The Chicago skyline stretched behind me, indifferent and glass-bright, and I couldn’t focus on a single thing it represented.
The quarterly reports sat untouched. Three acquisition proposals waited for signatures that weren’t coming today. Daniel had knocked twice in the past hour and twice I’d sent him away with a wave that probably landed harder than I intended.
I rolled my signet ring against the mahogany desk and tried to remember the last time a single person had occupied this much real estate in my head.
I came up empty.
Emilia Rivera had walked out of my office yesterday with her spine straight and her notebook tucked under her arm and the ghost of what almost happened still hanging in the air between us, and I hadn’t been able to think about a single thing since. Not the investigation. Not the legal exposure. Not the three thousand employees whose livelihoods depended on my ability to stay focused.
Just her.
The way she’d stepped back. The deliberate, costly way she’d put distance between us when every signal in the room had been pulling the other direction. I’d watched her do it — watched her remember something, watched it land on her face, watched her choose her work over whatever was building between us with the quiet, devastating conviction of a woman who knew exactly what she was sacrificing.
I respected it. I hated it. Both at once, with an intensity that had no place in a rational mind.
I can’t think clearly around you and I need to think clearly.
She’d said it like an apology. Like she was sorry the pull existed. Like if she could have engineered it out of the situation she would have, and the fact that she couldn’t was a problem she was managing rather than a feeling she was having.
I understood that impulse better than she knew. I’d been managing feelings like engineering problems my entire adult life. The difference was that watching her do it hadn’t made me feel relieved.
It had made me want to be the reason she stopped.
Which was exactly the kind of thinking that would get us both into trouble, and precisely the kind I couldn’t seem to stop.
My phone lit up with a news alert. Emilia’s byline flashed across the screen — a teaser piece about the Lakefront development that said nothing actionable but implied everything damning. She was building her case brick by careful brick, and any rational man in my position would be marshaling lawyers and crafting responses.
Instead I enlarged her photo.
A press event from last year — she stood slightly apart from a group of colleagues, her attention focused somewhere beyond the frame. Not posed. Not performing. Just watchful in the wayshe always was, cataloging a room full of people who probably hadn’t noticed her noticing them.
I closed the app before I did something pathetic.
The intercom buzzed. “Mr. Laurent?—”
“Cancel the Singapore call.”
A beat of silence. Daniel had been with me long enough to know that I didn’t cancel calls. I had taken calls through food poisoning, a building evacuation, and one memorable board meeting during which I was fairly certain I had a broken rib from a gym accident I’d refused to acknowledge.
“Sir?”
“Family emergency. Whatever sounds convincing.” I loosened my tie, suddenly unable to tolerate the pressure. “Hold all calls for an hour.”
“Of course.”
The intercom clicked off.
I stood and moved to the window, needing the lake the way I always did when my thoughts outran my control. The water stretched gray and enormous toward the horizon — the same view I’d been chasing since I was seventeen years old and desperate for any horizon that wasn’t the one I’d grown up under.
The Lakefront investigation was a problem I could solve. Someone in my organization had authorized substandard materials on Building C — I was increasingly certain of that, increasingly certain it hadn’t been sanctioned from my desk, and increasingly aware that finding out who had done it mattered for reasons that went beyond legal exposure. Someone had used my name. My project. My reputation for doing things right. And they’d done it badly enough that a journalist with a recorder in her clutch had walked into my gala and started dismantling it.
I should be grateful for that, in a strictly practical sense.
The thought of Emilia made my chest do the complicated thing it had been doing since yesterday.
She’d said for now when I’d said it. I’d said I didn’t know what I was going to do about it either. Both of us speaking around the edges of something we weren’t naming, and neither of us pushing through to the center of it.
That wasn’t me. I pushed through. I named things. I made decisions and executed them with the kind of clarity that had built a billion-dollar company from a neighborhood that didn’t produce billionaires.
