She taps her pen once on the table.
"Can we focus?" She doesn't look at either Noah or me when she says it, her eyes already back on her legal pad, and somehow it lands harder than anything Evelyn said.
Tessa's tone is brisk, unbothered, entirely unimpressed by the drama of the last sixty seconds.
I can't tell whether she's helping me or simply annoyed that the meeting has gone sideways. The uncertainty is more interesting than it should be.
Evelyn redirects to client strategy with the efficiency of someone who has never once indulged a tangent she didn't sanction. Tessa's posture is unchanged. She's upright, angled slightly toward the whiteboard, and entirely professional.
I watch her for a second. Part of me still waiting for the crazy eyes, and the personality flip.
They don't come.
Noah is talking about PR response timing, and I'm nodding at appropriate intervals, and most of my attention is on the movement of Tessa's pen across the legal pad.
At some point she reaches across the table for the water pitcher. Our hands come within approximately four inches of each other. She doesn't appear to notice. I appear to notice considerably more than is warranted, which I note with some irritation and file alongside the handwriting observation and the question about her opinions on reductive phrasing.
The meeting continues as normal.
As Evelyn closes the agenda, Noah leans toward me, just quietly enough to be deniable. "You buried the lede."
I say nothing. He accepts this, because Noah has always known when a silence is intentional, which is one of the things that makes him useful and occasionally exhausting.
People begin gathering their things. Laptops close, pens are capped, notebooks are shoved into bags. It is the small choreography of a meeting ending. I watch Tessa through it, the familiar worry settling in like a splinter working its way deeper.
The pattern is consistent, and I know it the way I know my own name on a search result: once they know what I'm worth, they begin looking for the angles.
Tessa caps her pen. She aligns her legal pad with the edge of her laptop and says, "George, I'll send you the revised client notes," in exactly the same tone she used this morning when she asked if I wanted coffee.
It is such a thoroughly ordinary sentence that I find myself almost off-balance by it. As if I had braced for a wave and the water stayed flat.
She doesn't look at me any differently. Doesn't smile with any new intention behind it. Doesn't make the small unconscious adjustments that people make when they suddenly see potential where they previously saw a colleague. The adjustments I have learned, over years, to spot before they fully form.
There are none.
I recognize, with relief, that she and Evelyn just ran interference for me. They did it quietly, without fuss, without making a performance of the courtesy.
I gather my notebook slowly, giving myself time I'm not sure what to do with.
Across the room, Tessa is already at the door, exchanging a brief word with Marissa about the onboarding timeline. She is the same as she was an hour ago, before the screen turned. The same posture, the same measured economy of movement, the same expression that gives away less than it probably should.
I think, despite everything, that the most unsettling thing about Tessa Bloom is not that she might change.
It's that some part of me is already hoping she won't.
The Maddox name has a gravity I have spent years trying to move through unaffected, and I have never entirely succeeded. I stand in Conference Room A for a moment, notebook in hand, the smell of dry-erase markers still faint in the air, and I watch her disappear into the hallway with the unhurried certainty of someone who has already moved on.
It never stays simple for long. And now that Tessa Bloom knows exactly what my name is worth, the only question I cannot answer is when she'll take advantage of it.
