The Merger Nobody Asked For
The elevator doors slide open with a soft chime, and Ashley steps into the marble foyer of her parents' penthouse already rehearsing her exit line. Twenty minutes, tops. She has a real life waiting downtown—a stack of client contracts to review before Monday, a bottle of Malbec chilling in her fridge, a bath she's been fantasizing about since Thursday. Sunday dinner with the Smiths is supposed to be quick and painless: roast chicken, polite interrogation about her love life, her mother's passive-aggressive comments about her "little apartment," and out the door by eight.
Except the moment she rounds the corner into the dining room, she knows something is wrong.
Her father is standing by the window with a glass of scotch he hasn't touched, and that's the first red flag, because Richard Smith touches his scotch the way other men touch their phones—compulsively, constantly, like it's an extension of his hand. Her mother, Diane, sits at the table already, spine straight, napkin folded into a shape too precise to be casual, and she's wearing the smile she reserves for charity galas and awkward silences.
"There's my girl," Richard says, and his voice cracks slightly on *girl*, which…
