Chapter 146 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 29

Chapter 146 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 29
VIVIENNE

Maya showed up on a Saturday with two coffees and supposedly no agenda, which I knew was a lie the second she walked through my door looking too casual in the way people look too casual when they've decided in advance not to push.

"I'm not here to talk about it," she said, handing me a cup.

"Okay."

"I genuinely just wanted to see you."

"Okay, Maya."

"Dev thinks I should give you space but I think giving you space is just a polite way of leaving you alone with your own thoughts and that's never worked for you. You spiral. You've spiraled since you were twelve. Remember when you convinced yourself you had appendicitis because your side hurt and it turned out you just ate too much bread."

"That was one time."

"You wrote a will, Vivienne. A whole will. On notebook paper. You left me your earrings."

"They were good earrings."

She wasn't wrong about the spiraling. I have very loud thoughts and I've been alone with them for two weeks and the main thing they've been doing is running laps around the same four topics while I try to finish a report and pretend I'm sleeping. I let her in. She sat on my kitchen counter the way she always does, legs dangling, both hands around her cup, and we talked about nothing for a while. Really genuinely nothing. A podcast she'd been listening to that she'd already told me about twice but I didn't stop her because her voice was familiar and easy and I'd missed it. A situation with her coworker that had been going on for three weeks and had entered its absurdist third act, something about a stolen yogurt and an HR complaint that had gotten wildly out of hand. Normal stuff. Easy stuff. The kind of conversation I didn't realize I'd been starving for until I was halfway through it and my shoulders had dropped about three inches.

Priya came by later that afternoon. She did not call first. She simply appeared in my doorway with snacks from the place around the corner and a bottle of wine she'd clearly been saving for something, and Maya buzzed her up like they'd planned it, which they definitely had.

"This feels planned," I said, looking between them.

"We texted," Maya said.

"Of course you did."

"We were worried about you. You've been doing that thing where you answer texts with one word and pretend you're busy."

"I am busy. I'm finishing a report."

"You're hiding in your report. There's a difference." Priya set the wine on the counter and started opening cabinets looking for glasses like she lived here. "Also you only eat dumplings when you're sad and Daniel mentioned you had them three times last week."

"Daniel reports back to you?"

"Daniel is a good man and a good colleague and also he's terrified of me. I asked him how things were going and he said 'fine' and then I stared at him until he admitted you seemed a little off."

"Priya."

"I'm not apologizing. Someone has to monitor you. Maya can't do it alone, she has a job."

"I don't actually," Maya said. "I took the day off. I'm fully committed to this intervention."

"It's not an intervention."

"Uhhh… It's a little bit of an intervention."

They looked at each other. That look, the one that crosses the boundary between two people who don't know each other that well but have found common ground in managing me. I've seen it before. Usually right before someone says something I don't want to hear and then I have to sit there and hear it anyway.

But nobody said anything I didn't want to hear. That was the thing. Priya opened the wine and Maya put something stupid on TV, some reality show about people renovating houses and yelling at each other about tile, and nobody mentioned Cole or the audit or the co-signer letter or any of it. I sat there between two people who knew I wasn't fine and had collectively decided the kindest thing was to not make me pretend being fine for their benefit. Just sat there. Watching terrible television and eating crisps and letting myself be not fine in company, which is completely different from being not fine alone and I hadn't realized how much I'd needed that difference until right that moment.

Priya made a joke around eight, something about my filing system at the office and how Daniel had apparently asked her if the color-coding was load-bearing, like if you removed one of the tabs the whole structure would collapse. I laughed, properly laughed, the surprised kind that comes out before you've decided whether it should.

Then my eyes went hot.

Because the color-coding thing. Cole had said the same thing back in week two, standing in my office while I arranged folders and he watched me with this expression on his face like he was witnessing something he found both baffling and genuinely charming.

The memory arrived without warning, the way the sharpest ones do, and I had to take a very large sip of wine and find something extremely interesting to look at on the television screen. Priya noticed. Of course she noticed. She just topped up my glass and moved on with the story and I loved her for it so much I could have said so out loud, but I didn't because I have a reputation to maintain.

Maya fell asleep on my couch at ten-thirty, which is a habit she’s been doing occasionally since she was twenty-two and has never once apologized for. Priya stayed until midnight, helping me finish the wine and telling me a long rambling story about her mother's new boyfriend that made me laugh until my stomach hurt, and then she let herself out quietly. I sat in the dark for a while after she left, listening to Maya breathe and thinking about how lucky I was in the ways that actually mattered, the ones that didn't require a man or an audit or anything I didn't already have.

That thought lasted about six minutes before my brain went back to Cole.

Fine. Whatever. I'm not going to fight it tonight.

The folder arrived Monday morning. Physical copies from the last outstanding document request, sent over through Marcus with a covering note about the Q4 backup records. I went through it at my desk with coffee and a patience I'd had to actively construct, pulling out the sheets I needed I got to work.

Forty minutes in I pulled out a page and a sticky note came with it, attached to the back of one of the sheets, clearly never meant to end up in the folder at all. Cole's handwriting, which I had learned over three months of session notes and margin comments was terrible in a very particular way, all forward lean with the letters slightly crowded together like they were in a hurry to get somewhere.

It said: Viv's right about the Brackenfield notation, check against the 2021 entity list before Thursday. Also, buy better pens. Also don't be an idiot.

I read it three times.

I put it down on my desk and just stared at it. A man who writes notes to himself in between figuring out corporate entity lists and apparently had to remind himself, at some point during all of this, to not be an idiot. Which was so deeply, recognizably him that something in my chest cracked open without asking permission first.

I thought about the gas station coffee and the way he'd just gotten me one without asking twice, no fanfare, no expectation of gratitude. I thought about the filing cabinets in his office and how he'd called it a temporary system with complete sincerity about something he'd clearly been living with for a year and a half and had no actual plans to fix. I thought about him on my front steps at ten-forty at night with no real reason and no excuse and no attempt to pretend he had either. I thought about the board meeting and him saying I trust Ms. Ashford's judgment like it cost him nothing to say that aloud in a room full of people who could have used it against him.

Here is the thing I've been not saying for about four weeks.

I'm utterly, hopelessly in love with Cole Westbrook.

Not the soft, cautious maybe version. Not the this is complicated and I'm still working it out version. Not the practically speaking there are feelings present version I'd been running through my head in increasingly elaborate packaging so I wouldn't have to actually look at the thing itself. The real version. The inconvenient, all-the-way, past the point of talking myself out of it version that had apparently been building since somewhere around week four, when he'd said you're right and handed me the win without needing credit for it, and I'd filed it under professional respect and looked the other way.

I'd been looking the other way for a while, it turns out. Weeks of it. Months, maybe. Since that first session when he'd said my name correctly and I'd been annoyed about it. Since the housewarming when he'd refilled my wine glass without being asked. Since the elevator when his hand had found my waist and I'd forgotten how to breathe. Since all of it, every single moment, stacking up quietly while I was busy pretending I wasn't paying attention.

The sticky note was still on my desk. His terrible handwriting going slightly uphill on the last line. I turned it over so I couldn't see it and then turned it back because that was dramatic and I'm not going to be dramatic about a sticky note like some lovesick teenager.

I'm in love with Cole Westbrook.

I picked up my pen and went back to page forty-four.

But I kept the sticky note. Folded it once and tucked it into the drawer where I keep the things I'm not ready to deal with yet but also not willing to throw away.