Chapter 2 #3
“I read your email.” He lobbed the opening volley.
“Yes. I gathered.”
“Benjamin sometimes lacks subtlety.”
“He has other qualities.”
“That’s generous.” He leaned back. “He’s protective.”
“I noticed.”
“Of my time, mostly. My blood pressure. Occasionally my mortal soul.”
“He seems very committed.” I couldn’t help the grin that overtook my face.
“He’s been with me a long time. He started as an intern and somehow became the only person alive who can tell me I’m being an idiot and make me grateful for the privilege of his opinion.” Callum glanced toward the door with obvious fondness. “He means well.”
“He called me a nepotist.”
“He probably called you worse in his head.”
“That’s comforting.”
“I didn’t say he was gentle.”
Something about the ease of it, the dry humor, the familiar warmth tucked beneath the formality, loosened a knot under my ribs.
I had expected pity or disappointment, or a brisk favor performed out of obligation.
I had expected to be handled. Instead, Callum was looking at me like a person who had received a complicated set of drawings and intended to understand all of them before deciding what could be built.
He tapped one finger against his legal pad. “How are you, really?”
The question was simple enough that I could have lied.
I was trained in lying politely. I could say I was fine, hanging in there, or taking things one day at a time, all the little phrases people handed one another so that nobody had to touch the mess beneath, but last night I had sent him the embarrassing version.
The human version. It seemed cowardly to replace that now with a brochure.
“I’m embarrassed,” I answered.
His face did not change, but his gaze narrowed just a hair. “Because you were fired?”
“Because I was fired again. Because I’m twenty-five and I still don’t know how to explain what I do.
Because my friends from college have titles with the word senior in them and apartments with actual dining tables, and I spent yesterday being told I wasn’t hungry enough by a woman named Marlena Cross who thinks fear is a leadership philosophy. ”
Callum’s jaw moved once. “Marlena Cross?”
I blinked. “You know her?”
“I know of her.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“It was meant to.”
A small, mean spark of satisfaction lit in me before I could become a better person. “Good.”
He almost smiled, then let it go. “What happened?”
I told him about my time with Marlena’s company starting with the midnight emails, the impossible revisions, and how Marlena changed instructions and then blamed me for following the previous version.
As I spoke, I heard myself trying to make it funny because being funny was my own personal brand of armor, and I heard myself trying not to sound wounded because being wounded was inconvenient.
Callum let me do both. He did not interrupt much.
When he asked questions, they were practical and specific, like how long I had been there, what my responsibilities had been, whether anything was documented, and whether I had references from anyone else at the firm.
When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, “You are not the first person to be fired in their twenties.”
I looked down at my hands. “It feels like it in this moment.”
“That’s because your twenties are designed to convince you every mistake is a verdict designed to judge your life.
” His voice was gentle, but not soft. “It isn’t.
Sometimes you fail because you are careless, or because you are learning, or because the person above you has confused management with sanctioned cruelty.
The trick is learning which is which without lying to yourself. ”
My throat tightened again, annoyingly. “And which do you think this was?”
“I don’t know yet.”
That surprised me.
He saw it. “You wanted me to say it was all her fault.”
“I wanted you to say it convincingly enough that I could believe it.”
“I won’t do that.” He leaned forward slightly. “I believe you had bad bosses. I also believe a person can have bad bosses and still develop bad habits from surviving them.”
The words should have stung more than they did. Maybe they would have from anyone else. From him, they felt like a hand at the back of my neck, not holding me down, but making sure I did not look away.
“What habits?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
I exhaled slowly. The rain moved against the glass behind him, fine and silver. Far below, traffic slid between buildings like blood through veins.
“I over-explain,” I said. “I try to anticipate what people want, but then I panic and anticipate everything, including things they never asked for. I take criticism personally and then pretend I don’t.
I stay too long because quitting feels like failing.
Then when I finally leave or get pushed out, I act like I meant to do that. ”
Callum watched me for a long second, and I had the terrible sense that he was pleased with my honesty.
