She lowered her hand.
“I have ideas,” she said.
“What kind of ideas?”
“Ideas I’ve been carrying for a while. Some of them are mine, not Myrror’s. They’ve been Myrror-shaped for fourteen months because I work here, but they don’t have to be. I want to find out what they are when they’re not Myrror-shaped anymore.”
“Then go find out.”
“Okay.”
“I have one more question.”
“What’s that?”
“How long?”
She tilted her head.
“How long before I’m allowed to take you out to dinner like a person who isn’t your boss?”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were filled with tears.
“A month,” she said. “Give me a month.”
“You have it.”
“You can wait a month?”
“It won’t be easy. But I’ll give you as long as you need.”
She nodded.
The silence came back. It had a different weight now than it had three minutes ago. The conversation was over. The decision was made. And there was one more thing she hadn’t said yet that I knew she was about to say, because she’d been working her way toward it the whole time she’d been standing in my office. I could see it in her expression.
“I love you,” she said.
I let the words settle over me. I let myself stand there for one second longer than I needed to, looking at her across my desk in her last-Friday blouse with her notebook on the corner and her hands flat on the wood, and I let it be true.
“I’ve loved you,” I said, “since you said hi on the rooftop.”
Her face did something I couldn’t put a name to. It was somewhere between laughter and tears and the kind of relief a person feels when she’s been expecting bad news and gets something else entirely.
“That fast?” she asked.
“That fast.”
I crossed the office. I came around the desk and I pulled her against my chest, and her arms went around me. Her face pressed against the side of my throat, and I held her in the morning sun in my office on the eighteenth floor of the building she was about to leave.
I let myself think the thing I’d been holding all week.
Everything I’d built, I’d built for this.
I’d built the company. I’d built the empire. I’d built the apartment, the bank accounts, the life. I’d built them for a reason I hadn’t been able to name for nine years, and now the reason was in my arms. The reason had a name, and the reason was going to leave my building this afternoon and figure out the next part of her own life by herself. I was going to wait one month, and then I was going to ask her to dinner. After that, we were going to do this the right way.
I held her tighter.
She held me back.
