Chapter 144 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 27

Chapter 144 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 27
VIVIENNE

The thing about working with someone competent is that it removes all your excuses.
Daniel Osei is good at his job. I've made my peace with that. He shows up on time, he reads everything before he comes in so we're not starting from scratch every session, he catches things I've already caught and confirms them without making it a competition, and he does not once attempt to explain my own report to me. Which, honestly, is a bar so low it's practically underground, but I've had enough experiences with men who trip over it to know it's worth noting.
So we work. Every morning, nine to noon, conference room B, my report between us like a very long legal prenup neither of us is emotionally attached to. He asks good questions. I give good answers. We make clean, efficient progress and the whole thing is perfectly fine and completely soulless.
And the problem, which I'm going to go ahead and name because I've been tiptoeing around it for a week, is that I miss the fighting and the banter.

Not the actual fighting. Not the part where someone was wrong and I had to explain why at length with color-coded documentation. But I really miss disagreeing with Cole. The way he'd push back and actually mean it, not just to be difficult but because he'd thought about it and reached a different conclusion and wanted to see if I could change his mind. The way a session would end with both of us slightly sharper than when we'd walked in, my brain humming, my blood moving. There's a kind of aliveness in being properly argued with by someone who takes you seriously, and Daniel Osei does not do that. Daniel Osei agrees with me quite a lot, and the things he doesn't agree with he flags with a polite question that resolves in about four minutes of calm, reasonable discussion.
It's deeply, profoundly boring. And I feel insane for thinking that. I spent the first month of this engagement white-knuckling through every session with Cole like I was defusing a bomb, and now I'm sitting here in conference room B missing the bomb. Missing the way his jaw tightened when I had him cornered on a point. Missing the way he'd lean back in his chair when he knew he was right and just wait for me to catch up. Missing the spark of something dangerous and electric that lived underneath every professional sentence we exchanged.
I don't say this out loud. I'm not that far gone.
The report itself is nearly done. Two more sections, the final recommendations and the risk summary, and then a clean read-through before it goes to the managing partner for review. A week, maybe ten days. Then it's filed, it's done, Daniel's name sits below mine, and the whole engagement closes out and the professional reason any of this is complicated goes away.
And it’s like and then what?
That's the part I haven't let myself think about for longer than about thirty seconds at a time, because thirty seconds is where it starts getting unwieldy. Then what is a question with more variables than I'm prepared to sit with right now, so I've been stacking work on top of it every morning like insulation and telling myself it's discipline when honestly it's just avoidance.
Tuesday evening I stayed at the office until eight working on the risk summary. Not because I needed to. I mean I needed to, but I could have taken it home. I stayed because the office has a particular quality after everyone else leaves, quiet without being empty, and I work better in it than I do in my apartment right now, where every room is slightly too still and my kitchen still has the good coffee he brought over three weeks ago sitting on the second shelf because I can't decide whether throwing it out is dramatic or just practical.
I ordered food at seven, ate half of it, kept working. Made a note on page forty-two. Made another one. Went back to page thirty-eight because something wasn't sitting right. The office was very quiet and I was very tired in a way that sleep wasn't fixing and I was doing fine, I was working, I was absolutely not sitting in an empty office at eight in the evening because being here felt less lonely than being home.
My door opened at eight-seventeen.
I looked up with the face I make for late-arriving colleagues, the one that says I'm working, what is it, alas it was not a colleague per say.
It was Jordan.
Jordan, in a leather jacket and a very relaxed expression, holding a brown paper bag from somewhere that smelled significantly better than the sad takeout I'd ordered an hour ago. He looked around my office with the unhurried assessment of someone visiting a mildly concerning zoo exhibit.
"How'd you get past reception," I said.
"I told them I was your cousin."
"Haha, very funny Jordan." I deadpanned
He set the bag on the edge of my desk and sat down in my guest chair without being invited, which apparently just happened now. "You look like you haven't eaten."
"I ate."
"What did you eat."
"Food."
"What kind of food."
"Jordan."
"Because you have a container over there that looks like it's been moved around your desk without actually being opened, and Cole said you've been in the building until eight every night this week, so."
I put my pen down. "What do you mean Cole said..."
"Cole sent me." He said it easily, not like a confession, more like a simple fact he wasn't planning to hide. "Before you get weird about it, he didn't say anything about the situation, he just said you've been staying late and he wanted to make sure someone made sure you were eating, because apparently he's in the guilt-spiral phase of this whole thing and making sure you have dinner is the only thing he can currently do that doesn't overstep."
I looked at the paper bag.
"He picked the restaurant," Jordan added. "He remembered you mentioned it once apparently. The Thai place on the second block." A pause. "I don't know why I told you that. Probably wasn't supposed to."
"Probably not."
He shrugged, completely unrepentant. "You going to eat or should we sit here performing this standoff a while longer."
I looked at the bag. Then at Jordan, who had pulled out his phone and started scrolling with the air of a man who was going to be here whether I engaged with him or not. The office was still very quiet. It was eight-seventeen on a Tuesday and somebody who was not supposed to be doing things on my behalf had sent someone who was actually pretty good company, and the food smelled genuinely great, and I was so tired of eating alone.
"What did he order," I said.
Jordan smiled. Not the teasing one. Something quieter. "The noodles," he said. "And the dumplings."
I stared at him.
He already knew about the dumplings. Which meant Cole knew about the dumplings. Which meant Maya or Priya had told him, or he'd just known, the way he sometimes just knew things about me without me telling him, that infuriating attentiveness of his that I'd spent these couple of months trying to explain away as professionalism before I ran out of ways to make that argument.
I reached for the bag. I didn't say anything else about it. Jordan didn't either. He scrolled his phone while I opened containers, and it was a very small gesture from someone who wasn't even allowed to make gestures right now, but it’s really sweet, my defences are melting and I was absolutely not going to cry about it.
I ate the dumplings first.