My brain would hit a rhythm, the words would flow, and then—that sound—and suddenly I was typing “certain” four times and staring at the screen like it had personally betrayed me.
Grace got her fist approximately halfway to her mouth. Not all the way. The logistics were still beyond her. But she made contact, knuckles against lips, and the expression that crossed her face was one of profound, scholarly satisfaction.Hypothesis confirmed. Fist: edible. Further research required.
Braham was at the far end of the dining table with the sleeves of his crisp white shirt pushed up, forearms bare, on a call inwhat sounded like Portuguese. His voice was low and measured, the same cadence he used for everything—deliberate, unhurried, the kind of voice that made rooms go quiet without him raising it.
He hadn’t looked at me in seventeen minutes.
I was absolutely not watching him. I was editing. The stylus was in my hand. That was editing. The fact that I’d been holding the same page for the last ten minutes without reading a single word of it was irrelevant. The pen was in my hand.
Case closed.
He ended the call. Set the phone down. Stood. Crossed the kitchen in three long strides, detoured past the island, and set a fresh coffee beside my elbow without being asked, without a word, without even breaking stride back to the table.
The mug was bone china, thin enough to see light through, and the coffee inside was black and steaming and smelled like the good beans, not the ones I’d brought from my apartment.
I stared at it for a beat too long.
Three days. That’s how long we’d been doing this. Three days of a rhythm that had settled over the penthouse like weather—the kind you don’t notice until it’s already changed the air.
Last night, Braham had read at the other end of the couch for two straight hours. Not a book. Financial reports, dense with numbers and footnotes, the kind of reading that would have put me to sleep in six minutes flat.
He’d held Grace the entire time, one large hand supporting her back, thumb tracing slow circles between her shoulder blades while he turned pages with the other. She’d been fussy. Colicky, maybe, or just the particular brand of existential dissatisfaction that infants specialize in.
I’d been stuck on chapter eight, the scene where Drew admits he’s been lying to himself, and every time I looked up from the laptop, there was Braham—this enormous man in a custom suit,holding a seven-pound infant like she was made of something irreplaceable, reading quarterly projections with the same focus he brought to everything.
I’d looked up at one point and felt something shift in my ribcage. Not a flutter. Not a pang. It was something heavier, more tectonic, like a shelf of ice giving way after holding too long.
I didn’t have a clean word for it.
What I’d said to him instead was, “Your scotch collection is aggressively expensive and you breathe too loud and the next time you read over my shoulder you become a plot point and I kill you in chapter twelve.”
He’d absorbed it all with the patience of a man running a very long game. The corners of his mouth had done that thing—the almost-smile, the one that lived in the space between amusement and something warmer—and he’d said, “Noted,” and gone back to his reports.
Now the coffee sat beside my elbow, perfectly placed, exactly the right temperature, and the manuscript glared at me from the screen with the smug certainty of a document that knew exactly how compromised I was.
I picked up the mug. Drank. It tasted exactly right—rich, slightly bitter, the kind of coffee that existed as a delivery mechanism for caffeine and also, apparently, as evidence that Braham Wolfe paid attention to things I hadn’t said out loud.
Grace blew a raspberry at the yellow triangle. Missed. Tried again. Connected. Squealed with the triumph of someone who had just split the atom.
I set the coffee down. The manuscript stayed exactly where it was. Chapter nine wasn’t going anywhere. Drew and Eli could figure out their own problems for another hour.
Braham’s phone rang again. French this time. He answered with the same low, even cadence, and I went back to staring at the screen like it owed me money.
Three days. That’s all it had been.
It felt longer.
By mid-afternoon, the penthouse had gone quiet in that specific way expensive buildings get quiet when the only people in them are either asleep or pretending to work.
Grace was out cold in the guest suite, which meant the air carried nothing but the low city hum forty floors below and the occasional murmur of Braham wrapping up what sounded like his final call of the day.
I was at the kitchen island with my editing page on the a screen I had not read in an indeterminate amount of time. The paragraph in front of me might as well have been written in a language I’d never studied.
The reason for this was sitting at the far end of the dining table.
Braham had his sleeves pushed up to the elbows again, forearms bare on the dark wood, phone in one hand, eyes on the screen with the focused stillness he brought to everything.
His thumb scrolled. Once. Twice. The light from the eastern windows caught the corded muscle along his forearms and turned it gold. His jaw was set at that angle—not tight, just present, the way a mountain is present—and the five-o’clock shadow along it had deepened from suggestion to fact.
