"I know you are." A pause. "Willow."
I turned back, one foot already on the sidewalk. "Yeah?"
"Thank you. For last night. The piano." He wasn't looking at me, eyes fixed on the steering wheel. "It's been a long time since anyone asked me to play."
My chest did something complicated. "Anytime."
I shut the door before I could say something stupid.Watched him pull away, his car disappearing into morning traffic, and tried to remember what my life had looked like before Callum Hayes started showing up in every corner of it.
Seven days. Seven days of sharing his space, eating his cooking, pretending we were just business partners with an expiration date.
Seven days of not almost-kissing him at 2 a.m.
I was so screwed.
eight
CALLUM
The Riverside elevations were mocking me again.
Same drawings. Same desk. Same inability to concentrate on structural load calculations when my brain had decided to become a highlight reel of Willow Monroe's greatest hits. Her on the piano bench at two in the morning. Her in my clothes, sleeves swallowed past her wrists. Her face when I'd saidplatonicthis morning—a micro-flinch she'd covered with a bright "Great!" that fooled neither of us.
I traced the roofline with my pencil. Didn't mark anything. Set the pencil down.
Eight hours. I'd been at this desk for eight hours and had accomplished the architectural equivalent of absolutely nothing. The western facade still needed shading solutions. The sustainability report was half-written. Richard Ashford expected a revised proposalby end of week and I was sitting here replaying the sound of Willow's sleepy voice as she shuffled into the kitchen in search of coffee.
It shouldn't have been charming. It was devastatingly charming.
Get it together, Hayes. You're a grown man. You've engineered buildings that will stand for a century. You can survive one woman sleeping in your guest room without losing your head.
Except it wasn't the sleeping arrangement that was the problem. It was the velocity at which Willow Monroe had embedded herself into the architecture of my daily life. She'd been in my apartment for less than twenty-four hours and already I couldn't look at the kitchen island without seeing her perched on it, bare feet swinging against my cabinets. Couldn't pass the piano without remembering her shoulder pressed against mine, the way she'd asked me to play as if it were the most natural request in the world.
Couldn't look at my own couch without thinking about the gray throw pillow she'd claimed—the decorative one, the one that had maintained its geometric integrity for eight years until Willow Monroe wedged it behind her back and declared it "actually useful now."
I'd been telling myself the same story for a year. That the attraction was a predictable, borderlinepathetic midlife fixation. Divorced man, seventeen-year age gap, younger woman who paid him attention—textbook, really. The scenario that would make any self-respecting therapist reach for their notepad.And how does that make you feel, Callum?
Ridiculous. That's how it made me feel.
But here's the thing about narratives you construct to keep yourself safe: they only work when they're accurate. And the more time I spent with Willow, the harder it became to pretend this was about her being twenty-three and me being a cliché.
It wasn't her youth that messed me up. It was the way she refused to be impressed by anything I'd built or earned, yet noticed when I hadn't smiled in days. The way she pushed back against every attempt I made to manage her, then turned around and defended me to strangers with a conviction I hadn't earned. Women my own age—the ones I'd taken to dinner once or twice a year in my meticulously scheduled attempts at human connection—were calibrated. Careful. They said the right things and laughed at the appropriate moments and went home in the Uber I'd ordered without leaving a mark.
Willow left marks everywhere. My apartment. My routine. My carefully maintained emotional perimeter. She'd breached the whole damn thing withoutappearing to try, and the gut check was that I didn't want to rebuild it.
That scared me more than the attraction.
I'm already proven I'm capable of destroying the people I care about. Jessica. Elena. A marriage I'd let die of neglect while I poured myself into buildings that would outlast every relationship I'd ever had.
I didn't deserve to want Willow Monroe. But wanting had never cared much about deserving.
A knock. Graham leaned into my office. "Quick question on the Riverside material samples—did we go with the reclaimed oak or the walnut for the feature wall?"
"Reclaimed oak. The walnut grain competed with the window proportions."
Graham nodded. Paused. Gave me that look—the one that said he saw more than I wanted him to see but was choosing, for once, not to comment.
"You heading out soon?" he asked instead. Casual.
