We're about eight inches apart. Her face tipped up. The question is gone and neither of us is pretending to look for it.
I look at her mouth. Then back at her eyes.
She doesn't move away. Doesn't finish the question. She just holds the look with her chin slightly up and her hands gone still on the cable, waiting to see if I'll close the distance.
I look at her for another second. Two.
Then I turn back to the junction box.
"Feed it through," I say. My voice comes out level.
A pause. Then she feeds the cable through. I catch it on my end. We keep working and neither of us says a word about the eight inches or the two seconds or the fact that something has shifted in this narrow space between the wall and the radiator.
When we come out into the main room she's moving fast again, already talking about the next run, and I let her talk and I answer what needs answering.
But I don't stop thinking about it. And from the way she glances at me twice on the way out to her truck at the end of the day, she doesn't either.
I should have kissed her.
three
Celeste
Itdoesn’ttakelongbefore my ex Darren reminds me that distance doesn't stop someone who knows your passwords.
I've been careful since Vancouver. New email accounts, new phone number, stripped my professional presence down to what I could control. I know he has people monitoring my public activity, but I thought I'd been thorough. I thought I'd closed everything that mattered.
What I missed was the old project management account. Darren and I built it together in year two of the business. A joint login, both names on it, a relic I'd stopped using when everything collapsed. I hadn't closed it. I'd just stopped thinking about it.
He's been in it for weeks. I find this out on a Tuesday when I try to log in to pull an old file and find the account locked — too many failed password attempts from an IP address that isn't mine. When I contact support and get the access log, I can seeforty-three logins. My last entry was eight months ago. Every other record since then is him.
He's read everything. Every client note, every research file I stored there before I knew I needed to be careful, every email thread from the last year of the business.
Including, at the top of the stack, a thread where I mentioned to a former colleague that I was doing independent research in Silver Ridge. A rough paragraph about the study. The name of the development foundation I'd been planning to pitch. The name Tara.
He's known about the Silver Ridge study for months.
I lock him out of the account, change every password I haven't already changed, screenshot the full access log. Then I sit at my desk and think about the fact that he's been reading and waiting, and he's already moved.
Ross shows up at one for the afternoon session. He comes around the back of his truck and stops when he sees my face.
"What happened?" he asks immediately.
I tell him.
He listens without interrupting. When I finish he's quiet before speaking. "Screenshot everything and keep it somewhere he can't reach," he says. "Separate email account, not connected to anything he's ever touched. If he does something else with what he found, you need documentation that predates it."
"That's what I did."
"Good." He holds my gaze. "And close every account you've ever shared with him. Even the dormant ones. Especially the dormant ones."
"Already done." I pause. "How do you think like that?"
He considers this. "The rigs teach you. When something goes wrong offshore, first thing they ask is what you knew and when you knew it. I learned to document everything automatically." He sets his toolbag on the kitchen table and doesn't reach for it,which means he's still thinking. "Someone like Darren, well, he's patient. He collects information and uses it when the moment is right. The only thing that stops that is having a better record than he does."
I look at him. He's just described Darren more accurately than anyone who's actually met him.
We stay at the kitchen table for an hour and I tell him things I haven't said out loud since I left Vancouver. Not just the what-happened but the shape of it — what it's like to build something for three years and have someone you trusted completely look at it and decide it was easier to take than to compete with. What it costs to realize you gave someone all the access codes to your life because you thought you were building something together.
