“I should let you go,” Astoria said.
“Okay.”
Neither of them hung up.
“Miller,” Astoria said, her voice quieter. “Thank you for telling me the truth.”
“I’m tired of not telling it.”
She let out a soft exhale that could’ve been a laugh. “Yeah. Me too.”
“Goodnight, Astoria.”
“Goodnight.”
The line went dead. Miller stood in her kitchen, phone pressed against her chest, and let herself feel the full weight of what had just happened. Tomorrow night, they’d meet at 7 p.m. at The Meridian, sit across from each other, and decide what happened next.
The smart thing—the safe thing—would be to walk away. To take the recusal as a clean break, to rebuild her professional reputation, to pretend the kiss in the library was a one-time lapse in judgment that would never happen again.
But Miller already knew she wasn’t going to do that.
She’d spent her entire life not really knowing what she wanted. She’d played it safe—in her lukewarm relationships with men, in her respectable career, in her life that looked right from the outside but felt hollow on the inside.
Astoria made her feel somethingreal. Terrifying and reckless and probably stupid, but real. And there was no way she was going to give that up.
14
Chapter 14: Astoria
The Meridian was the kind of hotel that understood discretion and upscale enough that the staff were trained to forget faces, and Astoria had chosen it for exactly that reason.
The bar occupied a corner of the lobby, all amber lighting and leather chairs and the quiet clink of expensive glasses. The sort of place where people came to have conversations they didn't want overheard.
She arrived twenty minutes early and took a table in the back corner, angled so she could see the entrance. The bartender brought her a gin and tonic without being asked—she must have looked like she needed one—and she wrapped her fingers around the glass without lifting it. The ice shifted and settled. She didn't drink it, though.
“The conflict is you.”
Miller’s voice had been so steady on the phone. Astoria had replayed those four words a hundred times since last night, turning them over like stones in her palm, looking for the catch.There had to be a catch. People didn't sacrifice their careers for someone they'd kissed once in a library three weeks ago.
Except Miller had. She'd walked into her boss's office and recused herself from a high-profile case, torpedoed her career, and when Astoria asked why, she'd saidyoulike it was the simplest thing in the world.
Astoria checked her watch. 6:54 p.m. Six minutes until Miller walked through that door and they had to decide what happened next.
She knew what she wanted to happen. That was the problem. She'd known since the library, since Miller's hands were tangled in her hair and the desperate sound she'd made against Astoria's mouth. She'd known and she'd spent three weeks trying to unknow it by burying herself in work and depositions, but sleepless nights were when her mind wandered back to the taste of Miller's lips no matter how hard she tried to redirect it.
Three weeks of pretending the kiss was a mistake and maintaining the fiction that they could go back to before, but they couldn’t go back. Astoria had known that the moment Miller pulled away in the library, teary-eyed. Some lines, once crossed, stayed crossed.
The question was whether they were going to cross anymoreof them.
It was 6:58 p.m. Astoria smoothed the front of her silk blouse—navy, simple, nothing that tried too hard—and resisted the urge to check her reflection in the dark window. She was forty-six years old. She'd built a company from nothing, stared down hostile boards and predatory investors, and survived fifteen years married to a woman who'd made an art form of making her feel small. She didn't get nervous.
Yet she was nervous.
The lobby doors opened at exactly 7 p.m., and Miller walked in. Astoria’s breath did something complicated in her chest.Miller was wearing a simple wrap dress in deep green, her hair down around her shoulders instead of pulled back, and she moved through the lobby with the kind of quiet confidence that made people look twice without quite knowing why. Her eyes scanned the room, found Astoria in the corner, and held.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Miller crossed the bar, weaving between tables, and slid into the chair across from Astoria. Up close, she looked as unsettled as Astoria felt. There was a slight tension around her eyes and her hands weren’t quite steady as she set down her purse.