“That,” he replied, “is more useful than most polished answers.”
“I’m glad my professional damage has utility.”
“Most things do, eventually.”
I laughed once, quietly, because I could not tell if that was comforting or grim. With Callum, the two seemed related.
He glanced at the folder in my lap. “May I see your resume?”
I handed it over. His fingers brushed the edge of the paper, not my skin, and still I felt the moment with ridiculous clarity.
This was going to be a problem. Not now, maybe.
Probably not even today. Maybe not ever in any meaningful sense.
But my body had begun keeping separate records from my brain, and I did not trust the clerk.
Callum read the resume without making a face, which I appreciated because I made faces at it all the time. His eyes moved steadily down the page. He did not rush, and the silence stretched long enough for me to start hearing every possible criticism before he had voiced one.
“This is not as bad as you think it is,” he offered after a minute or so.
I stared at him. “Did Benjamin pay you to say that?”
“No. Benjamin would pay me not to say that.”
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
Callum set the resume on his desk. “It’s uneven. That’s different from bad. You have administrative experience, client communication, basic project coordination, vendor management, executive support, and you write well.”
“You got that from my resume?”
“I got that from the email and from the fact that you turned ‘reorganized orchids by emotional tone’ into a bullet point about adaptive event support.”
I closed my eyes. “Please forget that line.”
“I refuse. It’s the best sentence on here.”
“I was desperate.”
“It shows initiative.”
“It shows I have been to hell and back with floral arrangements.”
“There are worse hells.”
“You sound like you know.”
“I’ve built luxury towers for men who believed marble could compensate for personality. I know several versions of hell.”
The warmth between us settled into something easier for a few minutes.
He asked about school, and I told him about the communications degree I had chosen because I liked people and words and had not yet understood how frequently both could be weaponized; the campus coffee shop where I had written papers until closing; the professor who had told me I had a talent for making complicated things sound human.
He asked about the apartment, about whether I still saw my aunt, and about my father’s old things.
At one point, he said, “Your father would be furious you waited this long.”
I looked at him quickly.
Callum’s expression was steady. “Not with you.”
“With who?” I asked, with confusion evident on my face, no doubt.
“With me, probably.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“No?” He glanced toward the window. “I promised him I’d look out for you.”
The room seemed to grow quieter.
I swallowed. “You did?”
“Yes.”
“Was he dying when he made you promise that?”
Callum looked back at me. “He was your father. He had me making that promise since you were born.”
The laugh that came out of me was too soft to be useful. “That sounds like him.”
I looked down before my eyes could betray me.
The grief was not a wave anymore. It did not knock me under the way it had at twenty.
But sometimes it found a door I had forgotten to lock and stepped inside wearing my father’s voice, my mother’s perfume, and the familiar sounds of the kitchen on a Sunday morning.
I breathed through it, and Callum let me.
He did not rush to fill the silence, which was another form of mercy I had not known I was missing.
After a moment, I said, “I didn’t ask you because I didn’t want to become another promise you had to keep. Another burden you didn’t ask for.”
He was quiet.
Then he said, “Avery.” His voice was soft.
I looked up.
“You are not a burden because your father loved you.”
That was when I almost cried, which was absurd because I had survived the firing, the text from Callum’s personal guard dog, the Uber ride, the lobby, and the word nepotism without losing face.
But kindness, direct and unadorned, could still take my knees out.
I looked at the corner of his desk and blinked hard.
“I’m not going to cry in your office,” I declared in an unfortunately whispery voice.
“No?”
“I have decided against it.”
“Strong choice.”
“I thought so too.”
He gave me a moment. Then he shifted, and his body language turned more formal all of a sudden.
“I need to be clear about something,” he said.
My stomach tightened. “Okay.”
“I can help you get through the door and into the room. I cannot carry you once you’re there. I won’t do that to the company, and I won’t do that to you.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
The question was firm enough that I sat a little straighter.
“Yes,” I replied.