Chapter 13
Elena
I get paid on Fridays and that alone feels like a religious experience.
I open my banking app in the elevator and stare at the number like it might evaporate out of pure spite. It does not evaporate. It sits there, real and blessed and still not enough to make me love my job.
I survive my job.
I’m getting better at it, which is wildly inconvenient for the personality narrative I have been maintaining where I’m a charming disaster held together by lip gloss and panic.
Now I know vendor workflows. Now I send follow-up questions that make sense.
Now Milan replies with “thank you, very clear” and I have to accept that competence is happening to me against my will.
Corporate logistics remain a language my nervous system did not volunteer to learn, and if Patrick Aldera did not exist at the end of this hallway with that face and those hands and that voice that can make a two-word instruction sound indecent, I would have gone fully feral by week three.
In my imaginary version of this relationship, we are at chapter twenty-four and one argument away from a proposal.
In real life, he says things like “reschedule Zurich” and “copy legal” and “where is the Bergamo memo” while looking at me with enough heat to set off the sprinkler system. Then he walks back into his office and leaves me to decode whether that was longing or managerial disappointment.
The coffee incident with his mother keeps replaying in my head all day like a clip on loop.
She is elegant in the way women are elegant when the world has rearranged itself for them for decades. She stands at the coffee machine while I’m making espresso and delivers a very polite, very precise message about territory and history and how little space there is for new people in old grief.
Then she smiles.
I smile back like I don’t understand social warfare. I hand over the cup. I go back to my desk and schedule calls while my chest does that tight-buzz thing it does when my body clocks danger before my brain has found the caption.
So yes, I get my paycheck. I don’t get fired. I also get a reminder that this job comes with territory, ghosts, and a mother who can assassinate your confidence in a single sentence while complimenting your posture.
By six thirty I’m done pretending this week has not happened.
I text Nadia.
(Me): We're going out tonight. I want good drinks and a reason to wear something nice and I don't want to think about work.
(Nadia): perfect. I know exactly where to take you.
(Me): how soon can you be ready?
(Nadia): I'm already dressed.
By eight we are in a speakeasy on the Upper East Side with a fake florist storefront entrance, velvet walls, low amber light, and cocktails with names like Moral Compromise and Last Good Decision.
Nadia thrives in places like this. She has that calm, self-possessed energy that makes men stand straighter when they approach and speak more carefully when they realize she is smarter than they are.
I have the opposite energy tonight.
I am funny. I am gorgeous in a black slip dress that makes me feel like I have my life together. I am one accidental mention of Patrick away from drinking straight mezcal and making catastrophic choices.
“You look better,” Nadia says after our second drink.
“I am better,” I lie.
She gives me the long look. “Did he fire you?”
“No.”
“Did he become a decent communicator?”
“Let’s not get delusional.”
She laughs and leans in. “Then what happened?”
I swirl the ice in my glass. “His mother happened.”
Nadia’s eyebrows lift. “Oh.”
“Exactly.”
“How bad?”
“Polite bad. The most dangerous kind.”
Nadia exhales through her nose. “What did she say?”
“She said that Sarah was amazing and he loved her.” I do the voice, low and precise. “I hope you understand that your place is at your desk. Not at his side.”
“And how did you respond?”
“Like a professional adult woman who has emotional boundaries and no unresolved belonging issues.”
“So you smiled and died inside.”
“Correct.”
She reaches over and squeezes my hand once. Nadia does not do dramatic comfort. She does precise comfort.
Then the conversation shifts because this is what sisters do when things are heavy. We move sideways until the weight becomes carriable.
She tells me about a wedding contract that nearly imploded because the bride changed her palette three times in forty-eight hours and still wanted peonies in off-season like climate and botany are optional suggestions.
I skip the part she already knows, that Erick came to the office and turned my desk into dinosaur headquarters, and tell her the new part.
“He sent me a drawing,” I say, grinning into my glass. “For me to finish.”
Nadia smiles. “Oh, that’s dangerous.”
“I know.” I press a hand to my chest like I might actually levitate. “I reacted like someone received a grand romantic love letter in 1812. I almost started jumping in the hallway.”
“You like him,” Nadia says.
“He’s impossible not to like.”
“You like the idea of kids,” she says, not a question.
I stare at my drink. “I don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes.”
“I don’t,” she says.
“You are very sure.”
“I’m very tired,” she says dryly. “Different thing, same result.”
