The lobby smells like fresh flowers and corporate ambition. I'm three steps past security when gardenia and malice intercept me from the left.
"Bailee." Celeste materialises like a horror movie screamer, coffee in hand, smile calibrated to a frequency only prey animals can hear. "Don't you look official."
"Good morning, Celeste." I keep walking. She keeps pace, heels matching mine click for click.
"Janitor to executive assistant in a matter of weeks?" She sips her coffee with the delicacy of a woman poisoning someone at a garden party. "The board will have questions."
"Then I'm sure the paperwork will be fascinating reading." I adjust the strap of my bag—new, borrowed from my mom, the nicest thing I own that isn't stained with bleach.
"Skip too many rungs and people start looking at what you're climbing with." Her smile doesn't reach her eyes—doesn't try. "Wouldn't want anyone drawing the wrong conclusions about how a half-blood janitor landed on the executive floor."
"I appreciate the career counselling." My voice comes out flat as a lake in winter. "I'll add it to my development plan."
I walk past her. Spine straight through the lobby, into the elevator, all the way to twenty-two—where it surrenders to a different siege entirely.
Spencer's office is a glass-walled cage with a view that makes the city look like it's auditioning. His calendar is a crime scene—triple-booked meetings bleeding into each other, the inbox defying mathematics.
"The Hargrove file is in the red folder. Board prep starts at ten—I'll need the quarterly summary reformatted by nine-thirty." Spencer doesn't look up from his laptop.
"Good morning to you too." I drop into the chair opposite his desk, and his scent hits me—woodsmoke and leather filling the space until my lungs forget how to operate on regular air.
"Morning." His mouth shifts by a fraction, the scaffolding beneath a smile. "The Hargrove file."
I find it and start reformatting with the focus of a woman defusing a bomb while sitting in a room that smells like the man who took her apart three weeks ago. The inexplicable pull hums behind my sternum like a second heartbeat, and my skin flushes from wrist to collarbone.
He leans over my desk to point at a column on the screen, his arm close enough that heat radiates off his skin without contact. My body tilts toward his, a sunflower looking at the sun—involuntary, obvious—and I overcorrect so hard my chair rolls back and my elbow cracks against the desk edge.
Spencer straightens, tracking the chair, the elbow, the flush climbing my neck. He says nothing. Returns to his laptop with the unhurried precision of a man who notices everything and comments on almost none of it.
I survive until eleven-forty by converting embarrassment into productivity, my body staging a low-grade revolt that I overrule with sheer bureaucratic fury.
The bathroom on twenty-two has a lock. I twist the deadbolt and my knees hit tile as the nausea crests—forehead against porcelain, talking myself through it: stress, bad sleep, skipped breakfast.
Not the other word. Not the one the doctor used. That word is in a locked drawer in my brain and I am not opening it today.
I rinse my mouth, press cold water against my wrists, and walk back looking like someone who's been lightly haunted. Spencer glances up—the full sweep, the quiet cataloguing—and asks nothing.
Instead he cancels his eleven-thirty, and fifteen minutes later sets a paper bag on the desk. Soup, bread, water—arranged with the precision of a man pretending this is nothing while executing it like a military operation.
"I'm fine, I don't need—" I push the bag back an inch, and he pushes it right back without looking up.
"Eat before the soup gets cold." His voice lands somewhere between request and commandment—a territory only Spencer Wallace could occupy without sounding absurd.
I eat. The soup is better than anything I've had in weeks that wasn't ginger tea consumed in secret, and my hands stop shaking by the third spoonful.
"Your mother." Spencer leans back, coffee between his palms. "What's she like—not the condition. Her."
Nobody asks about Mara as a person—she's been reduced to a medical file and a price tag so long that hearing someone ask who she is makes my throat do something inconvenient.
"She argues with news anchors. Full conversations—pause the TV, make her counterpoint, unpause, then get furious when they don't respond to her rebuttal."
"Does she win?" Something shifts behind his mouth—not quite amusement, but the closest his face permits in daylight hours.
"Always." I tear the bread in half. "She's also got a garden—or had one, before things got bad. Tomatoes, herbs, flowers she couldn't name because she planted whatever seeds were on clearance."
"Out there at six a.m. in her bathrobe, talking to the basil like it owed her money." My voice softens against my permission, and I make myself stop before I give away anything else.
"My father communicated primarily through silence and strategic disapproval." Spencer's gaze drops to his coffee. "Three boys in a house where the loudest sound was the thing nobody was saying."
"That sounds exhausting." The words slip out before I can curate them—genuine, unguarded, the kind of honest that usually costs me.
"It was efficient." His eyes find mine, and the storm-blue holds steady—no deflection, no armour. "Efficient and completely wrong."
The air between us recalibrates—warm, quiet, like sitting beside a fire after weeks of walking through cold. The pull settles from a scream to a hum, and for the first time since I walked into this building, my body stops fighting the room it's in.
I don't want this moment to end, which is the surest sign that I need to stand up immediately and do exactly that.
"The two o'clock needs a revised agenda." I push back from the desk, gathering plates. "And your three-thirty confirmed with the wrong conference room."
"You caught that." Not a question—a confirmation, delivered with the plain weight of a man who doesn't waste words on things he doesn't mean.
"That's what you're paying me for." I carry the bag to the bin, and his voice catches me at the door.
"Bailee." I turn, one hand on the doorframe, and his storm-blue eyes hold mine across the room. "You did well today."
Three words, no embellishment. My chest compresses hard enough that I nod once and escape to the elevator before my face does something unforgivable.
I'm replaying the compliment for the fourth time when the doors open on eighteen and Maya steps in.
She stands beside me, facing forward. Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen—the silence has the texture of something being sharpened, her reflection watching mine in the polished steel doors.
The lobby button glows, the doors begin to part, and Maya's voice arrives like a blade.
"Mother's asked the board to review all recent personnel changes." Maya's voice is pleasant, informational—a weather report about a hurricane aimed at my house. "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the newest assistant couldn't justify her position?"
The doors open. She walks through without looking back, heels clicking across marble with the rhythm of someone who's already won.
I stand in the elevator until the doors close again, my hand pressed flat against my stomach—a gesture that's becoming reflexive, protective, aimed at a secret that just acquired one more enemy.
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