"This," I say, pulling a worn paperback from the shelf, "changed how I think about leadership."
She takes it from my hands, our fingers brushing in a way that sends heat straight up my arm.Undaunted CouragebyStephen Ambrose. She turns it over, studying the back cover with the same careful attention she gives everything else.
"Lewis and Clark," she says. "Not what I expected from a hockey player."
"What did you expect?The Art of War?"
Her laugh is soft, genuine. "Maybe something with more hitting."
"There's plenty of conflict. It's just... different." I lean against the shelf, watching her flip through pages marked with years of reading. "Lewis is leading men into completely unmapped territory. Making life-or-death decisions with incomplete information. Keeping everyone alive and moving forward when he's probably terrified."
Her fingers still on the pages. "Sounds familiar."
"That's what wearing the 'A' feels like most days. You're making calls that affect people you care about, and you won't know if you were right until it's too late to change course." The honesty slips out easier than expected. Something about this corner, her attention, makes it feel safe to be seen.
She looks up, and I catch something shift in her expression—recognition, maybe, or understanding.
"The responsibility must be crushing sometimes."
"Sometimes." I study her face, noting the way she holds herself even here, even in this safe space. "What about you? What shaped how you think about leadership?"
"That's assuming I read about leadership instead of just marketing metrics."
"Sloane. I've seen your office. You have more leadership books than Harvard Business School."
Her smile turns wry. "Guilty. I think...Hidden Figures. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson." She slides the book back onto the shelf with deliberate care. "They didn't just break barriers—they made themselves indispensable first. Proved their worth so completely that discrimination became an obvious inefficiency."
"Strategic brilliance."
"Survival," she corrects, and there's steel beneath the soft words. "They couldn't just be good. They had to be perfect. Every day. One mistake would become evidence that women didn't belong in mathematics."
The weight of it hits me like an unexpected check. Of course. The pressure she lives under, the perfection she maintains—it's not paranoia. It's pattern recognition, learned from generations of women who paid the price for being human in spaces that demanded they be flawless.
"That's exhausting," I say quietly.
"That's reality." She touches the spine of another book, not meeting my eyes. "Sorry. You probably didn't bring me here for a lecture on workplace dynamics."
"I brought you here to get to know you," I say, stepping closer. "The real you. Not the version of Sloane who has to be perfect all the time. Not Easton's sister. Just... Sloane."
The words hang between us like a bridge. She looks up, and I see her weighing the invitation, calculating the risk of letting me see her without her armor.
"That's a dangerous proposition," she says softly.
"The best ones usually are."
Something shifts in the air between us.
The bridge, once built, holds. For the next hour, the conversation flows, easy and unguarded. I learn about the summer she spent trying to build a treehouse and the terrible poetry she wrote in high school. I watch the brilliant, guarded woman I know recede, replaced by a woman with a quicklaugh, and we forget we're supposed to be hiding. We get lost in the simple act of finally, truly seeing each other.
Her phone buzzes, sharp and insistent in the quiet.
She glances at the screen and sighs. "Sorry. Brynn. She's... persistent when she needs advice."
"Take it."
She offers an apologetic smile and answers. "Brynn, please tell me you're not calling to complain about your assignment again."
I can't hear the other end, but I watch Sloane's expression cycle through fondness, exasperation, and concern.
