“That’s not acceptable.”
“It’s not negotiable.”
Rising to my feet, I crossed to the windows, dragging a hand down my face as the city blurred beyond the glass. “We can’t just sit on our hands. There has to be a way to accelerate this.”
“There isn’t,” Elena replied calmly. “Not from our side.”
I turned back to her. “We corrected the error. What else do they want?”
“Time,” she said. “And proof that the problem isn’t systemic.”
The word lodged under my ribs.Systemic. As if the company we had built could be reduced to a compliance failure.
“As long as this review is active,” she continued, “they will assume risk. And risk slows everything down.”
I let out a breath that felt scraped raw. “We can’t afford slow.”
“No,” she agreed. “Which is why we stop trying to control the review and focus on what wecancontrol.”
I stared at her.
She held my gaze, unflinching. “Private development,” she continued. “Bridge financing. Reallocating crews. Preserving liquidity. We ride it out.”
Ride it out.The words didn’t sit right. “That sounds like waiting.”
“It sounds like surviving,” she corrected.
The low hum beyond the glass pressed in, steady and indifferent.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, Henry’s voice surfaced again—the careful distance, the refusal to open a door I didn’t know how to knock on. Control slipping in one place was one thing, but control slipping everywhere felt like failure.
“We built this to withstand pressure,” I said. “If we just sit here?—”
“We are not sitting,” Elena cut in, more forceful now. “We areadapting.” Her tone softened, but her eyes did not. “This is not just on you, Sebastian—it’s on all of us.”
It felt like it was.
Like if I had caught it sooner, tightened the process, burned that template the second it was approved, demanded better oversight, demanded sharper eyes, and demanded perfection the way I always did, then maybe this wouldn’t be happening. Maybe the review wouldn’t be expanding. Maybe the crews wouldn’t be idle, and the money wouldn’t be bleeding out by the hour, and the company wouldn’t be standing here waiting to be judged.
You didn’t keep them safe.
This wasn’t the plan.
This wasn’t the fucking plan.
CHAPTER TEN
ETHAN
The week after the art exhibit felt too calm.
Henry had flown back to the States to see his dad. He seemed to be doing okay, and I thought he might finally be close to agreeing to talk to someone. A professional. Someone who could actually help him deal. He’d talked to Mateo too, and that seemed… fine. Even though the last time I’d seen Mateo leave our apartment, he’d looked like a kicked puppy again.
And then there was Sebastian and me. A whole different disaster.
I had no idea where we stood. I hadn’t spotted him on the running trail again, and most of our office interactions were distant—well, our version of distant. Not nods, because we didn’t do nods, but the winks and lip bites we threw at each other from across the room weren’t actual intimacy.
And they shouldn’t have been.
