“No. Yes. Mostly yes. But there’s a part of me that’s apprehensive,” I admitted.
“Does Willow know about this?”
I shook my head.
“Good grief, this is worse than I thought. When are you going to tell her? After you've renovated an entire building in secret? You going to just hand her the keys and hope she doesn't have a panic attack?" Graham's voice was mild but his point was a nail gun. "This is a grand gesture. Grand gestures require communication. Otherwise, they're just expensive surprises that blow up in your face."
"Thank you for the unsolicited advice."
"You're welcome. I charge by the hour." He drank his coffee, shaking his head. “Look, you’re going to do what you’re going to do. All I’m saying is…be careful.”
“Duly noted.”
“Right. Which brings me to the actual reason I'm here. I have news. Good news, for once."
"What?"
"Ashford called this morning. He's hosting a dinner Friday night. Private. Eight people. His inner circle. And us." Graham paused for effect—the man had a flair for the dramatic that he denied possessing. "He's awarding us the Riverside contract."
The Riverside contract. Two years of proposals, revisions, presentations, and client dinners. Two years of tailoring every design choice to Richard Ashford's vision while maintaining the structural integrity that kept me up at night. Two years of Graham managing the politics while I managed the plans.
And now it was done. We'd won.
I waited for the rush. The relief. The satisfaction of a goal achieved, a finish line crossed.
It didn't come.
What came instead was a calculation I didn't want to make. The arrangement with Willow had been built on this contract. She'd agreed to play my girlfriend so I could land Ashford's business. That was the deal. The entire architecture of our relationship—fake, then real, then this uncharted territory we'd been living in—was framed around a transaction that was about to close.
If the contract was done, the arrangement was done. The reason she'd agreed to be in my life had an expiration date, and it just got stamped.
"Callum?" Graham was watching me. "This is the part where you celebrate. Or at minimum, acknowledge that a good thing happened."
"It's good news," I said. "Excellent news."
"You look like a man who just won the lottery and realized he lost the ticket."
"I'm processing."
“What’s to process? We crossed the finish line and won the trophy.” He set his cup down. "What's going on?"
I roused myself to force a smile. “Nothing, sorry. This is good news.” I wasn’t going to share the private details of me and Willow’s arrangement for Graham’s scrutiny.
If Graham didn’t buy it, he didn’t call me out. Instead, he rose with a short nod. “Good. I’ll see you Friday, then. Ashford's place. His wife is coordinating. I'll send you the details." Graham paused at the door. “For what it’s worth, I think the coffee shop plans are pretty damn good. Makes me wonder if you’ve been holding out on your best work.”
He left. I sat with the Elm Street drawings in front of me and the Riverside contract in my inbox and felt the two halves of my life pressing against each other with the structural pressure of competing loads on a shared beam.
One was the career I'd built over twenty years. Safe. Predictable. A monument to the version of myself I'd constructed after Jessica left.
The other was a coffee shop on warm-stock paper, designed around a woman who stole my coffee in the morning and fell asleep against me at night.
Both couldn't occupy the same foundation. Not forever. Sooner or later, I'd have to choose.
I went to the Elm Street building at lunch.
It was a twelve-minute drive from the office—I'd timed it, not out of obsession but out of... okay, it was obsession. I'd driven this route nine times in six weeks. I could drive it blindfolded, which was a fact I'd be sharing with no one.
The building sat between a used bookshop and a shuttered dry cleaner, its brick facade weathered to a dark red that caught the winter sun and held it. Two stories. Original arched windows on the upper floor, most of them intact. A recessed entryway with a transom that still had its decorative ironwork.
