I freeze. I know that vibration. It’s not a text. It’s a call.
I pull the phone from my jacket pocket. The screen lights up, the name glaring at me in crisp, white letters: Arthur Keane.
My thumb hovers over the decline button.Ignore it,I beg myself.
Bzzzt.
But the logic, the cold, hard logic drilled into my cortex for seven years, kicks in. If Arthur is calling at 3:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, something is on fire. If I ignore it, the fire spreads. If the fire spreads, the partnership is at risk.
“Just a minute,” I whisper to the empty chair across from me. “I’ll handle it, and then I’ll be one hundred percent yours.”
I slide my thumb across the screen and step out of the coffee shop, into the biting February wind.
“The structural engineer in Dubai just flagged the cantilever on the north tower. He says the load-bearing capacity is off by point-zero-five percent. If we don’t approve the redesign in the next hour, we miss the fabrication window.”
My stomach drops. The Silver Tower. My masterpiece.
“That’s impossible,” I snap, pacing on the sidewalk. “I checked those specs myself. The tension cables handle the excess load.”
“He says the wind calculations were based on the old model. Ross, I need you to walk him through it. Now. He’s on the other line.”
I glance through the window of the coffee shop. The table is empty. The oat milk latte steams gently.
“Arthur, I can’t. Margot is coming.”
“Margot can wait fifteen minutes,” he says, his voice dropping to that cold, reasonable tone he uses to dismantle my life. “Thisis a hundred-million-dollar structure. Do you want it to collapse because you were drinking coffee?”
2:58 p.m.
“Patch him through,” I say, closing my eyes. “But I only have two minutes. Not a second more.”
It is never two minutes.
I pace the sidewalk, phone pressed to my ear, hand chopping the air as I argue about tensile strength and wind resistance. I get lost in the numbers. The world narrows to the architecture, to the problem, to the solution.
I am brilliant. I am essential. I am fixing the unfixable.
“Fine,” the engineer finally concedes. “We’ll run the new numbers. Good catch, Calder.”
“Get it done,” I say, breathless, triumphant.
I hang up to the rush of the win, the adrenaline of a save.
Then I notice the time.
3:22 p.m.
Blood drains from my face. “No.”
I spin around and push through the heavy glass door of the coffee shop. The bell chimes, a cheerful, mocking sound.
I scan the room.
The table by the window is empty.
The latte I ordered is still there, the foam settled and cold. But next to it, there is a napkin.
I walk over, my legs feeling heavy, like I’m wading through wet concrete.
