Her Assistant Can Have Her

At a gilded engagement party three years in the making, Harry Beaumont watches his fiancée Madeline's personal aide, Dominic, humiliate him before New York's social elite. Dominic slides a supplemental prenuptial agreement across the table and demands Harry sign, while Madeline, glassy-eyed and swaying, sides with the man who has been her right hand since childhood. Harry has waited five years, enduring long-distance calls, empty promises and countless small cruelties at Dominic's hands.

When Harry crumples the agreement and throws it in Dominic's face, then strikes him, Madeline draws a pistol and orders an apology. Harry answers by recalling the warehouse where he took eight stab wounds for them, and the drink laced with mango nectar that stopped his heart. Dominic turns the gun on himself, then drives a steak knife through his own palm, and Madeline blames Harry for the blood.

As the ballroom watches, she hurls a crystal wine glass at his head and threatens to ruin him unless he apologizes.