LENA
I caught myself staring at the computer screen.The number hadn’t changed.Neither had my ability to care about it.
The Midsummer Gala was three weeks out.We had seven corporate retreats booked for July, a wedding party arriving next Tuesday, and the restaurant critic from Denver showing up sometime this month without advance notice because that was how restaurant critics operated.
I should have been in my element.Instead, I was stuck on the same spreadsheet for ten minutes while my mind kept drifting back to this morning.
The sculpture on his nightstand, small and rough and unfinished.His voice, quiet and raw, when he said his mother had been making it for him.A birthday gift for a little boy who never got to receive it from his mother.
“What was it going to be?”
“A wolf.”
I set down my pen and pressed my fingertips against my eyelids until I saw stars.
A wolf.The scars on his back that looked like claws had raked through his flesh.The way his eyes caught light strangely in dim rooms, reflecting gold for half a heartbeat before settling back to gray.The wildness I could feel underneath his control, that animal current running beneath the surface of everything he was.
His mother had been making him a wolf.And claws, not human hands, but claws had carved those marks into his back.
“What kind of animal did this?”I had asked him, that night after Stephanie.He had kissed me before I could finish the question.Distracted me with his mouth, his hands, the overwhelming heat of him.
Now I wondered if the distraction had been intentional.
I was missing a piece.An important piece.A piece he was hiding, or a piece I was refusing to see.And I couldn’t stop thinking about it long enough to do my job.
A knock on my office door made me jump.
Sophie leaned against the frame, her hair escaping its twist the way it always did by late afternoon.“You’ve been staring at that calendar for twenty minutes.Either you’re planning world domination or you’re somewhere else entirely.”
“Event logistics.”I shuffled papers that didn’t need shuffling.“The gala alone has forty-seven moving pieces.”
“Uh-huh.”Sophie didn’t move from the doorway.“And which of those forty-seven pieces requires you to look like someone stole your coffee and replaced it with existential dread?”
I almost smiled.Almost.
“I’m fine,” I said.“Just tired.”
“You’ve been tired for ten days straight.At some point that stops being tired and starts being something else.”She pushed off the doorframe and disappeared, only to return a couple minutes later with a plate balanced in one hand and two forks in the other.“Ratty says you skipped lunch.Again.”
She set the plate on my desk, pushing aside the spreadsheet I had been pretending to work on.Lemon cake, still warm from the oven, with that perfect glaze Ratty had been making since before I could walk.Our head chef had been feeding me comfort food since I was five years old, and he had an uncanny ability to know when I needed it most.
“I had coffee,” I said weakly.
“Coffee is not food.”Sophie handed me a fork.“Eat.Then talk.”
I took a bite because arguing with Sophie was pointless, and because the cake was perfect, and because sometimes it was easier to give in than to explain why I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt hungry.The sweetness melted on my tongue, familiar and comforting in a way that made my eyes sting.
Sophie watched me eat half the slice before she spoke again.“Talk to me.”
I should have deflected.Should have redirected to work talk, to the gala planning, to anything that didn’t require me to examine what was happening inside my own head.
Instead, I heard myself say, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Sophie waited.She was good at that.
“With Raphael.”The name felt different in my mouth now.Less like a curse and more like a question.“I told him I’m not running.But I don’t know what staying means.I don’t know what any of this means.”
“Do you need to know right now?”