I laugh. “Fair.”
She watches me for one beat. “If you ever want that, you’d be good at it.”
The comment lands deeper than I expect.
Because all week I keep seeing Erick at my desk, orange pen in a fist, explaining gravity and grief with equal confidence, and some unguarded part of me keeps asking a question I’m not ready to answer.
What if.
I don’t say that out loud.
Nadia’s attention shifts over my shoulder. Her expression does the subtle change it does when she is interested in someone and annoyed with herself for being interested.
“Trouble at three o’clock,” I murmur.
“Shut up,” she says without moving her lips.
“Tall, dark, nice jawline, currently pretending he did not circle this table twice.”
“I hate you.”
“You love me.”
“Barely.”
Five minutes later she is talking to him by the bar, posture open, smile controlled, voice in the register she uses when she is curious but not convinced.
I’m alone at the table with my drink and my phone and my excellent life choices.
A man appears like summoned irritation.
Expensive watch. Loud cologne. Confidence unsupported by data.
“You here alone?” he asks.
“Nope.”
“Your friend left.”
“She has legs. People walk.”
He grins like I just flirted.
I did not.
“Can I buy you another?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
He pulls out the chair anyway and sits.
I look at him. “That was not an invitation.”
“Relax,” he says, laughing. “We’re just talking.”
There is a very specific flavor of male entitlement where refusal reads as challenge and politeness reads as permission and eye contact reads as destiny. I hate this flavor.
“I don’t want to talk,” I say.
“You don’t know me yet.”
“I know enough.”
He leans in and his hand closes around my wrist.
There it is.
The anger comes fast and cold and completely clarifying. I go very still the way you go still right before you do something irreversible.
“Take your hand off me,” I say.
He doesn’t.
“She said no.”
The voice behind him is low and flat and instantly familiar.
The guy turns. Patrick stands there in a dark jacket and a face carved out of restraint. A second man is two steps behind him, taking in the scene with open fascination like this is premium entertainment.
“Back off,” Patrick says.
His jaw is locked. His eyes are not warning him. They are daring him.
The guy looks from Patrick to me, releases my wrist, mutters “whatever” and leaves with injured dignity.
My pulse is still running hot.
Patrick pulls the empty chair out and sits opposite me, his eyes moving over my face.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” I set the glass down. “Just angry.”
“Good.” Something in his expression settles. “Angry is the right response.”
The second man appears at Patrick’s shoulder, gives me a warm look and Patrick a pointed one.
“I’m at the bar,” he says. “Try not to murder anyone in public.”
“Alister,” Patrick says, not looking at him.
The man grins at me. “Alister Reynolds. Friend and occasionally his conscience.”
“I can see why he needs one,” I say.
He laughs, genuinely, and drifts toward the bar.
I look at Patrick. “Coincidence?”
“Alister knows the owner.” A beat. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”
I believe him. He is not a man who engineers surprises. If he’d wanted to find me he would have simply asked.
“We can leave,” he says. “If you want.”
I look around, velvet walls, low amber light, the ghost of that cologne still two feet behind me. I’ve wanted to leave since Nadia walked away. I just didn’t have an exit until now.
“Yes,” I say, without hesitation. “Absolutely yes.”
The corner of his mouth twitches upward.
I cross to the bar and touch Nadia’s shoulder. She turns immediately, scans my face, and her smile drops.
“I’m heading out,” I tell her.
“Are you okay?” she asks, low and direct.
“Yeah,” I say. “I just need air. I’ll text you when I’m home.”
She studies me for one second, her gaze moves past my shoulder, finds Patrick, comes back. Her expression doesn’t change but something behind her eyes files this away for later.
“Okay. Text me.”
I squeeze her hand, turn around, and go back to Patrick.
Outside, the night air is cold and the street is loud and I’m grateful for both.
We walk without discussing where. East, because that’s the direction I start in and he falls into step beside me without comment.
For half a block neither of us says anything. Then:
“I’m sorry that happened.”
His voice is quiet and even and I know immediately he means the bar, the wrist, the whole ugly little scene.
“I’m glad you were there,” I say.
He says nothing for a beat. Two. Then: “I could have killed him.”
I glance over. His jaw is set, eyes forward, the same face he uses to close a deal. He means it the way other men mean it when they’re trying to scare you.
“That’s romantic,” I say.
“It’s not.”
“Little bit.”