[Theo’s POV]
The text sits in my outbox like a grenade with the pin already pulled. We need to talk. Not about the PI, not about the case, not about work. Subtle as a car crash—I run a company worth nine figures and can't compose a message to a woman without sounding like a man issuing a subpoena.
An hour. Sixty minutes of staring at a skyline that bills itself as the most expensive view in Manhattan, waiting for a reply from someone who takes the subway. She's not coming, and I've accepted this with the same grace I bring to quarterly losses—badly, while pretending otherwise.
My hand reaches for the phone to check again when movement catches in the doorway, and every prepared sentence evacuates my skull. Annie—coat still buttoned, bag over one shoulder, Sarah's drawing folded in her hand like a weapon she hasn't decided whether to deploy.
Her cheeks are flushed from the cold or the stairs or both, and she's breathing like she ran here, which means she almost didn't come. The almost is the part that makes my pulse do something inconvenient.
"I got your message." She doesn't cross the threshold. "I'm here, and you have five minutes."
"Sit down." She doesn't. Delivered the way she used to reject my thesis frameworks at Wharton—absolute, immediate, almost recreational. Some things survive five years and a custody war intact.
I lean back and study her—coat buttoned to the throat, jaw set, eyes that dare me to waste her time. She looks like she walked into this office to fire someone, which is impressive given that she doesn't have the authority and I technically sign her paychecks.
"Are you planning to pretend last night didn't happen?" The question lands between us, and I watch her shoulders square against it.
"That's exactly what I'm planning." Her chin lifts a fraction, defiant. "It was a mistake, Theo."
"It wasn't. We both know it wasn't." I hold her gaze, and the air between us contracts the way it always does—charged and inconvenient and entirely mutual.
"It doesn't matter what it was." She steps far enough inside to close the door, putting solid wood between this conversation and the empty floor beyond. "You have a fiancée and I have a custody war, and the last thing I need is another man whose life I complicate."
Another. The word detonates quietly, buried too deep for anyone else to hear. But I hear Jake's shadow in it—the way she's already cast herself as the disruption, the wreckage, the thing that derails someone's clean trajectory because she dared to exist inside it.
"You're not a complication." My voice comes out lower than I intended, stripped of the boardroom finish I usually keep between myself and anything that actually matters.
"That's easy to say when your engagement isn't the one on a judge's desk." Her eyes are steady, but her fingers have gone white-knuckled around that folded drawing, and the gap between her voice and her hands tells me everything her words refuse to.
"The engagement isn't real." I say it like pulling a pin—deliberate, aware of the blast radius. "It's a business arrangement tied to Caroline's family fund, and she's always known it."
Annie goes still. Not processing—recalculating. Every assumption she's built her defense on rearranging beneath her while she watches.
"Why didn't you tell me that before?" Quiet, almost dangerous—like she’s rearranging her entire understanding of the last three months.
"Because it doesn't change anything from your side." True, and also the coward's answer, and we both know it.
"It changes everything from your side." She takes a step closer and the strategist surfaces—the woman who dismantled billion-dollar blind spots before my senior team blinked. "If the engagement falls apart, the fund pulls out. Meridian loses its biggest backer mid-round."
I know the numbers down to the decimal. "That's my problem to manage—my mess." I lean forward, elbows on the desk, because the distance keeps shrinking and I need something solid between my hands and the impulse to reach for her. "Right now, we focus on Sarah."
Something shifts behind her eyes. She unfolds the drawing and sets it on my desk—careful, deliberate, smoothing the creases flat with her palm the way she'd handle evidence.
Three crayon figures. A woman with dark curls, a small girl, and a tall man with yellow hair. Beneath them, in letters that slope downhill and forget a vowel: my famlee.
"Sarah drew this today." Her voice has changed—quieter, the sharp edges worn down by something she can't cross-examine. "Our daughter has decided you're family based on one hallway conversation and a dragon-cat."
I look at the drawing—the tall man smiling, enormous and lopsided, the kind of trust a four-year-old grants without negotiation. My throat constricts and my fingers hover over the crayon figures without touching them because touching them might undo something I'm not ready to reassemble.
"That terrifies me." Annie's voice is barely above the hum of the building. "Because if this falls apart, she loses someone she's already claimed, and she has already lost enough."
"I'm not going anywhere." The words bypass every strategic instinct I possess and exit my mouth raw, unformatted—the verbal equivalent of showing up to a shareholders' meeting in yesterday's shirt.
"Jake said that too."
The room empties of sound. Manhattan hums forty stories below, indifferent, but up here the silence has its own weight and I can hear the clock marking seconds between what I want to promise and what she's survived before.
This is the wall. Not Caroline, not the custody case, not the funding exposure or any variable I can model on a spreadsheet. The wall is scar tissue—the kind that forms when a man swears he's not going anywhere and then turns the promise into a leash.
My phone cracks the silence open. Whitaker's name on the screen—ex-federal, the PI I'm paying enough to fund a small university. I press speaker because Annie deserves to hear this without a filter between her and the truth.
"Barnes. We've confirmed the payment trail to the clerk's office—direct deposit, routed through two shells, but the origination is clean." His voice is flat, professional. "I need one more week for the full evidence package."
"One week," I repeat, watching Annie's face—watching the first real breath she's taken since she walked through that door.
"One week. Everything your attorney needs." He hangs up, and the drawing sits between us—three crayon figures and the entire architecture of what this could be if we don't destroy it first.
"We're getting Sarah back." I say it looking straight at her, meaning it with every resource and ruthless instinct I possess. "Everything else—the engagement, what we are to each other, the kiss—it waits until she's home."
Annie nods. One small dip of her chin, no argument, no counter-strategy, no five-point rebuttal about why I'm wrong. It's the first time she hasn't fought me on something, and the quiet agreement lands heavier than her sharpest objections ever have.
It scares me. Looking at her face across my daughter's misspelled family, I'm certain it scares her too.