Adjusted schedule attached.
That’s it.
Later, through the glass, I see people moving again. The floor resumes its rhythm. The crisis is being absorbed, compartmentalized, reduced to process.
I sit at my desk and open my laptop.
I don’t work.
What I think about—unhelpfully, relentlessly—is how she must have walked into her own Monday.
How untouched she likely was.
How composed.
How the world protected her better than I did.
I don’t try to contact her.
That privilege is gone.
I keep my door closed the rest of the day.
Not to hide.
To contain.
Because for the first time, I understand something with brutal clarity:
The board can impose consequences.
The company can survive me.
But the person I hurt owes me nothing.
And if I ever want to earn even the right to speak to her again, it won’t be through control.
It will be through truth.
Even if it costs me everything else.
Chapter Thirty-Two
DEREK
I don’t go outto Jamie’s desk.
Not because I can’t.
Because I don’t trust myself not to make it look like work—or her to make a scene.
Her desk sits in the open by the elevator—public, visible, a place where anything said becomes a rumor before it becomes a sentence. I won’t give the floor that.
So I pick up the phone and press her extension.
“Jamie,” I say when she answers. “Can you come into my office.”
There’s a pause—brief, precise.
