Chapter 8
eight
CALLUM
The Riverside elevations were mocking me again.
Same drawings. Same desk. Same inability to concentrate on structural load calculations when my brain had decided to become a highlight reel of Willow Monroe's greatest hits.
Her on the piano bench at two in the morning.
Her in my clothes, sleeves swallowed past her wrists.
Her face when I'd said platonic this morning—a micro-flinch she'd covered with a bright "Great! " that fooled neither of us.
I traced the roofline with my pencil. Didn't mark anything. Set the pencil down.
Eight hours. I'd been at this desk for eight hours and had accomplished the architectural equivalent of absolutely nothing.
The western facade still needed shading solutions.
The sustainability report was half-written.
Richard Ashford expected a revised proposal by end of week and I was sitting here replaying the sound of Willow's sleepy voice as she shuffled into the kitchen in search of coffee.
It shouldn't have been charming. It was devastatingly charming.
Get it together, Hayes. You're a grown man. You've engineered buildings that will stand for a century. You can survive one woman sleeping in your guest room without losing your head.
Except it wasn't the sleeping arrangement that was the problem.
It was the velocity at which Willow Monroe had embedded herself into the architecture of my daily life.
She'd been in my apartment for less than twenty-four hours and already I couldn't look at the kitchen island without seeing her perched on it, bare feet swinging against my cabinets.
Couldn't pass the piano without remembering her shoulder pressed against mine, the way she'd asked me to play as if it were the most natural request in the world.
Couldn't look at my own couch without thinking about the gray throw pillow she'd claimed—the decorative one, the one that had maintained its geometric integrity for eight years until Willow Monroe wedged it behind her back and declared it "actually useful now."
I'd been telling myself the same story for a year.
That the attraction was a predictable, borderline pathetic midlife fixation.
Divorced man, seventeen-year age gap, younger woman who paid him attention—textbook, really.
The scenario that would make any self-respecting therapist reach for their notepad.
And how does that make you feel, Callum?
Ridiculous. That's how it made me feel.
But here's the thing about narratives you construct to keep yourself safe: they only work when they're accurate. And the more time I spent with Willow, the harder it became to pretend this was about her being twenty-three and me being a cliché.
It wasn't her youth that messed me up. It was the way she refused to be impressed by anything I'd built or earned, yet noticed when I hadn't smiled in days.
The way she pushed back against every attempt I made to manage her, then turned around and defended me to strangers with a conviction I hadn't earned.
Women my own age—the ones I'd taken to dinner once or twice a year in my meticulously scheduled attempts at human connection—were calibrated.
Careful. They said the right things and laughed at the appropriate moments and went home in the Uber I'd ordered without leaving a mark.
Willow left marks everywhere. My apartment. My routine. My carefully maintained emotional perimeter. She'd breached the whole damn thing without appearing to try, and the gut check was that I didn't want to rebuild it.
That scared me more than the attraction.
I'm already proven I'm capable of destroying the people I care about. Jessica. Elena. A marriage I'd let die of neglect while I poured myself into buildings that would outlast every relationship I'd ever had.
I didn't deserve to want Willow Monroe. But wanting had never cared much about deserving.
A knock. Graham leaned into my office. "Quick question on the Riverside material samples—did we go with the reclaimed oak or the walnut for the feature wall?"
"Reclaimed oak. The walnut grain competed with the window proportions."
Graham nodded. Paused. Gave me that look—the one that said he saw more than I wanted him to see but was choosing, for once, not to comment.
"You heading out soon?" he asked instead. Casual.
"Shortly."
"Good. You look..." He seemed to search for a diplomatic phrasing. "Tired."
"I appreciate your concern."
"That means go away, doesn't it."
"It does."
He went. The door clicked shut. I stared at the elevations for another thirty seconds, then closed the folder and reached for my keys.
She was waiting on the sidewalk outside Brew & Bean when I pulled up—not in a visible way, not obviously watching for my car.
She was leaning against the brick facade with her bag over her shoulder, scrolling through her phone, and the fact that I recognized her particular brand of forced nonchalance from half a block away told me everything I needed to know about how far gone I was.
