I was going to tell him in the morning.
I was going to walk into his office on Friday—one week to the day from the meeting where I’d first met him—and I was going to say the thing I had to say to him, and I was going to let him answer it however he was going to answer it. We’d figure out what came next together. Or apart. I didn’t know which yet.
I set the phone down on the coffee table, face up.
Then I sat on the couch in the dark for a long time and let myself feel everything I’d been refusing to feel since that morning. I didn’t cry, and I didn’t text him, and I didn’t move from the couch until the city outside my window was fully dark.
10
SUTTON
I’d been at my desk since 6:20, and I hadn’t done a useful thing in any of the hours since.
The board prep was open on my second monitor. The licensing review was open on my first. My assistant had sent me three follow-up notes from yesterday afternoon’s partner calls, and I’d opened each of them, read the first sentence, and not retained the second. The coffee on my desk had gone cold an hour ago.
I’d been holding it together all week.
I knew I had. I’d been watching myself do it from a slight distance for six days now—the meetings, the calls, the decisions, the small managerial noises a CEO makes when he’s running a company. I’d made all the noises. I’d run the company. I’d closed two deals on Tuesday and approved a hiring plan on Wednesday and given a board chair forty-five minutes of my undivided attention yesterday afternoon while the woman who’d rocked my world was sitting at her desk like everything was normal.
And nobody had noticed.
Nobody had noticed that the man at the head of the table this week was not the same man who’d been at the head of the tablelast week. I’d been giving the company exactly what it expected from me, in the exact tone it expected to receive it in, and the company had taken what I gave it and gone about its business.
The only person who’d noticed was Beckett.
He’d called me Tuesday afternoon and asked what I’d done after the dinner Monday night. I’d told him. He’d asked what I was planning to do about it. I’d told him I didn’t know.
He’d been quiet for a long second, and then he’d said, “Welcome to the club” in a tone of voice I’d been giving him grief about.
I’d been giving him grief because just weeks ago, Beckett had bought a building. He’d bought Pixel Lofts on a gut feeling. That was the whole reason. He’d been telling me for years that he remembered what it had felt like to be a broke twenty-three-year-old, and one afternoon in the spring, he’d called me from his car to tell me he was buying a mid-rise condo building. Young professionals in this city deserved better than what he’d had, he’d said.
I’d told him on the phone it was the dumbest business decision he’d ever made. He’d taken the comment with the unbothered cheer of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t need me to understand it.
Then he met Hadley. She’d been running leasing at the building for a year before he bought it—came with the property, the way good people sometimes do. Beckett told me later he’d known the second he saw her. He’d gone in to walk the units with his inspector and she’d been in the leasing office with her hair in a braid and a stack of renewal letters she was hand-signing, and something about the way she’d looked up at him had rearranged his entire afternoon.
He’d called me that night, slightly drunk, and told me he was going to marry a woman whose last name he hadn’t yetconfirmed. That had been five weeks ago. Suddenly, him buying that building on impulse made perfect sense.
I understood it all now.
I understood it now because if Joss had told me on Wednesday night, between the second and third floor of the executive elevator, that she wanted something I had no business buying, I’d have written the check before we hit the eighteenth floor. I understood it because the things I’d thought were important last Friday morning at 8:55—the licensing pipeline, the Q3 close, the board’s enthusiasm about a possible acquisition discussion next quarter—had not become less important to me over the past week. They’d just stopped being the thing I was building everything for.
The thing I was building everything for was eleven floors below me.
I’d known it Friday night on the rooftop, when she’d looked up at me with her shoes off and her feet tucked under her and answered my arrival with one of the best sentences I’d heard in years.
I’d known it Monday night in her hallway, when I’d had my hand on her jaw and made the only correct decision a man in my position could make, which was not to kiss her. Because if I’d kissed her there I would not have left.
I’d known it Wednesday in the conference room, in a way that had reorganized my understanding of what I was born to do.
And now it was Friday again, and I’d been at my desk since 6:20, and I had no idea where any of this was going next.
My phone lit up on my desk. I didn’t look at it right away. I made myself finish the email I was halfway through pretending to read. Then I picked the phone up.
Can we talk?
Three words. From Joss.
I read them once. I read them again. I put the phone down and looked at it for a beat, and then I picked it back up and typed.
