Chapter 147 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 30

Chapter 147 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 30
VIVIENNE

The report went in at 4:17 on a Thursday afternoon.
I watched the email send and then sat there staring at the screen like something was supposed to happen. Confetti. A marching band. The building's fire alarm going off in celebration. Instead I got a confirmation email and the quiet click of Daniel's laptop closing, which was somehow both deeply anticlimactic and exactly right for the kind of work we did.
"Good work," he said.
From Daniel that actually meant something, and I'd learned that about him over three weeks. He wasn't generous with praise but he also wasn't cheap with it, so "good work" meant good work, not you didn't actively make this worse or I'm saying this because someone told me I should be more encouraging. He shook my hand and said he'd be in touch if the review committee came back with anything, and then he picked up his bag and was gone in under three minutes, which I respected because the man had a life and he didn't pretend otherwise.
And then the room was just mine.
Shola had left an hour earlier once we'd gotten through the final edits, and the associates had trickled out after that. The conference room had that particular late-afternoon feeling, like a space that had been lived in hard for a while and was now just a table and some chairs and the ghost of about forty thousand printed pages. I didn't pack up right away. Just sat there for a bit and let it sink in.
Ten weeks. Eleven if you counted the prep work before I first set foot in this building. I remembered that first morning, couldn't find the elevator for ten minutes, sat in a conference room arranging color-coded folders while someone else's executive assistant watched me like I might pocket the nice pens. And tonight I'd left with a signed report and a complete picture of two years of operational negligence, Daniel's name below mine at the bottom.
I packed up slowly, put the folders in my bag in order, and took one last look at the thirty-first floor view, which was genuinely excellent, the kind of view you pay for in ways that aren't money. I'd been professionally irritated in front of it approximately forty times and I was going to miss it in a way I hadn't expected.
I didn't let myself think about what else I was going to miss. Not yet. Not while I was still in the building.
The drive home usually takes twenty-two minutes. I know this because I am someone who times things and then feels mildly satisfied when the timings hold up. I got about six minutes in before my brain did what it had been trying to do for four days and I just stopped fighting it.
Cole had said something, weeks ago, the evening after the board meeting. We'd been in the hallway outside the conference room, everyone else gone, both of us pretending we weren't lingering on purpose. He'd said it almost offhand, like it wasn't the most careful thing anyone had said to me in years.
"I'm not asking you to be ready. I'm just still here."
I filed that away at the time under things I wasn't going to examine until the audit was done, and the audit was done now, and I'd been turning it over for four days without meaning to. In the shower. In the car. While Shola talked about something else entirely and I nodded along while my brain kept going back to that sentence like a tongue on a sore tooth. The thing about it was that he'd actually meant it, not in the way people say things like that and then check their watch twice in the next ten minutes. He'd meant it in the way he meant most things, quietly and without requiring acknowledgment, and he'd gone and done exactly that. He waited. He stayed within the lines I'd drawn without complaining about them. Sent Jordan over with dumplings instead of showing up himself. He'd been so careful with the space I'd asked for that it had started to feel less like distance and more like someone standing just outside a door with his hand not quite on the handle, waiting to see if it opened from the inside.
Patient. The most patient thing a man had ever done for me, or the most painful, and I'd spent weeks trying to figure out which one it was. Tonight, with the report filed and the audit done and nothing professional standing between us anymore, I didn't care which one it was. Both probably. Both at once. Fine.
I was not going home. I knew it before I'd fully decided, the way you know the coffee is going to be too hot and drink it anyway. I wasn't going back to my apartment to sit with my own thoughts and my good judgment. I was going to his building. Park the car. Walk up. Say whatever came out when he opened the door, because I was done being careful about something I'd already made up my mind about on a sidewalk three weeks ago when I found a sticky note that said don't be an idiot and kept it.
Which, depending on how the next half hour went, might prove to be either deeply romantic or spectacularly ironic.
I laughed to myself.
"You've questioned hostile board members," I said to the windscreen. "You've survived opposing counsel who thought interrupting people counted as strategy. One man actually tried convincing you to soften an audit finding over dinner."
He'd called it networking.
I'd called it inappropriate.
Silently.
Because professionalism.
"This is one door," I continued. "You knock. He answers. You say words."
Simple.
In theory.
My stomach disagreed.
By the time I pulled into the visitor's car park outside Cole's building, I had rehearsed at least seven different opening lines.
Every single one sounded ridiculous.
I switched off the engine and rested both hands on the steering wheel.
I took one last look in the rear-view mirror.
My hair was behaving.
More or less.
There was a tiny piece sticking up near my temple that had escaped whatever agreement the rest of it had made, so I flattened it down with my palm. It sprang right back up.
"Fine," I muttered. "Win."
His front door opened and I immediately turned my head to the entrance.
A woman came out first, tall and genuinely stunning, the kind of beautiful that registers before you've fully processed it, wearing something that probably cost more than my monthly rent and wearing it like she didn't know and didn't care. She was laughing at something over her shoulder, head tipped back, easy and lit up from the inside, and then Cole came out behind her.
His hand went to the small of her back. Brief and familiar, the automatic gesture of someone who'd done it a hundred times and didn't think about it anymore. She said something I couldn't hear from here and he smiled, the real one, the full one, the one I'd seen maybe twice in a conference room and a hundred times in the dark.
He walked her to the passenger side and opened the door. She got in. He got in the driver's side. The car pulled out of the spot and swung toward the exit and drove directly past where I was parked.
He didn't look left. He didn't see me.
I sat in the visitor's lot with my hand still on the door handle and watched his taillights until they turned the corner and were gone.
Right. Okay then.
I sat there for probably three minutes, though it felt much longer, going through a whole tour of feelings I hadn't agreed to. Annoyance first because that was the easiest one, who was she and why was she coming out of his flat laughing like that. Then disbelief because apparently I'd been reading this completely wrong. Then something slower and heavier that I refused to name while I was still sitting in a parking lot. Finally a flat exhausted resignation that settled like sediment at the bottom of everything else.
I put my seatbelt back on and started the car.
The drive home took twenty-two minutes and I spent it doing this thing I'm not proud of, building the argument for why this was fine actually, maybe even good. We were very different people with very different lives. The professional overlap was always going to be complicated. He was clearly not sitting at home eating sad desk lunches over me so there you go, case made, moving on.
I knew it wasn't true. I knew it the way you know things you're telling yourself specifically to get through the next twenty-two minutes. The version of me who'd kept a sticky note in her desk drawer for three weeks knew it wasn't true. The version of me who'd driven to his building on instinct the second the professional reason not to evaporated knew it wasn't true.
But I got home anyway and made tea and sat down on my sofa with my coat still on and the mug in both hands and the television off and the apartment very quiet.
I was fine. Absolutely fine and totally fine and nothing that had just happened was going to be something I'd have to deal with because it was probably nothing and definitely fine.
The tea went cold.