She spotted the car, pushed off the wall, and pulled open the passenger door before I could come around to get it.
"Before you say anything," she said, dropping into the seat and kicking off her shoes—a move I'd catalogued as Standard Willow Protocol—"today was a day."
I pulled back into traffic. "Bad?"
"Not catastrophe-level. More of a slow, grinding sort of awful." She leaned her head back against the seat, stared at the ceiling. The wardrobe I'd bought her—dark jeans, a cream sweater that made her skin look warm—fit well. I noticed. Told myself to stop noticing.
"Tell me."
She didn't commandeer my radio. Didn't connect her phone to the Bluetooth. That absence told me more than any complaint could have.
"I had a meeting with the owners today. Pete and Linda.
" She picked at a thread on her sleeve. "The espresso machine needs a full replacement.
Not a repair—a replacement. And the cooler's been making that grinding noise for weeks, and now it's graduated to full death rattle.
" She paused. "The repair estimates are. .. significant."
"How significant?"
"Significant enough that Pete's face went a color I've never seen on a living person.
" She turned toward the window. "They didn't say it.
They're too decent to say it while I'm standing right there.
But I could do the math. The equipment costs are stacking up and revenue isn't keeping pace, and at a certain point the numbers just stop making sense. "
The shop might close. She wasn't saying it. She was arranging the facts in neat rows and letting me draw the conclusion myself.
My instinct was to fix it. Write a check. Make a call. I knew suppliers, knew equipment dealers, could have a reconditioned commercial espresso machine sourced and delivered within a week. The solution was so obvious it practically vibrated in my teeth.
But I'd watched Willow long enough to understand that what she needed right now wasn't a man with a checkbook swooping in to save her. She needed to be heard. To have the worry taken seriously without being immediately solved.
So I drove. Let her talk. Let her explain the repair timeline, the budget constraints, the way Linda had hugged her before leaving as if they both knew what the hug meant.
Mid-sentence, she trailed off. Stared out the window at the city passing.
I didn't fill the silence. Just drove.
After a while, she said, "Sorry. I'm not great company tonight."
"You don't need to be great company. You need to be fed."
The ghost of a smile. "Is that your solution to everything? Food?"
"It's my solution to most things. The rest I handle with expensive whiskey and denial."
She laughed—short, tired, but real. I'd take it.
The apartment wrapped around us in its usual silence. I'd never minded the quiet before Willow. Now it felt conspicuous, as if the apartment itself was holding its breath.
She offered to help cook. I told her to sit. She hoisted herself onto the kitchen island—her spot, claimed with the casual territorial instinct of a cat—and pulled her knees up, making herself small on the marble.
"Tell me a customer horror story," I said, pulling ingredients from the fridge. "Distract me from the fact that I'm about to butcher this garlic."
“Okay, Chef Ramsey, no false modesty needed. You’re ridiculously good at everything apparently.”
"Humor me."
She considered. "Okay. So this guy comes in today.
Business suit, Bluetooth earpiece, the whole insufferable package.
He orders a—and I quote—'oat milk cortado with a half-pump of sugar-free vanilla, two ice cubes, extra foam, but not too foamy, in a twelve-ounce cup but only filled to the eight-ounce line. '"
“Sounds like a hostage negotiation.”
"Right? And when I hand it to him, he takes one sip and goes, 'This tastes different than it did yesterday.' He's never been in before. I've never seen this man in my life. He's confusing us with another shop."
"What did you do?"
"I smiled and remade it. Then I went to the back and silently screamed into a bag of French roast."
I set a cutting board on the counter. "The silent scream into dry goods. Classic coping mechanism."
"Don't mock my process."
The delivery was funny—her timing always was—but the edges were soft tonight. No performance. No sharpened wit deployed as armor. Just Willow, worn down and willing to be ordinary in my kitchen, and that ordinariness was more intimate than any kiss we'd almost shared.
I cooked. She watched. Fell quiet for stretches, then circled back with observations that had nothing to do with what we'd been talking about—the way the city looked from this angle at dusk, whether pigeons had a leader or operated on collective anarchy, if I thought anyone had ever actually finished reading Ulysses or if humanity was collectively faking it.