Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry.
I press my palms against my eyes and count to ten.
It takes me two hours to go back.
Two hours after reading, rereading, and pacing the room, all while arguing with myself in a voice that sometimes sounds like mine, sometimes, my father’s, and sometimes, Maren’s. Two hours of weighing options that aren’t really options — stay and comply, or leave and face Landon with no salary and no savings and a broken contract that adds $500,000 to the debt I already can’t pay.
The math remains the same. It always equalsstay.
But staying doesn’t mean silence, and it doesn’t mean compliance without comprehension. I can’t fight the contract, but I can understand the punishment, and understanding requires information, and information requires asking.
I go back to his office and knock harder this time.
“Come in.”
I open the door.
He’s where I left him, right behind the desk. The flat assessment from this morning is gone. In its place is amusement.
He knows what’s in that contract. He knows I calculated the trap and found no exit and came back anyway, and the knowledge is splashed all over his smug face.
“You read the contract,” he says. Not a question.
“Every page.”
“And?”
“And I understand that I don’t have leverage here. You made sure of that.”
He doesn’t even bother denying it. His eyes gleam.
“I’m not here to argue the terms,” I say. “I’m here to understand what I did wrong. Specifically. So, I don’t do it again.”
He stands.
The motion is fluid — the same controlled movement from the dinner, the same economy of force. But this time I’m not thirty feet away across a candlelit table. I’m right across the desk, and then he’s moving around it, and the six feet become four, then three, then?—
He stops. Close. Too close. Close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to maintain eye contact.
He smells of citrus and wood. Clean and dark.
His eyes look down into mine. At this distance I see things the daylight didn’t reveal from across the desk. The flecks of silver in the blue. The thickness of his lashes, dark against the pale irises. The faint lines at the corners of his eyes that suggest he might, somewhere in the private history of his face, have smiled once.
“You disobeyed a direct order,” he says. His voice is low, lower than necessary, pitched for proximity, for the space between two people who are standing too close. “You were told to stay on the upper floor. You chose not to. And that choice cost me more than you can imagine.”
“I was helping your daughter.”
“I know what you were doing. The intent doesn’t change the consequence.”
“What consequence? What happened after I left that room?”
He doesn’t answer. The silence fills the space between us. But at this distance, the silence has a heartbeat. I see the pulse in his throat.
“You should be grateful,” he says, “that the only consequence for you is restricted movement.”
The words land soft and hard at the same time — soft in delivery, hard in implication.The only consequence.As if there were other options. Other punishments or things he could have done and chose not to, and the choosing is supposed to be a mercy.
But it’s the way he says it. That’s what undoes me.
