I didn’t make it to bed for another hour and a half. I sat on the edge of my mattress with my dress still on and my makeup still on and Hadley’s sentence repeating behind my eyes like a song I couldn’t unstick. I eventually changed. I eventually washed my face. I eventually slid under my sheet and lay there in the dark with my window open and the city humming outside it, and I didn’t sleep until almost two.
When my alarm went off Tuesday morning, I felt like I’d been hit by a small truck.
I drank water. I drank coffee. I drank more coffee. I picked out a blouse that didn’t require ironing and a skirt that didn’t require thinking about, and I left my apartment at the same time I always left my apartment. I rode the elevator down to the lobby with two other tenants whose faces I didn’t register, and I walked to Myrror with my sunglasses on because the June morning sun was already aggressive, and I needed something between me and the world.
I made it to my desk at eight ten.
I was at my desk for exactly forty-seven minutes before he showed up.
I knew it was him before I looked up. The pod went a little quieter—not all the way, just a fractional lowering of background chatter, the kind of small acoustic dip that meant somebody senior had entered the area. I kept my eyes on my screen for two more seconds because my heart had started pounding wildly, and then I made myself look up.
Sutton was standing at my desk.
He was in another suit. Dark gray today. He was holding a thin folder. He looked like a CEO stopping by a junior PM’s desk in the middle of an open-plan floor to discuss something a perfectly ordinary CEO would discuss with a perfectly ordinary junior PM.
“Joss.”
“Sutton.”
I’d never called him Sutton out loud before. I’d been calling him Sutton in my head since Friday night. The name came out of my mouth a little flatter than I’d intended, and I felt the room around us shift another fraction.
“Do you have a minute?” he asked.
“Of course.”
He didn’t sit down. There wasn’t a chair for him to sit down in. He stood at the corner of my desk with the folder in his hand and one hand resting on the partition above my monitor. The distance between us was professional in inches but not professional by any other measure.
“The engineering estimate came in,” he said. “It’s tighter than I expected. I’d like you to walk through it with the head of engineering and get back to me by end of week.”
“Sure.”
That was all the work content. The whole conversation had taken eleven seconds. He could’ve sent it as an email. He could’ve had his assistant tell my boss to tell me. Neither of those things would’ve required him to be standing at the corner of my desk on a Tuesday morning with one hand on my partition and his eyes on my face.
I knew it. He knew it. Every PM within line of sight of my pod knew it.
He didn’t leave.
He stood there another two seconds. He looked at me the way he’d looked at me last night when I’d been waiting for him to kiss me. Except now there were eleven other people in line of sight, and one of them was the senior PM, who sat two desks over and had been pretending to type for the last thirty seconds.
He pushed off the partition. “Try not to work too late, Joss.”
The same line. The same exact line. Two days in a row.
He walked away.
I held still until he was out of the pod. Then I let myself exhale. Then I made the mistake of looking up.
Mira was standing in the doorway of her office on the far side of the floor. Her arms were crossed. Her glasses were pushed up on top of her head, and from across the floor, I could see the exact line of her mouth.
She’d watched the whole thing.
She didn’t look away when our eyes met. She held my gaze for one beat. Two. Three. Then she gave me the smallest nod I’d ever received from another human being—the kind of nod that didn’t meangood joborcarry onor any of the polite things a senior leader nods at. It meantI see you.
She turned and walked back into her office.
She closed the door behind her.
I sat at my desk with the cursor blinking on my screen and my hands flat on either side of my keyboard. I felt something I hadn’t felt in any of the previous four days settle in alongside the want that had been living there since Friday morning. It was heavier than the want. It was older than the want. It was something my mother had taught me to feel before I’d known the word for it, and it had a name now, and the name wasseen.
