In early pitch decks, before the scandal headlines, he saw Lena with hair longer, shoulders confident, gaze bright with that particular fire only visionaries possessed. Except her name wasn’t Lena Gray. It was Elena Hartmann.
She wasn’t a waitress, as he had suspected. She was the architect of a multimillion-dollar company. The woman he’d seen wiping tables and avoiding attention had once led boardrooms with the kind of authority he’d always respected. The realization left him uneasy. Why would someone with that brilliance choose exile over reclaiming her legacy?