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"I'm not admitting anything."

"You left a book on the chair for her. With a note." He practically yells. "A handwritten note, Danny. You hand wrote something. For a woman. On the back of a receipt. You once sent a formal email to reject someone's napkin-folding technique."

"Yeah, but the napkins were wrong."

"The napkins were fine. You were in a mood." He waves his hand. "Not the point. The point is that the man I've known for fifteen years does not handwrite notes to women. The man I've known for fifteen years does not buy books about feelings and have opinions about fictional families and show up early and leave late and—"

"Jagger."

"DANNY."

"Stop talking."

"No." He says it cheerfully. "I will not stop talking. Because this is the best thing that's happened in this building since you opened it, and I have been waiting years for you to act like a human being, so no, I'm going to enjoy every second of this."

Caleb looks at me across the table. His face is neutral — it's always neutral — but his eyes are doing the thing they do when he's processing something and has decided not to share his conclusion yet.

"She's good," he says. Two words. From Caleb, that's a speech.

"You've met her?"

"I've observed her." Which for Caleb means he's run a full background assessment and psychological profile and probably knows her blood type. "She's steady. Doesn't rattle. Good under pressure." A pause. "She'd have to be."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you're a lot of pressure, Danny."

The table goes quiet for a second.

Jagger doubles over laughing. “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to him, Caleb.”

"It wasn't nice. It was an assessment."

"It was both. I'm savoring it." I smile.

“Woah, what was that?” Jagger says.

“What?” I reply, confused.

“Did you- did you just smile at something that was said?”

“Yeah? I have emotions, sometimes I smile.”

“Nah, no way. Danny you’ve smiled less and less as the years have gone on. I was worried you’d start to forget how to.”

I wave Jagger off and finish my whiskey. I look at the three men across from me — Jagger with his grin, Caleb with his silence, Elliot with his tablet and his numbers — and I don't say the thing they're waiting for me to say. Not yet. I don't have the words for it and I'm not going to fake them to win Jagger a bet.

But I don't deny it either.

And the not-denying sits between us like an answer.

Monday morning always means an intense security meeting with Caleb.

Caleb has the Gala schematics spread across my desk — floor plans, camera angles, personnel layouts. This is the kind of work I usually find satisfying. Clean problems with clean solutions. Where to put the bodies, how to cover the sightlines, the mathematics of keeping hundreds of people safe in a building designed to feel intimate.

"Standard layout is twelve on the floor, eight perimeter, four upstairs," Caleb says, running his finger along the floor plan. "We've used this for the last three galas. Zero incidents."

"I want sixteen on the floor."