I scrawled a list, my handwriting degenerating the further my mind ran ahead. Lumber prices, custom supports, engineer fees—it was an avalanche, and we didn’t even know if the peak had broken yet.
Elena’s tone softened, maybe hearing the strain. “My junior associate is already on the way for an emergency assessment. I’ll be along soon. Let’s not panic just yet, okay?”
Harper leaned in, palms pressed to the edge of the table, eyes moving down her checklist. “Anything else we need right now?”
Nobody spoke. It felt like there should be a bell or a buzzer to signal the moment a place crosses from manageable chaos into open crisis.
“Meeting adjourned,” Harper said, softer this time.
Joe gathered his things, legal pad under arm, mouth pressed flat. The look he shot me was absolute, wordless commiseration. He clapped my shoulder, hard enough that I felt it even after he left the room.
Jules lingered, or maybe just hesitated. “Harper, Chase, keep me in the loop. Anything, even a hunch, I need it.”
“You’ll have it,” Harper replied. “Thanks, Jules.”
Then the accountant left too. Suddenly, the room felt twice as large, twice as empty. Harper rubbed at the crease between her brows, shoulders slumping for the first time all day.
My laptop screen reflected the overhead glare. In the glass, I caught the lines carved deeper than usual at the corners of Harper’s mouth, the telltale tightness of someone holding it together for everyone else. The way she fielded questions, never let a detail fall, never once let panic into her voice. Even now, with our history crackling in the air and half the future of the Coleridge legacy shaking overhead, she held the line.
Damn, she was good.
There were moments I envied it, her ability to dig in and manage disaster after disaster, the way she radiated command and reassurance even when I knew—when I could feel—it was costing her something. I thought of myself, spinning between site visits and late nights, always a half-step from unraveling. With Harper, there was no unraveling. Just motion. Always forward. Even now, crisis mode slipping away, she looked almost luminous. Tired, but absolutely in her element.
“Never a dull moment.” I straightened my chaos of papers into some semblance of order. “We should start charging extra for the thrill factor.”
She laughed, a bright sound that finally cracked the tension in the room. “Maybe we can call it an adventure package.”
I smiled, and the weight shifted just enough to breathe again. She caught my eye and held it, something soft and familiar warming the space between us.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said.
Her confidence nudged at the knot in my chest. “I know. It’s just… a lot.”
She nodded, moving closer. There was something reassuring in the way she stood so close, like all those walls weren’t crumbling. “You’re doing everything you can, Chase. We’ll get through this.”
“I hope you still feel that way when we’re replacing half the building.”
She swallowed audibly and raised her chin as if readying herself for bad news. “Do you blame me?”
I cocked my head, dumbfounded. “Why would I blame you for termite damage?”
She laughed, but it came out shaky. “Well, if not blame, then you owe me a ‘I told you so’. This is exactly what you warned me about when we agreed to do the room block floor by floor.”
I mustered a smile and couldn’t resist running a knuckle down the smooth skin of her arm. “You just said it. We agreed. Blame never even entered my mind, so put it out of yours, okay?”
“I am sorry, though.”
“So am I. These things happen. Now we have to figure out where to go from here.”
I reached for a scattered folder just as she did. Our hands met atop the faded architectural rendering, fingers brushing in a potent tangle of intent and accident.
We both froze.
Time caught its breath.
Her eyes, dark as wet earth, met mine. Something hungry, raw, and familiar flared up in the space between us. The conference room vanished, and there was only the shock of her skin on mine and a cascade of memories I couldn’t bury. The soft exhale of her breath, the faint tremble in my own hand. For half a heartbeat, the rest of it—shoring, schedules, the imminent doom—fell away. I dropped my eyes to her mouth and saw, crystal clear, the way her lips tasted, how her lips always curled up at the corners when she wasn’t on guard.
The pull was tidal. I leaned in before I even registeredit. Her hand turned up under mine, just barely, in an unspoken question I ached to answer.
