I let myself in with the key he'd given me last week. His apartment was quiet. Clean. Warm. All the things my life currently wasn't.
I found him in the study.
He was at the drafting table, bent over a set of drawings. Not the Riverside plans—I'd seen those enough times to recognize the blue grid paper and the neat Ashford annotations in the margins. These were different. A warmer paper. Pencil, not ink. Softer lines, more detail. Work that looked personal rather than billable.
He heard me come in and straightened. Rolled the drawings up in one smooth motion and slid them into a cardboard tube propped against the desk.
"Hey," he said. Casual. Normal.
"Hey." I leaned against the doorframe. "What are you working on?"
"Just messing around. Old habit." He capped the tube. "How was Elena?"
He'd changed the subject so fast I almost missed the pivot. But I was running on fumes and didn't havethe energy to chase it. Whatever those drawings were, they could wait.
"Elena was great," I said. "She hugged me. A real hug. And she gave me her number."
His face did a complicated thing—surprise and relief and a flash of fear, all cycling through in about two seconds. "She hugged you."
"Full contact. Both arms. Voluntarily." I kicked off my shoes. "I think I passed."
"You more than passed."
I wanted to tell him about Pete and Linda. Wanted to say the shop might be gone in three weeks and my apartment is ready and everything outside of this room is falling apart. But he was looking at me with such open, uncomplicated warmth that I couldn't bring myself to introduce the mess. Not tonight. Tonight I wanted to exist in the version of my life where things were working.
Tomorrow. I'd deal with it tomorrow.
Later that night, I brushed my teeth. Stole one of his t-shirts. Crawled into bed and pressed my face against his chest when he joined me, breathing in the clean cotton and the warmth of him.
"You okay?" he asked. His arm came around me. Automatic. Anchoring.
"Tired."
"Long day?"
"The longest." I closed my eyes. His heartbeat was right there, under my ear, reliable in a way that the rest of my world had stopped being. "Hold me for a while?"
He pulled me closer. Didn't ask questions. Didn't push. Just held me in the dark while the city hummed outside the windows and my life rearranged itself into a shape I didn't recognize.
I was falling in love with a man who hid drawings in cardboard tubes and kissed my hair while I pretended to be fine.
I was losing the place that had made me who I am.
And my apartment was ready. Sitting empty. Waiting for me to decide whether I was going home or whether I was already there.
sixteen
CALLUM
I was designing a building I had no business designing.
Not the Riverside project—that sat in its folder on the left side of my desk, dutifully awaiting the attention of a man who was supposed to care about it. The sustainability report was due Thursday. The material samples needed sign-off. Richard Ashford's inbox was expecting a revised elevation by end of week.
Instead, I was hunched over a set of pencil drawings on warm-stock paper, sketching a coffee bar layout for the fourth time in a week.
The counter needed to be L-shaped. I'd tried a straight run and a U-shape, but the L gave the best flow—enough room for two baristas to work without colliding, a natural queue line for customers, and a clear sightline from the register to the front door. Theespresso station would sit at the bend, positioned so the person pulling shots could see the entire room.
Willow always watched the room while she worked. I'd spent a year observing that habit from my corner table at Brew & Bean. She tracked every customer, every conversation, every shift in energy. A good barista served coffee. Willow conducted a room.
