He left me standing there with a coffee I’d forgotten to drink and a feeling in my chest I couldn’t name.
That afternoon, an email arrived that reminded me exactly why I needed to keep my guard up.
From: Richard Sterling
Subject: Transition materials—SEAS documentation request
Charlotte,
I trust the new facility is meeting your needs. As part of my ongoing consultation during the transition period, I’ll need copies of the original SEAS development files, including the early-stage prototypes and testing logs. These were developed under my oversight and remain relevant to several pending matters.
Regards, Richard
My oversight. Like he’d done anything besides block funding and pocket the credit. And Charlotte, of course. Always Charlotte. Ten years and he’d never once used the name I actually went by, as if calling me what I wanted to be called would cost him something he wasn’t willing to spend.
I drafted a reply that was four paragraphs of precisely worded fury, deleted it, and wrote instead:
Richard,
All SEAS documentation requests should be directed to the Pierce Construction legal team per the transition protocols.
Best, Charlie
I signed it Charlie on purpose. A small act of defiance that no one would notice except me.
Except—and this was the thing I kept circling back to—Asher had never called me Charlotte. Not once. Not in the bar, not in the boardroom, not in meetings. Even when he used the formal Ms. Winters, there was a deliberateness to it, like he was choosing distance rather than falling back on it. And in unguarded moments—the car conversation, the flicker of a smile when I’d challenged his numbers—it was just Charlie. As if he’d never considered any other option.
I didn’t know what to do with that either.
I stayed late that night. Not because I needed to—for the first time in a decade, the lab was actually ahead of schedule—but because the silence in my temporary apartment was worse than the silence here. At least in the lab, the quiet felt productive.
At nine o’clock, I finally packed up. The hallway was empty, the building dim except for the security lights that cast long shadows across the polished floors. Through the glass walls of the third-floor office, I could see that Asher’s light was still on. His silhouette was bent over his desk, jacket off, hand in his hair.
He was still here too.
I took the elevator down before I could think about what that meant. And how badly I wanted to join him. Sit next to him in tired but satisfied silence. And just be.
9
ASHER
The call with the Singapore team had gone sideways for the third time this week, and I was out of patience.
“What part of ‘non-negotiable timeline’ is giving you trouble?” I said into the phone, pacing the length of my hotel suite. “Because I can have legal walk you through the contract language syllable by syllable if that would help.”
Silence on the other end. Then a stammered apology and a promise to have revised numbers by morning.
“By six a.m. Pacific,” I said. “Not your morning. Mine.”
I ended the call and tossed the phone on the bed. Mike, sitting in the armchair by the window, didn’t look up from his tablet.
“You know they’re three hours into their workday over there,” he said mildly.
“Then they’ve had three hours to get it right.”
“Just pointing out that most people respond better to carrots than sledgehammers.”
“I’ll send them a fruit basket after they deliver.” I pulled the garment bag from the closet and unzipped it. Black tux, white shirt, no tie. Shane had texted his approval of the outfit threetimes already, along with a threat about what would happen if I wore my “funeral tie.”
