Everything was right. Mia was down the hall. Shane was somewhere being Shane. The mountains were outside doingwhat mountains did. I was in the bed of a man who made terrible eggs and kept an empty house and had called my best friend before I’d known I needed her, and his arm was heavy across my waist and his breathing was steady and the splinter was so small I almost didn’t feel it when I pressed.
Almost.
17
ASHER
She was still asleep when I left the bed.
I stood there for approximately four seconds, like an adolescent, then went downstairs and made coffee and tried to be a functioning person.
The coffee helped. The eggs did not. I was starting to suspect the eggs were a lost cause, but the routine of making them had become something I didn’t want to give up—the cracking, the pan, the spatula, the pretending I might get it right this time. Charlie ate them without complaint. That might have been the thing that undid me most.
She came down in my Henley and my socks again and sat on her stool and ate the terrible eggs and said “Morning” like it was the simplest word in the English language. I said “Morning” back like I hadn’t been standing at the stove for twenty minutes thinking about the sound she’d made when?—
I flipped the eggs. Badly.
She went to her room to work after breakfast. Set up her laptop on the desk by the window, spread her SEAS files across the desk in the particular organized chaos that meant she was thinking, and disappeared into the project with the focus ofsomeone who’d been doing deep-concentration work her entire adult life. I watched her from the hallway for a moment—the way she leaned forward, chewed her thumbnail, typed in fast bursts—and thought: she doesn’t know.
She didn’t know that while she’d been at the bar last night with Mia and Shane and Sloane, I’d spent four hours on the phone. She didn’t know that Jax Shaw had sent me a preliminary threat assessment that ran eleven pages. She didn’t know that Richard Sterling had contacted a member of her SEAS team directly—an email to Dr. Kessler, her lead researcher, requesting “preliminary data sharing” under the guise of a collaboration inquiry that had no authorization from anyone at SEAS or Pierce Industries.
She didn’t know that Richard’s email had been sent at 2:47 a.m., which meant he was either working through the night or not sleeping—neither of which was a good sign.
She didn’t know that Kessler, to his credit, had flagged it immediately to Mike Armitage, who’d flagged it to me, and who’d spent the next three hours constructing a legal and operational response that would seal every crack Richard might try to slip through.
I had it handled.
That was what I told myself as I walked into my study and closed the door halfway—not all the way, because all the way felt like hiding, and I wasn’t hiding. I was managing. There was a difference.
The callwith legal started at ten.
Cheryl had drafted a cease-and-desist for the unauthorized contact with Kessler. Standard. Clean. The kind of documentthat would make Richard’s lawyers advise him to stand down. But Cheryl also raised a point I’d been turning over since three in the morning: the SEAS project timeline was exposed.
“He’s not reaching out to Kessler because he’s curious,” Cheryl said, her voice flat with the professional calm of a woman who’d been cleaning up my messes for six years. “He’s mapping your deliverables. If he knows when the Phase Two data drops, he can position a competing grant application to undercut SEAS before the results are public. He’s done it before.”
“I know.”
“The timeline is public-facing. Filed with the grant commission. Anyone can pull it.”
“So we change the timeline.”
Silence on the line. The kind of silence that Cheryl used when she was choosing between telling me I was right and telling me I was being reckless and had decided on a third option, which was waiting for me to hear myself.
“We accelerate Phase Two,” I said. “Pull the deliverable window forward by six weeks. Restructure the milestone schedule so the data drops before Richard can position against it. We file an amended timeline with the commission, reroute the lab resources?—”
“Asher. That’s Charlie’s project.”
“It’s a Pierce Industries project.”
“That Charlie runs.”
“And I’m protecting—” I stopped. “That’s what this is. Protection. If Richard gets ahead of the Phase Two data, the entire SEAS initiative is compromised. Everything she’s built.” I heard the edge in my own voice and pulled it back. “I’m not taking anything from her. I’m making sure she has something to come back to.”
Another silence. Longer.
“I’ll draft the amended filing,” Cheryl said. Not agreement. Compliance. There was a difference, and I heard it, and I chose not to let it move me.
After I hung up, I sat at the desk with the legal pad and the scattered papers and the half-empty water glass from last night and made a list. Amended timeline. Resource reallocation memo. Updated security protocols for the SEAS lab. NDA review for all team members. A second call to Jax about expanding the monitoring scope.
