Chapter forty-two
Epilogue: Tessa
Iset the portfolio on the table before the prospective client is finished settling into the chair.
He straightens his cuffs (both of them, twice) and I recognize the gesture immediately. A man buying time. I've seen it often enough to know what comes next: the careful arrangement of composure before someone admits they need something they didn't plan on needing.
The office is quiet, the kind of quiet that makes small sounds loud. The clock on the far wall ticks. Outside, a car passes. Somewhere in the building, a door closes.
"The board meets in six weeks," he says, without looking up.
I don't write it down. I don't need to.
His jaw tightens when he names the clause: inheritance, contingent, non-negotiable. He says it like each word costs him. "I'm not here because I want to be," he adds, and honestly, I appreciate that more than he knows. The ones who pretend they want to be here are always harder.
I slide the intake form one inch closer to him.
He glances at it, then at me, and for a moment he looks exactly like someone who has never once in his life asked for help.
"I don't need a love story," he says flatly. "I need something that works."
I hold his gaze just long enough. Long enough to let him know I've heard that before, from people who turned out to be profoundly wrong about themselves.
"No," I say, and he blinks. "The right partnership fixes it."
Across the room, I'm aware of George without looking at him. I know exactly where he's standing. I know, without looking, that he's listening.
"The goal isn't romance. It's alignment. Mutual benefit. Stability that reads as real because on one level, it is."
He taps the corner of the profile. Once, twice. Running calculations he hasn't shared with me yet.
"And sometimes," I add, quieter, "it turns into something else."
I don't elaborate. He heard thesomething elseclearly enough.
"This has worked before?" he asks. "Reliably?"
"It works," I say, "when the dynamic holds under pressure."
He looks up, because that's not the answer he came prepared for. Good. I let the silence sit for a beat, let him turn it over.
"We were designed to solve a problem," I say, and catch myself, a half-second too late, having shifted fromtheytowe.
His eyes sharpen. "Personal experience?"
The back of my neck goes warm. My voice stays even. "It's the most relevant data point I have."
From across the room, quiet enough that only I would catch it: "She's underselling it."
I do not look at George. I make this choice consciously, deliberately, and it costs me something small and specific.
The client almost smiles. "Your colleague has an opinion."
"My colleague," I say, "always has an opinion."
We return to the work. I walk him through the second folder, the practical constraints, the timeline and the optics of a first public appearance. He asks three sharp questions in rapid succession and I answer all three without hesitating, and I watch him revise his assessment of me in real time. I find I don't mind.
At some point I reach for my coffee and find it's gone cold.
