Chapter 164 Small Steps
Chapter 164 Small Steps
Gen's POV
The elevator doors opened onto the twenty-third floor with a soft chime, and I stepped back into the familiar hum of the Sterling Finance division.
I had forgotten, in the week I'd been away, how the air smelled here — dry, climate-controlled, a blend of printer toner and recycled cold air that I had once found oppressive but now recognized as something close to normal.
Emma was at the coffee station near the entrance, still in her coat, struggling with a pod she'd shoved in crooked. She looked up the moment she heard the elevator.
"Gen." Her face opened with uncomplicated relief. "Where did you go? You answered a call and then just — vanished. I thought something happened."
"Something came up," I said, keeping my voice steady. "A personal matter. I'm sorry I didn't explain."
Kevin, walking past with a stack of folders, paused and offered a small nod. "Glad you're back. We were short a brain at Monday's prep."
I thanked them both and walked toward my workstation. The exchange lasted less than two minutes — light, procedural, entirely unaware — and as I moved through the floor I became conscious of a quiet relief settling through my chest.
They didn't know. Nobody except Freya knew about my mother, and the department had simply filed my absence under the broad, unasked category of personal emergencies and moved on.
There was mercy in that.
I set my bag down and pulled out my chair, and that was when I saw them.
A small bouquet of white calla lilies sat at the corner of my desk, stems wrapped in brown paper, tied with a single ribbon. Beside them, anchored by the edge of my keyboard, was a square of notepaper in Freya's angular handwriting:
Life has its valleys. But growth finds a way through. My condolences.
I stood very still for a moment. I read it twice, set it down carefully, and sat. For a long while I just looked at the flowers. The lilies were white and cool and quietly present, and that was enough.
I pressed two fingers briefly to my lips and breathed out slow through my nose, and the sting behind my eyes receded before it could become anything more.
---
By ten o'clock, the core competition team had gathered in the smaller conference room. Six analysts, a data associate, and Freya at the head of the table. The session ran two and a half hours — dense and circling and occasionally brilliant, one argument pulling loose another before anyone had finished making their first point.
The result, I discovered when we spread our materials on the table, was that my analysis was the furthest along.
I participated without drawing attention to the fact — redirected questions, offered two structural corrections to Kevin's sector breakdown, spent the last forty minutes in a disagreement with the data associate that turned out to be more productive than either of us expected.
When Freya finally called the session, I leaned back and thought, in a way that felt almost disconnected from myself: It's been a week. It has also been a very long time.
---
Noon came and the department emptied toward the elevators. Emma leaned past the partition and invited me to try the France place on the ground floor.
"I'll stay up," I said. "Things to catch up on."
I waited until the floor was quiet, then unwrapped the sandwich I'd brought from home and took a bite without tasting it. The offices settled into a particular kind of silence — vacated workstations, paused screens — and I had expected to find it neutral. I was accustomed to silence.
But the bite of sandwich sat heavy, and I found myself looking at the empty chair across from me without meaning to.
It was a specific thing, what I felt. Not grief exactly. I was aware that for the past seven days I hadn't once eaten a meal without Ryker somewhere in the same room. I had woken to the sound of him making coffee.
The quiet hadn't been loneliness because it had been temporarily, completely, solved — and I had let myself be solved by it without noticing until now.
I set the sandwich down and picked up my phone.
I typed before I could think about it too carefully: Are you at the office? Can I come up?
I looked at it. I knew what it meant — that I was reaching first, that I had crossed some internal threshold without formally deciding to. Six months ago I would have waited, deflected, found a reason not to.
I sent it anyway.
The response came back in under a minute.
Always. Come.
I was already standing.
---
The elevator to the top floor moved slowly, or seemed to. I watched the numbers climb and thought about the week. The way he had stayed, simply and without fanfare. The way he hadn't filled the silence with anything that would require me to perform gratitude. The way I had fallen asleep on his shoulder on the third night and woken to find he hadn't moved.
I was afraid of needing this. I was also, I admitted, already past the point where the fear was sufficient reason to stop.
The doors opened.
His office occupied the full south-facing corner. In the mid-afternoon light the city stretched clean and bright through the floor-to-ceiling glass, Oakhaven's skyline arranged like something ordered and permanent. Ryker was standing at the window with his back to me. He turned when he heard me, said nothing, and simply held out one hand.
I crossed the room without hesitating.
He drew me down to the sofa and settled beside me, and then pulled me in until I was leaning fully against his chest, my cheek against the warm fabric above his heartbeat. His arm settled around my shoulders.
I closed my eyes.
His heartbeat was steady and slow and entirely unafraid. I breathed in once, then again, and something that had been clenched for seven days began, carefully, to loosen.
We sat without speaking for a while.
"There's a gathering tonight," he said eventually, his voice low. "Some friends. Nothing formal. Would you like to come with me?"
I considered it for perhaps half a second — and surprised myself with my own answer.
"I'd like that." I shifted slightly against him. "I need to be around people. Around you."
I felt him exhale, a quiet release through his chest.
"I'll wait for you. Take your time with work."
---
By six-fifteen, the floor had largely cleared. I saved the last of my files, closed the program, and sat for a moment in the glow of the dark screen. Outside the windows, the sky had deepened to a blue-gray that sat somewhere between afternoon and evening.
I thought about what I'd told him. I need to be around people. Around you. A month ago I wouldn't have said that out loud to anyone. A month ago I had been very carefully maintaining the fiction that I needed nothing and no one.
I retrieved my coat from the back of my chair. Shrugged it on. Picked up my bag.
The calla lilies were still holding. I tucked Freya's notecard into my inside pocket and stood there for a moment, looking at the quiet desk, the dark monitor, the ordinary small geography of a day I had survived.
Then I breathed in, breathed out, and took the elevator upstairs.
---
We arrived at the club at half past seven.
It occupied a low-profile building in the eastern quarter — no signage visible from the street, just dark glass and a single attendant who recognized Ryker before we reached the door. Inside, the space opened into something warm and unhurried: low lighting, dark wood, the kind of room that had been designed to make noise feel like conversation rather than intrusion. The crowd was small and clearly familiar with each other.
Ryker's hand settled at the small of my back the moment we stepped inside — a light, steady pressure that said I'm here without making a performance of it. I felt my shoulders drop half an inch.
I was still getting my bearings when a voice cut through from somewhere to our left, bright and carrying.
"Mr. Sterling." The voice came from our left, pleasant and unhurried. "I wasn't sure you'd actually show."