The leak came like winter. A photographer had captured a private moment—Adrian and Mei leaving a hotel together—then sold the images to a tabloid hungry for humiliation. The board called. Hannah Wu posted a sardonic comment, as if news of their marriage were a clever joke. The shareholders called for distance. Victor Hsu asked pointed questions in meetings like a man who tasted the world with the intent to swallow its better parts.
Mei stayed at her desk and began to shrink. She felt the office press against her; whispers tightened into dangerous ropes. She watched coworkers' eyes flick to her wedding band as though seeing it for the first time. The rumor turned into a blade when an old rumor escalated—someone suggested the heiress was a plant, that Mei, who had the right face and wrong name, had been bought by the family to settle an old score.
"Prove it," Victor said to the board as if he were challenging the weather.
At a board meeting called to address the scandal, Adrian's suit could not hold the pressure. Eleanor insisted on public control. Adrian batted away her attempts as if swatting an insect. When the board's questions turned toward Mei's past—when they hinted she could be a fabricated asset or worse, a liability—Adrian did something clumsy and human.
"You—" he started, and before he could think, before the logic of restraint overrode the animal part of him, he struck.
The slap landed against Mei's cheek with a sound that rang in the marble room. Guests inhaled as if someone had pressed pause. Time fractured into the worst kind of optics. Mei's head turned; her hand flew to her face as if to check whether reality had gone tenderly, disastrously wrong.
Adrian's hand trembled as if in disbelief. He had meant to pull her back, not humiliate her. He had not meant to do that. He had never done anything like that before.
"Adrian—" Eleanor began, fury and scandal braided into her tone.
Mei stood. The room watched as if anticipating fireworks or autopsy. She did the only thing she could: she rose, voice controlled and small as a glass bell.
"I resign," she said.
There was nothing cinematic in it—no dramatic fall, no swooning. She walked out with the dignity of a woman who had learned the language of survival in a different dialect.
Outside, the rain had begun.
Cliffhanger: A tabloid prints a close-up of the slap with a headline that will not only humiliate but endanger them both.