Page 22
She saw Norden was underneath her.
Not walking toward the scaffolding. Already there, planted where she’d have landed if the slip had gone the other way, and there was no version of physics that put him there in the time it had taken her boot to find purchase again. He’d been across the atrium two seconds ago — near the concierge desk, thirty feet off with a wall of guests between them. Now he was directly below her, close enough that she could see his jaw working, the calm costing him more than usual, and there was no version of the last two seconds that explained how he’d covered that ground. No footsteps. No blur at the edge of her vision. One place, then another, nothing connecting them.
She’d have called it a trick of the light if the light in question hadn’t been broad daylight pouring through forty feet of glass, and if she trusted her own eyes even a fraction less than she did.
She looked down at him.
“I had it.”
“I know.” He didn’t move.
“You can go back to your building now. I’m not going to fall.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why are you standing there.”
“Because you might.”
The words landed plain and certain, and the air between them went warmer — not the thermostat’s doing, no matter what the vents claimed credit for, but the way he was looking at her, not at the scaffolding, not at the brace, at her, like she was the only unstable thing in the building worth tracking.
“That’s not an answer. That’s a deflection wearing an answer’s clothes.”
“It’s both. I’ve never seen a reason those two had to be mutually exclusive.”
“Most men would at least pretend the concern was about liability.”
“I’m not most men.”
“You keep saying that like it’s news.”
“It keeps being true, so I keep saying it. Consistency.” He didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t do any of the things a normal person did to fill silence. “You want me to pretend I wasn’t standing here. I could do that. I’d be lying, and you’d know it, and we’d both waste time on the pretending.”
“I don’t have time to waste. I have a bracket to fix.”
“Then fix it. I’m not stopping you.”
“You’re standing directly under me. That’s the definition of stopping me, technically speaking.”
“I’m standing directly under you in case you need stopping from hitting the floor. And I’d think a woman this precise about measurements would appreciate it.”
She opened her mouth to tell him exactly what she thought of men who hovered. The sentence left without her. She closed her mouth, went back to her measurements, and spent the next forty minutes intensely aware of him not moving from that spot — present the way wind was present, not asking permission, not going anywhere.
She wrapped up the measurements faster than the work honestly deserved, packed her tools with more clatter than necessary, and started down the scaffolding rungs without looking at him again, mostly on principle.
This wasn’t the men who’d guarded her before, back when she could afford men who guarded things, the ones who stood close because it made them feel important. Norden hadn’t wanted her to notice him at all. He’d simply been where the danger theoretically was, and stayed, and would keep doing that whether she thanked him for it or not — which was, she decided, boots finally flat on marble, a deeply inconvenient thing to have learned about a man.
By the time her boots hit marble, he’d gone. The atrium read larger for it, in a way she declined to examine any further than she’d examined anything else that entire day. She had a bracket to fix and a pulse doing an inconvenient thing every time she thought about the forty minutes, and only one of those two problems was currently fixable.
The atrium emptied out by nine that night — guests filtered up to their rooms, the lobby down to one person at the front desk and a handful of security walking a schedule she hadn’t bothered learning. She let herself in through the service corridor with the credential Jen had handed her on day one, laminated and precise, and carried the first finished test panel across the marble by hand.
A security guard took one look at the blanket-wrapped shape in her arms and asked, with real concern, whether she was moving a body. She told him it was worse. It was art. He didn’t look reassured. She didn’t blame him — eleven hours of work wrapped in moving blankets at nine p.m. probably did look like a crime in progress, and she made a mental note to bring a moving dolly next time, for the optics if nothing else.
She propped it against the scaffolding base, unwound the blankets one at a time, and stepped back to check her own work with the same cold eye she’d have used on anyone else’s — arms crossed, weight on one hip, ready to find fault and fix it before morning if she had to.
She didn’t find anything wrong with it. That almost never happened, and when it did happen, she’d learned not to trust it right away — good instincts, checked twice.
Every finished piece looked different once it left the furnace — that part never changed, six years running, a small manageable disappointment she’d learned to expect and route around. This one didn’t disappoint. The panel caught the low security lighting and did what she hadn’t engineered, hadn’t planned for, hadn’t seen a single calculation predict. Warmth moved through the glass with no obvious source — not the room, not the fixture overhead, nothing she could point to and blame.
