[Annie’s POV]
Theo's office smells like peanut sauce and classified financial crimes. Thai containers line the desk between shell company filings, chopsticks still in their wrappers.
"I assumed you hadn't eaten." He slides a container of pad see ew toward me without looking up. He's right—my last meal was a granola bar of unknown vintage around two PM—and the casual domesticity of noticing does something inconvenient to my chest.
"Bold assumption." I snap the chopsticks apart and shove noodles into my mouth. "What if I'd had a five-course dinner before this?"
"You didn't." He finally looks up, and the certainty on his face tells me he's been studying my patterns. "Your blood sugar crashes around four—you get a line between your eyebrows and start arguing with inanimate objects."
"I argued with the printer once." I chew aggressively to avoid acknowledging that he's memorized my metabolic schedule.
"Twice." He pushes a second container toward me with the back of his pen. "The copier last Tuesday also counts."
The PI's preliminary findings cover every surface—transaction dates, LLC registrations, payment flows tracing Jake's money through three shell companies.
"The pharmacy tech was paid through Greystone Holdings, registered in Delaware six weeks before the hearing." He taps the filing date. "Same registered agent as the LLC that paid the neighbor."
"Same day of registration." I pull the page closer, my strategist brain kicking alive. "Both filed within forty-eight hours—that's not coincidence, that's a production schedule."
"Good catch." He leans past me to read the dates, and the strip of heat between his chest and my back registers like a weather event I'm aggressively ignoring.
"There's a gap, though." He reaches past me, forearm brushing mine, pulling a bank statement from the stack. "Payments start six weeks out, but the rehab email was backdated to six months prior."
"Because fabricating digital records is easier than fabricating financial ones." I turn my head and he's right there—close enough to see the shadow along his jaw. "The email timestamp is the weak link."
"Already flagged it for Nina." His voice is lower than IP addresses require. "She can crack the timestamp in a week if the ISP cooperates."
"They'll cooperate." I turn back to the documents because this distance is a fire hazard. "Nobody shields a falsified rehab inquiry once subpoenas land."
The food goes cold while we work. Two hours dissolve into payment trails and the seamless rhythm of two brains running parallel calculations.
"You're good at this." He says it without looking up. "The pattern recognition—you always were."
"Don't compliment me while I'm destroying your competitor's defense strategy." I flip a page. "It's confusing."
"How's Sarah handling the visits?" He asks it during a lull, pen going still, and the question sounds differently than it would from anyone else.
"She adapts." I straighten papers that don't need straightening. "Performs for the social worker, appropriate affect—then whispers when can I come home and I keep saying soon like the word still means something."
"Does she say anything about Jake?" His voice is careful, testing a boundary he knows isn't his to cross.
"No, she doesn’t." My fingers press into the stack of filings. "I don’t know if I should be alarmed by that or not."
His thumb traces the edge of the legal pad, back and forth—the first ungoverned gesture I've seen from this man.
"I keep thinking about the hallway," he says quietly. "She grabbed my hand and shoved that drawing at me and said it's very important—not like a kid showing off, like she was entrusting me with classified information."
"She does that." My fingers stop on the documents. "Assigns weight to things adults would dismiss—it's her superpower and her curse."
"My mother was like that." He sets the pen down carefully. "She died when I was eleven. Before that, she'd invent animals—a cat that could fly, a dog that sang opera."
My throat closes. Sparkle Inferno—fire and glitter, because both kinds are real. A four-year-old inheriting impossible creatures from a grandmother she'll never meet.
"Theo." My voice comes out rough around the edges. "Sarah's dragon-cat breathes fire and glitter simultaneously. She was very firm about the glitter being non-negotiable."
His eyes go bright—not wet, but luminous, the wattage turned up to something I wasn't braced for. His mouth works once around nothing.
"I missed everything." His thumb has stopped moving. "First steps, first words, four years of dragon-cats and I didn't even know she existed."
"Her first word was no." The sentence bypasses my filtration system entirely. "Deployed at nine months and hasn't stopped since."
"Of course it was." His mouth pulls sideways, and the amusement in his voice is so unguarded I almost don't recognize him. "What was her second word?"
"More." I almost smile despite myself. "Which tells you everything you need to know about her negotiation style—she comes by it honestly."
His laugh—sudden, unguarded, startled out of him—lands behind my ribs and takes up residence. Warmer and more reckless than anything I was prepared for.
The documents sit forgotten between cold pad Thai and colder coffee. The distance has been shrinking all evening—an inch lost to shell companies, another to Sarah, another to that laugh.
He's right there. Thai sauce on his sleeve, pen behind his ear, looking at me the way he did on that terrace five years ago—like I'm the only problem he wants to spend all night solving.
I kiss him. Slowly, crossing the distance with my eyes open until the last second. His mouth is warm and tastes like peanut sauce and my brain has officially left the building.
His hand comes up to my jaw—thumb tracing my cheekbone with a gentleness that stutters my breath. My fingers curl into his shirt, his heartbeat hammering against my knuckles, rapid and unstrategized.
His mouth opens against mine and the kiss deepens into five years of silence and one night neither of us forgot. His other hand finds my hip, pulling me closer by increments so gradual they feel like questions my body keeps answering yes.
His thumb sweeps down my neck and my spine arches into him. The sound I make against his mouth is quiet, involuntary, mortifying—and I don't care because his breath has gone ragged and his fingers are tightening on my hip.
I pull back. His hand stays on my jaw one more heartbeat—thumb against my pulse—before it drops.
"We can't do this." My voice sounds like someone dragged it across concrete. "You're engaged, Theo."
The word fills every inch of air between us. He doesn't argue, doesn't explain, doesn't reach for me again—just looks at me with everything his mouth won't say written in the tight line of his jaw.
I pick up my bag and the strap catches on my fingers. "Goodnight, Theo." He doesn't answer, and I don't look back—looking back is a skill Sarah already mastered and I'm still learning to survive.
In the elevator, I press my forehead against cold metal and breathe. My lips are still warm, my pulse still wrong, and the fourteenth floor is getting farther away with every floor I drop.
My phone buzzes—Nina, with a court date for the appeal hearing. Two weeks from Thursday, and my mouth still tastes like him.