[Edmund’s POV]
The thing about arriving before anyone else is that for twenty-two minutes, the building belongs to me and the coffee machine. No ringing phones, no calendar alerts, no James asking about quarterly projections—just the hum of the heating and the silence of a place that hasn't started pretending yet.
I set two mugs on the counter. Stare at them, the way I do every single morning, and put one back.
Four years since we signed the lease—James with his spreadsheets, me with whatever the opposite of spreadsheets is. Ashford & Hale, because his name tested better in focus groups and mine sounded like a furniture catalogue.
He handles numbers, I handle people. Between us, we've built something that works, mostly because we argue about everything except the things that matter.
The photo on my shelf catches the early light—Oliver mid-laugh, green eyes enormous, holding a fistful of grass. Rosalind would have framed it better, would've known the morning sun washes that corner out at seven-fifteen.
She knew things like that. I still set two mugs out and I still catch myself doing it too late.
My phone buzzes—Mum, confirming she'll have Oliver at nursery by nine. Margaret Hale: punctual, opinionated, endlessly generous in the specific way that comes with detailed feedback on my diet, my hours, and my hiring decisions.
She thinks I work too much, and she's right. She also thinks Oliver needs a firmer bedtime routine, which—also right, but I'm not giving her the satisfaction of hearing that from me.
I open my laptop and the first thing I see is the client brief, reformatted and pinned to the shared drive. Cora's work—clean headers, consistent margins, not a comma out of place.
Two weeks in and she runs this office like she built it. No degree, no corporate background, and she handles my calendar better than the last three assistants combined.
But there's something underneath the competence. She's sharp, she's fast, she's guarded—not shy, not cold, guarded the way a person is when they've decided exactly how much of themselves is available and the rest is behind a locked door.
I notice it in the pauses before she answers anything personal, the way she reroutes every conversation back to work. It nags at me, and I know exactly why, and I'm ignoring it with the dedication of an Olympic athlete.
"You look like a man who's been staring at a photograph for too long." James drops into the chair across from me, takeaway bag in hand, radiating the confidence that never once was questioned.
"I was reviewing the client brief." I close the laptop a beat too slow, which James notices and remembers like he collects ammunition the way other people collect stamps.
"Right." He pulls out two sandwiches and slides one across. "So—your new hire. How's that going?"
"She's excellent." I unwrap the sandwich because it's easier than the eye contact James is currently engineering. "Best assistant I've had."
"Bold claim for someone who listed waitressing as primary experience." He bites into his sandwich like making a point. "I'm not saying you're wrong—I'm saying the interview was four minutes long."
"Three minutes." I hold up three fingers for emphasis. "And she was better in three than most candidates in thirty."
"Edmund Hale, patron saint of gut decisions." He grins—the grin that got us our first three clients, weapons-grade charm with plausible deniability. "Speaking of office dynamics—have you noticed Elisa's been in a mood?"
"Elisa's always in a mood." I reach for my coffee, which has gone cold while I wasn't paying attention. "It's part of her management style."
"A specific mood, Edmund. Started right around the time your new assistant showed up." He points at me with a crisp. "I'm just observing."
"Observe quieter." I wave it off because Elisa Pemberton's moods are not something I have bandwidth for between the Whitmore pitch and Oliver's dental appointment and the fact that I still can't figure out why my assistant flinches whenever someone stands behind her.
"The Whitmore pitch—we need to talk timeline." James wipes his hands on a napkin, suddenly all business. "They moved the presentation to next Thursday."
"Next Thursday." My hand stops halfway to the coffee, the sandwich forgotten on the desk. "That's eight days, James."
"Which is why I'm telling you now, over a sandwich, like a good business partner." He leans back and spreads his arms wide. "Late nights, weekends, that face you're making—eight straight days of it."
"I'll talk to Cora about adjusting the schedule." I rub the back of my neck, already calculating which evenings Mum can take Oliver and which ones she'll remind me she's not his nanny.
"Your waitress-turned-executive-assistant." He says it warmly, teasing the edges. "I like her. She told me my tie was inside out on Tuesday and didn't blink."
That sounds exactly like her—direct, unbothered, already moving on before you've processed what happened. I almost laugh, and the almost is its own kind of diagnostic I'm choosing not to examine.
The afternoon is calls and emails, and then Cora's at my door with a stack of printed briefs. She reaches across my desk to set them down, and her sleeve rides up—two inches, maybe three.
Fading bruises on her inner forearm. Yellow-green at the edges, darker toward the centre, shaped the way bruises are shaped when they come from fingers gripping too hard.
My eyes find them before my brain catches up. She sees me looking, and the sleeve comes down—smooth, automatic, the gesture done a thousand times and learned how to make it look like nothing.
"The Whitmore headers need your sign-off by five." Her voice doesn't waver, not a fraction. "Should I hold your four o'clock?"
"Yes. Hold it." I meet her eyes, and whatever she reads in mine makes her shoulders shift a quarter of an inch higher.
She nods and walks back to her desk with the posture that is immaculate, yet looks like it weighs her to the ground. I don't ask the question, and it sits behind my ribs for the rest of the day.
Oliver is asleep by eight-fifteen—personal record, almost certainly a trap. I sit on the edge of his bed with his hand curled around my finger and try to remember the last time my thoughts went quiet.
They won't stop circling. Not the Whitmore pitch, not the bruises—though those are in the rotation now, persistent, impossible to put down.
It's the thing from Friday that keeps surfacing. Cora, crouched to Oliver's height, listening to him describe Lightning's top speed with an expression I've only seen once before—Rosalind, the first time they placed the ultrasound image in her hands.
Not attention. Something beneath it, raw and private, like watching someone stare at a photograph of a house they grew up in and can never go back to.
Oliver shifts in his sleep, fingers tightening around mine. I brush the hair from his forehead, my thumb passing the crescent birthmark below his ear—his little moon, Mum calls it.
Cora held his toy car like it was made of something precious, and her eyes did the thing they do when she thinks nobody is watching. I don't know what it means, and I can't stop turning it over in my hands.