When and where?
Her response came in twelve seconds.
Now. Your office.
I stood up.
I crossed to the door of my office and put my head out and asked my assistant to clear my morning. She looked up from her screen and registered my face and didn’t ask any questions. She just nodded once and started rearranging my calendar. I went back into my office. I left the door open. I stood at the window with my hands in my pockets and watched the morning hit the city below me—the river catching the sun, the buildings throwing their shadows the wrong direction this early in the day—and I waited.
I knew what was coming.
I’d known what was coming since yesterday afternoon, when she’d been standing at her desk watching me through the glass wall of the conference room. I hadn’t seen her watching me. I’d known anyway. I’d known the second I came out of that meeting and looked across the floor and didn’t catch her eye, because the only reason she wouldn’t have caught my eye was that she was deciding something. And that something was why she was coming to my office, I assumed.
I was going to listen. I was going to listen, and I wasn’t going to interrupt, and I wasn’t going to fix anything, and I wasn’t going to talk her out of anything. I’d spent the last week being a man who was certain about exactly one thing, and the thing I was certain about was her. If she’d spent yesterday and today becoming certain about something herself, then my job was to hear what it was.
I heard the elevator chime down the hall. I didn’t turn around.
I heard her heels on the executive floor—the same low heels she’d worn in the meeting last Friday, I would’ve bet money on it—and I heard the small sound of her stopping outside my open door. I waited two beats. Then I turned.
She was standing in the doorway in the same blouse she’d worn last Friday morning. The same pencil skirt. The same low knot at the back of her neck. Her notebook was in one hand, held the same way she’d held it a week ago today, eleven floors below me, when she’d walked into that conference room expecting a normal meeting.
She looked exactly the way she’d looked the first time I’d noticed her.
I had a brief, ridiculous thought about how many times in my life I’d be allowed to see her for the first time again, and then I cleared my throat. “Come in.”
She came in.
“Close the door.”
She closed the door.
She stood in the middle of my office with her notebook in her hand and her eyes on my face, and we looked at each other for what felt like the longest four seconds of my life. I didn’t move toward her. She didn’t move toward me. The silence between us was the same charged silence that had been sitting in every room we’d been in for the last week, except now it had a different weight.
She spoke first. “I’m not here to break things off with you.”
I closed my eyes for one second. I opened them.
“Okay,” I said.
“I needed to say that first.”
“I’m glad you did.”
She nodded. She crossed the office. She didn’t sit in the chair I gestured to. She set her notebook on the corner of my desk and stood next to it with her hands on the surface. She looked at me across the four feet of mahogany between us and started.
“Mira pulled me into her office yesterday.”
“I know.”
She blinked. “You know?”
“I saw it coming. I’ve been waiting for it all week.”
“You’d been waiting for it.”
“Joss.” I took a breath. “I’ve been the CEO of this company for nine years, and Mira’s been running product for me for six of them. I saw her face at the reception on Wednesday. I knew she’d seen me cross the room to you. I knew that meant she’d watched us all week. And I knew that the next thing she’d do, because Mira is exactly the kind of senior woman she is, would be to pull you in and tell you what I’d want her to tell you if I had a junior PM in my org with her name on a fast track.”
“What did you think she was going to say?”
