I want to see her. That’s the truth, stripped of every justification I’ve been constructing for nine days. I want to see Celeste. I want to know she’s okay. I want to sit in whatever room she’s in and feel that thing again—the recognition, the frequency, the sense that someone else speaks the language I’ve been speaking alone.
Before I can stop my thumbs, I’m googling Celeste’s headquarters. An impressive building in the ritzy part of Manhattan populates on the image search. It’s only fifteen minutes away.
Oi, this is fucking crazy.
But I’ve already swung my legs around the edge of my bed. Already rummaging through my small closet for a shirt with a collar. I’ve already decided I’m getting answers today. After nine days, two hours, and roughly four hundred phone checks since I last saw her—I put on the nicest things I own, tuck the Rolex case under my arm, and take the subway to Midtown.
The building has a security desk. Two guards, one turnstile, the kind of badge-access system that says you either belong here or you don’t. I do not. I also do not have a plan for this, which I probably should have considered during the subway ride instead of staring at my own reflection in the dark glass and rehearsing opening lines like an understudy.
A woman in a pencil skirt and headphones is walking toward the turnstile with her badge already extended. I fall in two steps behind her, close enough to seem like we’re together, far enough to not seem like I’m following her. She badges through. The turnstile clicks. I slip through in the gap before it resets, angling my body so the Rolex case looks like a delivery and my collared shirt looks like a uniform and my entire vibe says I do this every day, I’m bored of this building, please don’t look at me.
Neither guard looks at me.
Full ops success. I’m in.
The lifts are a wall of polished steel. I press the top-floor button because if you’re Celeste Brinely—if you’ve built an empire from a sketchbook and a name you inherited from your grandmother—you don’t sit on the third floor. You sit at the top. Where the view matches the altitude of your standards.
The doors open on forty-seven and the guess pays off.
It’s chaos. Beautiful chaos—the productive kind, where everyone is moving with purpose and nobody has time to question the man in the collared shirt who just stepped off the lift holding a box. Garment racks line the hallway. Fabric bolts lean against the wall like colorful drunks. Someone speed-walks past me carrying a mannequin torso under each arm, which is a sentence I never expected to witness in real life.
I keep walking. Down the main corridor, past open workrooms where sewing machines chatter and designers pin things to forms and a woman argues passionately into a phone about something called a “hand feel” which I’m choosing not to investigate. Everyone is too busy to notice me, which is the beautiful thing about creative environments—if you walk with enough confidence, you become part of the scenery.
A sign on the wall catches my eye. Sleek, minimal, the same font as the logo on the building’s exterior. It reads ‘Celeste.’ It’s only in this moment I realize how freaking confusing it is to have your company name be your name. Because where am I headed right now? Celeste’s office? Or a boardroom?
I follow the arrow anyway. The hallway narrows, the noise dims, and the energy shifts from workshop to executive. Quieter. Cleaner. The air smells different up here—less fabric dust, more ambition.
There’s a desk outside a glass-walled corner office. An executive assistant’s station, clearly—dual monitors, phone console, a small orchid that’s somehow both alive and resentful. The chair is empty. No assistant. No gatekeeper. Just an unguarded threshold between me and the woman I’ve been thinking about for nine days straight.
Through the glass, Celeste is at her desk. Head down. Reading something with the kind of puzzled intensity that suggests the document is written in hieroglyphics. Her hair is pulled back. Black blazer. Glasses I haven’t seen before—reading glasses, thin-framed, making her look like a very stylish professor who’s about to fail your entire thesis.
Oh, shit. Not good. This naughty-professor look is doing things beneath my belt, and I want my presence here to be a pleasant surprise, not predatory.
I knock on the glass.
Her head comes up. And for one unfiltered second—before the composure kicks in, before the armor slides back into position—her face does something I wasn’t prepared for. Her lips part. Her eyes widen. Her hand freezes over the document mid-turn. It’s not surprise, exactly. It’s something rawer than that. Recognition. Relief. The look of someone who’s been waiting for a knock they didn’t believe was coming.
Then she blinks, and Celeste, CEO, returns to the building.
She stands. Walks around the desk. Opens the glass door herself, and stands there looking at me with her arms not yet crossed but clearly considering it.
“How did you get up here?”
“Charisma and a collared shirt.”
“Security didn’t stop you?”
“Security was…busy.”
“Busy?” she echoes in disbelief. “That’s concerning, Saylor. Security is here to make everyone feel safe at their place of work. No strangers.”
“And they’re doing a great job. I feel very secure. I haven’t seen even one stranger on the way up.”
Her mouth twitches. She steps aside just enough to let me through, and I walk into her office. It’s everything I imagined and nothing like I’ve seen before—enormous windows, sculptures in the corner catching the light, sketches pinned to a corkboard behind her desk, the faint scent of something expensive that I can’t identify but that my brain has already filed under her. There’s a mannequin in the corner wearing what looks like a half-finished dress, draped in muslin with pins catching the sun and glowing, like tiny lightsabers.
Celeste closes the door. The lock clicks behind me.
Now she crosses her arms. “Why are you here, Saylor? Is Rina okay?”
