Chapter 9 - The Board Dinner He Never Wanted Me to Attend
A week after the bakery, Dante invited me to his townhouse for dinner. Not a date. Not a seduction. Just dinner, Victor present for the first hour, documents stacked at one end of the table, and a nurse practitioner Dante had quietly asked to vet a prenatal specialist for me because the hospital waitlists were miserable.
It should have felt transactional.
Instead, it felt careful.
After Victor left, Dante poured water and asked, “Why did Derek say he could never bring you to a board dinner?”
I frowned. “Because he was cruel?”
“Yes,” Dante said. “But cruelty usually sits on top of a logic.”
The question stayed with me.
Later that night, while rereading old emails, I found three clues I had dismissed years ago.
First, Derek had repeatedly discouraged me from attending early client dinners, saying finance conversations would bore me.
Second, when Channing Capital was first written up in a trade magazine, he insisted on cropping me out of the launch-party photos before posting them.
Third, after his first institutional round closed, he told me—with an edge I never forgot—that “certain people don’t need to know every detail of where things began.”
At the time, I thought he was ashamed of our years together because they looked less glamorous than his new life.
Now I saw another possibility.
He wasn’t just embarrassed by me.
He was keeping me away from rooms where someone might ask how the company started, who the early money came from, or why the woman at his side sounded familiar to the cap table.
The next morning, Nora called with an update.
A former accountant from Derek’s early years had agreed to talk.
“He remembers your note,” she said. “And he remembers Derek saying it had to stay quiet until ‘the structure got cleaned up.’”
The room around me seemed to narrow.
What Dante had asked over dinner suddenly made perfect sense.
Derek didn’t exclude me from important rooms because I was unpolished.
May you like
He excluded me because I was evidence.
And that realization led directly into the twist waiting in Part 10.
