His mouth presses to my temple.
Stays there.
I don't move. He doesn't move. The wind comes once across the ridge, lifts my hair and settles again. Neither of us speaks. Neither of us needs to.
18
OWEN
"We agreed on almost all of their points," I say. "The counter was strong. The retained control clause is exactly what Reid wanted."
Jace is standing in the middle of the office with his arms crossed. He has been standing like that for eleven minutes. "Almost isn't all."
"Almost is sufficient when the remaining points are negotiable."
"Why should we negotiate at all?" He drops into his chair, then immediately stands again. Jace cannot hold still when he is losing an argument. "We're the ones not asking to sell. They came to us. Why are we the ones budging?"
"Because that's how acquisition works."
"Then why consider it at all?" He turns to face me. "We don't need their money. We're the biggest outdoor gear company on the continent. Every territory. Every market segment."
"Which is exactly why we're vulnerable." I pull up the market share projections on my screen and turn the monitor toward him. "If we decline, the fund doesn't disappear. They findanother company to back. A competitor gets the capital injection we turned down and in three years they're at our position and we're fighting to survive."
I take my glasses off and press two fingers to the bridge of my nose.
I know exactly which argument will move him. We have never processed anything the same way. But I have been reading him across every temperamental difference for thirty years and I know, with the precision I apply to everything, exactly where his resistance lives and what it takes to reach past it.
"And selling doesn't mean stepping away," I say. "We retain operational roles. Product approval. Brand decisions. Everything that makes True North what it is stays in our hands." I let that land. "And the capital injection will make a big difference to other projects that you actually care about."
He looks up.
"The convertible jacket system," I say. "Your project. The one you've been developing for three field seasons, that converts to a full insulated ground layer. We’ve been running it on discretionary funds because the manufacturing cost at current scale makes the numbers unworkable." I watch his face. "With acquisition capital behind us, the numbers work. We manufacture at scale. And we can finally develop the program you pitched two years ago and start donating a unit for every hundred sold. To shelters. To search and rescue."
Jace goes still.
The specific quality of stillness that means something has reached him past the stubbornness, all the way down to what he really values. He pitched that donation program the same week he came back from his first solo expedition at nineteen. He has never once stopped pushing it.
I have always been able to find that place in him. We are nothing alike, Jace and I. He is outward and I am inward, he ismotion and I am stillness, he fills a room and I observe it. I know him the way you know terrain you've crossed in the dark. By feel. By the small signs other people don't know to look for.
He is easier to read than he thinks he is.
I walk to the window. The cold leaks through the frame at the bottom seal, a thin draft that finds my socks. The pine resin from the gear samples stacked in the corner has been in the air all morning. I stand there and let the quiet work while Jace reaches his conclusion by the route only Jace takes, out of order, through instinct rather than logic, arriving at the same place by a completely different road.
I lift my head.And then I see them.
Maya and Reid are coming up the path through the snow.
They are moving slowly. Close to each other. Her face is turned up toward his, saying something, and he is looking down at her and smiling. A full, unguarded, open smile, directed at whatever she just said, and it changes his face entirely into something I have never seen on him before.
Her shoulder is against his arm. They are leaning toward each other with the unconscious tilt of people who have stopped maintaining distance.
His hand is around hers.
My glasses hit the floor.
I am standing at the window with my hand at my side and the cold draft at my feet and something moving through my chest that is not a clean or comfortable feeling. Not jealousy, or not only just that. Something more structural. The specific sensation of a calculation you've been running quietly for weeks arriving at an outcome you weren't prepared to receive.
Something has changed and the evidence of it is written in the angle of their bodies and the easy grip of his hand around hers and the smile that is still on his face as they reach the porch steps.
