POV: Priya
I had not slept.
The restaurant had been twelve hours ago. Twelve hours since Jackson had sat across from Jasmine and said the word cowardice about himself without flinching. Twelve hours since he had said she told me what it would cost, and the cost was her, and every organ in my body had rearranged itself around the sentence.
I was not a woman who lost sleep. I was a woman who filed things — emotions, complications, inconvenient truths — into the correct drawer and closed it. That system had served me for thirty-eight years.
It had not survived Jackson admitting he was a coward in a flat-lit restaurant while I sat two feet away with my hands folded and my pulse doing something my hands had no permission to match.
Now I was in Jasmine's kitchen again. Same table. Same morning light. Jasmine across from me with a cup of tea she had made without asking — camomile, the gesture of a woman who already knew this conversation was going to cost something.
"Talk to me," Jasmine said, her voice low and even. "About what is happening with you. Not the legal architecture. Not the conditions. You. What do you feel about all of this?"
I looked at my hands on the table. Steady. They were always steady. The steadiness was the performance, and underneath the performance was a woman who had gripped the steering wheel after the restaurant until her knuckles went white because a man she was supposed to be managing had cracked open in front of her and the crack had shown her something she could not unsee.
"I do not know," I said, and the admission cost me more than any sentence I had spoken in a courtroom. "I am not sure what I feel. I know it is not nothing. I know that when he speaks to me — not the strategic version, the version that called me at eleven at night and asked about Aurora's drawings — something in me responds that I have not felt respond in a very long time."
I pressed my palms harder against the table.
"I am not calling it love. It is too early for that word and I am too careful with words to use one I have not verified. But something is there. Something I did not invite and cannot dismiss. And it frightens me, because I know his record, and I am still sitting here telling you that when he said the cost was her, my chest did something I could not control."
Jasmine did not rush to fill the silence. She let the words sit between us the way she let everything sit — with patience.
"He could be performing," I said. "The crack could be strategy. I advise women on exactly this every week."
My voice dropped.
"But I was in that restaurant. I was two feet from him. And either he is the greatest performer I have ever encountered, or something in him actually broke when Liam died, and what I am seeing through the break is real."
I stopped. The discipline I had brought into this kitchen had lasted four minutes. That was how far Jackson Blackwood had gotten under my skin.
Jasmine set her cup down.
"Priya," she said, and her voice had changed — not the boardroom register. Something warmer and more raw, the voice she used with the people she had decided belonged to her. "I have known you for years. You are the most careful person I have ever met. You do not say I do not know about anything, ever, because you always know."
She leaned forward.
"The fact that you are sitting in my kitchen saying I do not know tells me more than any answer you could have given me. Because it means this is real enough that your filters cannot process it. And that is either the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to you, or the most important."
My throat tightened. I had braced for judgment, for distance, for the clinical assessment of a woman protecting her daughter. I had not braced for this — for Jasmine looking at me with eyes that said I see you the way I see myself, and I know what it costs to feel something you did not plan for.
"It is your life," Jasmine said. "I am not going to tell you what to do with it. I have watched you protect my daughter, my company, and my family for years. I know who you are, Priya. And I know you will do the right thing — not because you always know what the right thing is, but because when you do not know, you are honest about it. That is rarer than certainty. That is the thing I trust."
I felt the tears arrive before I could stop them. Not many. Two, maybe three, moving down my face in the specific, mortifying way tears moved on a woman who did not cry in front of other people.
Jasmine reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
"If he hurts you," she said, and her voice went quiet and absolute, "I will not be professional about it."
I almost smiled. "Noted," I said, and my voice was thick, and I did not try to fix it.
I stood. I collected my bag. Jasmine walked me to the door.
I turned in the doorway. I looked at her — this woman who had buried a fiancé and raised a daughter and fought a war on three fronts and was now telling me she trusted my judgment about the man who had tried to take her child.
"Thank you," I said, and the two words carried the gratitude, the fear, the specific relief of being seen by someone who did not require you to be certain before they believed you were serious.
She nodded once.
I left. The elevator arrived immediately. The doors closed. I stood inside with my bag against my chest and my face still wet and the terrifying weight of a woman who had been honest about the thing she could not name and had not been turned away for it.
The elevator reached the lobby. I walked out into the afternoon.
Three floors above me, the apartment was still holding the shape of what I had said.
Finn came in from the hallway. Jasmine was still at the door, her hand on the frame.
"Did you hear?" she asked without turning.
Finn leaned against the wall beside her, his voice careful. "Enough. Do you think she knows what she is doing?"
Jasmine looked at the closed door.
"Yes," she said quietly. "And that is what makes it complicated."