Chapter thirty-two
Tessa
Iarrive at the ERS office forty minutes before anyone else. My badge swipes with a soft click, and the lobby greats me. Grey carpet, grey light, the silence of a building before the staff arrive.
The fluorescents hum overhead. I stand under them for a moment, letting the cold light settle over everything.
I pull up three client files at once. I don't need all three, and some part of me knows that, but blank screen space has started to feel like an accusation.
The coffee machine in the break room gurgles and spits through its cycle, and the sound of it almost steadies me.
I pour a cup and wrap both hands around it and stand there being a normal person having a normal morning, which works for approximately forty seconds.
Work, I remind myself, heading back to my desk.I'm here to work.
I open Camden and Lila's media summary and read the same paragraph twice without retaining a single word. The letters are just shapes. I close it and open it again.
On my second coffee run I take the long hallway route.
George's name is on the frosted glass of his office door, printed in the same clean sans-serif it has always been. It's such an ordinary thing. Just letters. Just a name.
I stop walking. Not for long, just for a second.
I know he's not coming in today. I know this. And yet some stupid, optimistic chamber of my chest half-expects the door to open anyway, expects him to appear with his coffee and his slightly-wrong collar and whatever low-grade disaster he'd be in the middle of narrating.
The hallway gives me nothing back.
I keep walking. I keep my cup level. I do not look behind me.
Back at my desk, I finally manage to read the Camden and Lila summary properly, and the news is good. The press cycle has softened, the narrative has shifted, the machine is working. I feel the mild, competent satisfaction of a doctor reviewing a clean scan. Professional. Contained. Completely fine.
Arthur and Lindsay's file shows a recovery curve faster than I projected, and I let myself have a small, private moment of pride about that, the quiet kind that doesn't need an audience.
One of our newest couples has requested a contract extension. Which means the system works. Which means I built something real, something that actually functions, something that holds people together.
I close the folder and rest my hands flat on the desk and wait for the satisfaction to arrive properly.
It doesn't.
I have spent years helping people choose each other, I think,and I am apparently catastrophically bad at being chosen.
The thought doesn't arrive with any particular drama. It just settles there, factual and unhurried, which is somehow so much worse than if it had hurt loudly.
Marissa materialises at the edge of my desk with her lanyard still swinging, freshly badged-in, carrying the specific energy of someone who has had one coffee too many already. "Ready for wedding weekend chaos?"
I smile the smile I have been smiling since roughly the age of nine, the one that is warm and competent and reveals nothing. "Always."
She keeps walking, already onto her next thought, her voice trailing back to me about logistics I'm not tracking. I watch her go and think:the mask is the most reliable thing about me.
I glance back at my screen. The sentence I just typed in the Camden file is a masterpiece of saying absolutely nothing. I delete it without ceremony.
My phone lights up with Eleanor's name. It's a voice note, thirty-seven seconds. I press play.
Her voice is giddy and slightly breathless, the way she gets when she's been up too late being happy. She tells me Daniel reorganized the entire welcome bag system at midnight and made a spreadsheet,Tessa, a spreadsheet, and she sounds so completely, helplessly in love with this man and his midnight spreadsheets that I have to set the phone face-down on the desk.
I stare at the ceiling tiles.
You deserve this, I think.You deserve someone who makes spreadsheets at midnight for you.
