Emma
“Emma?” Jennifer cut through the fog in my head, hard enough to snap me back into the fluorescent-lit conference room. “Everything okay?”
I blinked down at the spreadsheet I’d been staring at for—god, who knew how long.
Still hearing Damien from that morning, low and certain:Waiting for you to claim me.
Heat crept up my neck. “Yes. Sorry.” I shook my head as if I could dislodge him from it.
“I need you to focus,” Jennifer said, not unkind but firm. She tapped a highlighted section of the sheet. “These numbers are… not great.”
I leaned in, pulse ticking faster.
She pointed to a red column. “We’re showing a $1.8 million discrepancy in Q2 expenditures compared to the approved budgets. And the cash-flow projections for next quarter…” She clicked to the next tab. “Look at this.”
My stomach dropped.
The liquidity forecast dipped into yellow—then into orange.
If revenue stayed flat, we’d be scraping the bottom of our operating reserves by next month, much earlier than previously expected.
I scanned line by line, willing it to be a rounding error. A misplaced decimal. Anything. “This has to be a mistake.”
But no.
Marketing had overspent. Operations had underperformed. One vendor doubled their pricing without warning. Payroll for the new dev team hit harder than expected.
And as ugly as it was, it all added up.
“Davidson’s going to eat us alive.”
“Unfortunately,” Jennifer agreed.
My pulse skipped.
Damien’s warmth from this morning—his arm around my waist, his grin, the easy domestic bliss of our last four days—felt like it belonged to someone else entirely.
The real world bled back in, cruel and cold.
Of course the first moment I let myself breathe—let myself want something—life would yank the floor out from under me again.
“Okay,” I said, taking a measured breath. “Let’s go through everything line by line and make sure what we’re seeing is correct.”
She nodded, pulling her chair closer.
We worked through the discrepancies, but the knot in my chest only tightened. Every red cell felt like a warning flare. Every variance felt like a countdown.
And underneath it all—beneath the numbers and panic—the memory of his words breathed again:
Claim me.
A promise.
A risk.
A wanting I wasn’t sure I deserved.
Jennifer snapped her binder shut and left for her next meeting, heels clicking down the hall. The door closed behind her—leaving a quiet that rang in my ears. I pulled out my phone on instinct, scrolling to Candace’s name.
