“It’s what I can give you right now. The gala is six weeks away. A lot can change in six weeks. If Holland continues to pull back, if she makes it clear she doesn’t want to be involved, then the decision gets easier. But I’m not going to announce a formal partnership while she’s still technically a founding partner and I don’t know where she stands. That’s not strategy. That’s recklessness.”
Laura picked up her tablet and tucked it under her arm, and when she spoke again her voice had lost its softness. “You need to figure out where she stands. Soon. Because I’m not going to keep standing in the background while you decide whether I’m worth acknowledging.”
She walked to the door. Her hand was on the handle when she stopped and looked back at him. “One more thing. The Morrisons called this morning. They asked for Holland. I had to tell them she wasn’t available. Do you know how that sounded? The legacy clients asking for the wife, and the COO having to say she’s not available. That’s the kind of thing that makes people ask questions. And the questions they ask are never about me.”
She opened the door. She didn’t slam it. She closed it with the same soft click she’d used when she entered and walked back through the open office floor with her spine straight and herexpression neutral, as if she had just finished a routine budget review.
Callum stayed behind his desk. He looked at the door for a long time after it closed. Then he looked at his phone, at the message thread with Holland that had gone silent four days ago. No responses. No read receipts. Just the last message he’d sent – We should talk about this – sitting there unanswered, a small gray bubble in a sea of white space.
He didn’t pick up the phone. He didn’t send another message. But he sat there, and he thought about what Laura had said, and he thought about what Holland might be doing with four days of silence and a mind that had always been sharper than anyone gave her credit for.
The gala was six weeks away. Laura had made her demands clear. But Holland, with her silence, was making hers as well. Sitting alone in his office, with the lake gray and flat outside his window, Callum finally understood he wasn't choosing between two women. He was choosing which half of his company to lose.
Chapter Eight
HOLLAND
The studio smelledlike good coffee and old paper—the kind of room that had absorbed years of actual work rather than the performance of it. I’d given myself a reason to be there: the Thompson foundation issue, the three inches out of plumb that David Okonkwo had flagged and that Laura had somehow walked away with credit for solving. A reasonable pretext. Finn would see past it in about thirty seconds.
He did.
“Twelve minutes,” he said, setting a mug down in front of me, “and you haven’t brought up Thompson once.” Black, no sugar. He’d remembered from college. “Want to try that again?”
I wrapped both hands around the mug. The heat pressed into my palms, grounding and specific. “I’ve been avoiding the office.”
“I gathered.”
“Four days. Maybe five now.”
Finn leaned back against the drafting table, arms crossed. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, which meant he’d been working on something physical instead of digital. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and there was a faint graphite smudge along the side of his left hand. “You don’t strike me as someone who avoids things without a reason.”
“Most people don’t see me at all,” I said. “That’s part of the problem.”
He didn’t fill the silence. He let it sit there, and I kept talking—not because I felt pressured to, but because I actually wanted to finish the thought. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. At home, going quiet meant bracing for whatever Callum would do with it. At Crestline, it meant watching Laura’s eyes drift to her phone. Here, Finn just waited.
“Callum and Laura are rewriting the narrative,” I said. “Not just the affair. I mean the company. My role. The history of how Crestline even started.”
Finn’s expression didn’t change, but something in his posture went still. “Which parts?”
“All of them. The seed money. The design language. The lakefront portfolio. He’s telling people I was supportive but not foundational. That I helped, but I didn’t create. That the aesthetic was his vision and I just executed.”
“That’s not a rewrite,” Finn said. “That’s a demolition.”
“He’s been doing it for years. I just didn’t notice how far it had gone until Laura started showing up in my seat at dinners and he didn’t correct anyone.”
Finn picked up his own mug. “I remember the cantilever competition our junior year. You stood before a room full of faculty and explained a forty-foot span with a clarity that made them uncomfortable, because they knew you were better than they were.”
I traced the rim of my mug. “That was almost a decade ago. Before all of this.”
“Doesn’t make it less true.”
The far door opened. A man came through it with a tablet tucked under one arm and a roll of trace paper under the other—tall, dark-haired, the kind of person who moves through a room without announcing himself. His eyes found me and held for a moment before he continued toward the side table.
“Finn mentioned you,” he said, setting things down. “Theo Bennett. Operations.”
He offered his hand. The handshake was brief and entirely without performance. “The Thompson underpinning. Helical piers, two-week window. Yours?”
“Mine,” I said. “Laura presented it.”
