“Then you don’t know me very well.”
She shoots me a look but doesn’t respond. Instead, she boots up her computer and dives into work. Within minutes, she’s completely absorbed, barely acknowledging my presence.Her focus is remarkable, as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist.
I find myself watching her more than I should. The way she frowns at her screen when something doesn’t add up. How she mutters under her breath when she catches an error. When she reaches for her coffee without looking, her hand finds the mug by memory alone.
She catches me around midmorning. “What?”
“Nothing. Just observing.”
“Well, observe something else. It’s distracting.”
I return to my own work, but my attention keeps drifting. I can’t help it.
Over the next few days, a routine develops. We arrive separately, work in parallel silence, and leave at different times. She asks questions when she needs clarification. I provide answers without unnecessary elaboration, while remaining professional and distant. Exactly what she wanted.
On Wednesday, she finds a discrepancy in a quarterly report that has been filed incorrectly for eighteen months. Nobody else caught it. Nobody even looked.
“This could have cost the company millions if it went on much longer,” she tells me as she slides the corrected file across my desk.
“And you found it in two days.”
“It wasn’t hard. The numbers didn’t match. I followed the trail.” She shrugs like it’s nothing. Like anyone could have done it.
But they didn’t. She did.
She’s brilliant. Genuinely, quietly brilliant. And she’s been languishing in obscurity because she refuses to schmooze or self-promote.
Their loss. My gain.
“You’re staring again,” she complains on Thursday afternoon without looking up from her screen.
“I’m thinking.”
“Think in a different direction.”
I turn back to my laptop. But I’m smiling.
And from the corner of my eye, I catch the smallest twitch at the corner of her mouth.
She noticed.
Chapter 7 - Kirsten
The numbers on my screen are seared into my brain, but I couldn’t tell you what they mean.
That’s the curse of a photographic memory. I remember everything I see. Every digit, every decimal point, every cell in this spreadsheet. But remembering and understanding are two different things, and right now my brain refuses to do the latter.
Because Menlow is sitting twelve feet away, and apparently that’s enough to turn me into a complete idiot.
He’s on a call, speaking in a low voice about quarterly projections. I should be using this time productively. Instead, I’m watching the way he leans back in his chair with the phone pressed to his ear. One hand spins a pen between his fingers. He does that when he’s thinking.
I’ve noticed a lot of things about him over the past few days. The way he loosens his tie around three o’clock. How he takes his coffee black but adds sugar when he thinks no one’s looking. The furrow between his brows when he reads something that doesn’t add up.
I hate that I notice these things.
He’s a criminal, I remind myself. He forced you into marriage. He’s holding your life hostage.
All true. All completely valid reasons to despise him.
