford gatherings.
He watched her slowly morph from that fiery girl on stage into the silent, suffocated Mrs. Langford.
It wasn't that he didn't think it was a tragic waste.


VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABEL
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Sign the Papers Mr. Langford