The black screen of my phone stared back at me like an open wound, the faint glow illuminating the trembling of my fingers.

“Come alone if you want to learn why Daniel married you.”

The words repeated inside my skull until they became a deafening roar, drowning out the ambient hum of the city traffic fourteen stories below. I sat on the edge of the sprawling king-sized bed, the 1000-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets feeling like jagged ice against my bare skin. For the past six months, my mind had been a fractured, distorted mirror. I was forgetting crucial board meetings, misplacing vital multi-million dollar contracts, and snapping at my executive team for no discernible reason. The whispers had started in the breakrooms and echoed all the way up to the C-suite. Emily is cracking under the pressure. Emily isn’t her grandfather.