“It’s annoying.”
“Extremely.”
That earned me a real smile — brief and genuine, the kind that reached her eyes and made the armor drop for exactly one second. And something in my chest unknotted just enough to breathe.
She started toward the elevator, then stopped. Turned back.
“The board meeting tomorrow. What time?”
“Eight AM. Why?”
“Because I’m going to need you available by ten for a follow-up interview.” Her professional mask was back, but her eyes were warm. “Whatever you decide to do, I want to be there to document it.”
“On the record?”
“Always.”
I watched her walk away. The elevator doors closed, and the office settled into the particular silence that followed her — larger than usual, emptier than it had any right to be for a room that had never held her long.
I turned back to the window.
My phone buzzed. Shareholders. Board members. Legal team. All the pieces of a carefully constructed life, demanding attention.
For the first time in twenty years, I didn’t reach for it immediately.
Instead, I stood with the question she’d left me. Who is Sebastian Laurent without his empire?
I’d built Laurent Enterprises to prove I was not my father’s son. Not the boy from the kitchen floor. Not the kid who couldn’t stop what was happening to his mother and had spent two decades overcompensating for that failure with money and control and walls so high he’d forgotten there was anything behind them worth seeing.
But Emilia had seen it anyway. She’d walked into my service corridor with ink on her thumb and looked at me like I was a puzzle worth solving rather than a man worth fearing.
And she’d just told me the solution wasn’t more control.
It was something I’d never tried.
My phone rang. Daniel’s extension.
“Sir? The Singapore call has been rescheduled for?—”
“Push it to next week.”
Silence. I could practically hear him recalibrating. “Sir, they’ve been waiting for months. If we delay again?—”
“Then they’ll wait a little longer.” I settled into my chair, the city gold and sprawling beyond the glass. “Right now, I need to focus on what matters.”
“And what’s that, sir?”
A week ago I would have said the Singapore deal. The board’s confidence. Stock price. The machinery of an empire that ran on my ability to stay three moves ahead of everyone else.
Now?
“I’ll let you know when I figure it out,” I said. “But I think it involves becoming someone I haven’t tried being yet.”
I ended the call and sat with the quiet.
Outside, the sun was setting over Chicago — the skyline going amber and then rose and then the particular deep blue of a city settling into evening. Somewhere out there, Emilia was filing her story. Building something that mattered. Being exactly who she was without asking anyone’s permission.
I’d spent thirty-nine years building walls.
