[Annie’s POV]
Priya Kapoor—the senior strategist who cornered me in the kitchen yesterday with coffee and onboarding horror stories—is waiting at my cubicle when I get back from Theo's conference room. Two fresh cups, same conspiratorial energy.
"You again." I drop into my chair, and she pushes the second coffee toward me like it's a summons.
"Me again." She perches on the edge of my desk, the same way she claimed the kitchen counter yesterday. "Sit—we need to talk about why you're here."
"That's ominous for nine AM." I take the coffee because turning down free caffeine requires a moral conviction I don't currently possess.
"Wharton, summa cum laude, Strategic Analysis prize." She ticks the items off on her fingers. "And you're formatting Davies's reports—a man who misspelled 'revenue' in a board deck."
"Maybe I like formatting." My voice is light, practiced—the same deflection that's kept me invisible for five years.
"That's not an answer, Annie." Her eyes are sharp but warm—the same look she gave me yesterday when I let a dry observation slip and she zeroed in like a hawk. "You restructured Whitfield's risk model while everyone else nodded along like dashboard ornaments."
The honest answer involves a penthouse I built and a husband who erased me from it. Neither fits into workplace small talk. "People end up where they end up."
"God, you're difficult." She sips her coffee slowly, clearly prepared to outlast me. "Fine—don't tell me."
"But stop apologizing every time you're the smartest person in the room." She sets the mug down hard enough for emphasis. "It makes the rest of us look bad."
"I don't apologize." The protest tastes thin even on my own tongue, and Priya's expression confirms it.
"You prefaced a market correction with 'this might be wrong, but.'" She raises both eyebrows. "In a room where Davies presented a pie chart that added up to a hundred and six percent."
"Nobody corrected him?" The question slips out before I can cage it, and something behind Priya's gaze sharpens—pleased, like she's caught me being myself.
"Not a soul." She leans forward, elbows on her knees. "You corrected the entire European model and opened with a disclaimer—see the difference?"
My lips press together hard. She's not wrong, and the fact that she noticed makes something behind my sternum ache in a direction I wasn't expecting.
"I'll work on it." The words come out quieter than I intended, stripped of their usual defensive coating.
"You'd better." She clinks her cup against mine—a gesture that somehow carries the weight of a blood oath. "Now tell me honestly—is Davies as bad as I think, or am I biased because he microwaved fish in the shared kitchen twice?"
"Both can be true." The words slip out before I can leash them, and Priya's laugh turns heads three cubicles over.
We spend twenty minutes dissecting the team—her rapid-fire assessments drawing out increasingly unguarded commentary from me. I tell her the VP who schedules Friday four PM meetings should be tried at The Hague.
She snorts coffee through her nose, and for a few minutes my ribs open a fraction wider around my lungs. Being valued by someone who wants nothing except conversation is an unfamiliar muscle—it aches when I stretch it.
The afternoon dissolves into real work—mine. I build out the Whitfield pitch section, layering competitor analysis with a regulatory framework that accounts for three scenarios Theo's senior team missed.
The numbers click together beneath my fingers and I catch myself smiling at my own screen. My cheeks actually hurt from the novelty—enjoying my brain for the first time in five years.
My hands still on the keyboard. Wanting credit, wanting recognition—that's exactly the kind of selfishness Jake used to identify and cut out of me with surgical patience. I swallow hard and keep typing.
Priya materializes behind my shoulder, reading without invitation. Her hand lands on the back of my chair. "Annie—if you don't present this section yourself, I will personally riot."
"I'm a junior hire, Davies is the lead." The script comes out automatically—someone else's words wearing my voice.
"Davies couldn't find a blind spot if it bit him on his fish-microwaving ass." She taps the screen. "This is three levels above anything his team has produced."
I don't argue. Arguing would mean pretending she's wrong, and my jaw won't unclench far enough to fake it.
The floor empties in slow degrees—laptops closing, coats shrugged on, goodnights thinning down the corridor. I'm still refining the third scenario when a shadow crosses my desk and stays.
"Your Whitfield section." Theo is close enough that I catch cedar and something warm beneath it. "I have questions—walk me through it in my office?"
His door closes behind us and he pulls my analysis onto the wall screen. "Your competitor framing—you're weighting regulatory capture over market share. Why?"
"Because market share is a lagging indicator in a sector where one policy shift erases a two-year lead." I point to the third column. "GenVec proved that in Singapore."
"Your team is modeling the world they want, not the world that exists." I hold his gaze. "Your exposure model assumes stable tariffs through Q3—that's not conservative, that's fantasy."
"Harsh." His arms cross, but his mouth gives him away—one corner pulling sideways against his will, and it tightens something behind my ribs.
"Accurate." I shrug. "Reprice the first eighteen months as a loss leader or the board kills it by March."
"Now you sound like second-year Annie Murphy." He shakes his head. "The Kessler framework—remember?"
"We fought about discount rate methodology for two weeks." My chin lifts. "I remember you being stubbornly wrong about terminal value the entire time."
"You were the only person at Wharton who told me that to my face." His voice has dropped below its professional register. "Everyone else just nodded."
"Someone had to." My mouth has gone dry, and I should step back because somewhere during the argument we've drifted to the same side of the desk—my hip inches from his, the wall screen forgotten behind us.
"Annie." Just my name, stripped bare, no sentence behind it. He's looking at me the way he did on that terrace five years ago, and neither of us moves.
The air between us pulls taut. My pulse drums against the side of my throat, and his gaze drops to the exact spot where my heartbeat is visible—tracks it there, deliberate and unhurried.
I don't step back. His forearm rests beside mine on the desk, heat radiating across the quarter-inch gap, and my body is committing quiet treason—mapping every point of near-contact against my explicit orders.
The door swings open without a knock. A woman steps through in a tailored camel coat, dark hair swept into something effortless, moving toward Theo as though the room already belongs to her.
She kisses his cheek. "Darling, you weren't answering your phone." Her smile is warm, polished—and aimed directly at the man whose body heat is still registering against my skin.
She turns to me, and the curiosity in her gaze is pleasant, measured, perfectly friendly. "Oh—am I interrupting?"