5. Margot
5
MARGOT
W e’re back at the penthouse by the time it all boils over. The city below is a haze of motion and light, but inside these walls, everything feels too still. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that comes right before someone says something they can’t take back.
I’m standing near the floor-to-ceiling windows, my arms crossed tightly over my chest, watching the blur of headlights move down Fifth like veins in a restless beast. I haven’t changed out of my work clothes. I’m still in the same ivory blouse and navy trousers I wore to today’s investor call, creases at the elbows, lipstick worn off, hair pinned back but fraying at the edges. My heels are off, abandoned by the doorway, but I haven’t moved far. I’m pacing in small, agitated circles, too restless to sit, too charged to stay still.
When I hear the front door unlock, I move toward it, fast at first, then slower as he steps inside. There’s a second where I almost say something, almost reach for him, but I stop short, words stuck behind pride and the ache of everything that’s unraveling. I hover just a few feet away, arms still crossed, jaw tight, waiting for him to meet me halfway. But he doesn't. Not yet. And it hurts more than I want to admit. Because underneath all my frustration, beneath the anger and exhaustion, is the ache of missing him, even when he’s right in front of me.
I hate that we’re fighting. I hate that his voice feels like distance instead of comfort. But mostly, I hate that he’s right, that I’ve buried myself so deeply in code and control I forgot what it’s like to lean on someone. On him. And still, even now, even with tension tightening between us like a wire, I can’t help but notice the way his black crew neck clings to the curve of his shoulders, the way his blonde hair catches the light in soft gold waves. He looks like something out of a dream I’ve tried not to have too often, strong, grounded, and infuriatingly handsome. It would be easier if I could stop wanting him when I’m this angry. If my body didn’t still hum at the memory of his hands, the steadiness of his presence. But he’s always been the contradiction I couldn’t quit, tenderness and fire, wrapped in steel.
Grayson tosses his keys onto the kitchen counter. The sound is louder than it should be. Sharp. Final.
“Want to talk about it?” he asks, not looking at me.
“About which part?” I fire back. “The part where our clients are dropping like flies, or the part where the media thinks I’m one glitch away from a God complex?”
He exhales and runs a hand through his hair. He’s wearing dark jeans and a black crew neck, simple and clean, effortless, the kind of understated confidence that always draws attention without asking for it. “You can’t code your way out of this, Margot. You can’t data-clean emotional fallout.”
I turn to face him fully. “I’m not trying to clean it. I’m trying to understand it. There’s something wrong. The match outputs from last night don’t align with the models. We’re getting edge-case anomalies that weren’t there before.”
Grayson folds his arms. “Maybe the problem isn’t sabotage. Maybe it’s the system itself. Maybe you built something too perfect for real people.”
“Don’t do that.” My voice sharpens. “Don’t act like I haven’t considered that. But you didn’t see what I saw in those test runs. You didn’t live in that data for three years. This isn’t a misfire. It’s interference.”
His eyes narrow. “You’re serious. You think someone’s tampering with it.”
“I know someone is.” I walk across the room, grabbing my tablet from the console table. I bring up the match logs, flipping it toward him. “Look at the timestamp pattern. The last two updates were pushed from an unauthorized node, on our internal server.”
He stares at it, jaw clenched. But instead of being alarmed, he just shakes his head.
“You’re spiraling,” he says.
“I’m analyzing.”
“No, you’re clinging to the one thing you think can’t fail you. And maybe that’s the problem. You trust the algorithm more than you trust people.”
I blink, stunned.
His voice softens. “Including me.”
A beat passes. Then another. I set the tablet down like it’s suddenly too heavy to hold. “You think I’m paranoid.”
“I think you’re scared. And when you get scared, you hide behind control. Behind code.”
The words land like a blow I wasn’t braced for.
But I don’t break. I just straighten. “And you? You hide behind ideals. You think love should be messy and poetic and unplanned. But maybe it doesn’t have to be chaos to be real.”
He walks to the windows now, mirroring where I stood earlier. “Maybe. Or maybe you can’t calculate your way through a world that was never meant to be clean.”
Silence stretches between us like wire, tight and dangerous. We stand there, in opposite corners of the same room, both holding truths that won’t bend to meet in the middle.
When he finally turns to face me, his eyes are unreadable. “So what now?”
I want to tell him everything. That I’m scared too. That I hate this space growing between us, the way our words now land like loaded questions instead of lifelines. But I don’t say any of that. I don’t know how. So instead, I go with instinct.
“We keep going,” I say, my voice quiet but certain. “We protect what we’ve built. But we do it carefully. Intentionally.”
He nods once, the movement small but resolute. “Uneasy truce, then?”
I nod back, mirroring him. “Uneasy truce.”
But even as I say it, I feel the distance settle between us like a third presence in the room. Something cracked between us, fine as hairline fractures, but no less dangerous. The kind of damage you don’t see until it’s too late.
We move past each other with the kind of caution usually reserved for strangers or diplomats, aware that one wrong word could tip the whole night sideways. He disappears down the hall without another glance, and I stay where I am, watching the skyline blink against the dark. Not broken. Not yet. But close enough that I can feel the fault lines beneath my feet. And maybe that’s why I don’t sleep that night.
Because after Grayson retreats to the other side of the penthouse and I’m left alone with the city lights and a quiet I can’t ignore, I feel it in my bones, that tug of instinct, that whisper that won’t let go. If there’s even a chance the algorithm’s being manipulated, I need to find out who’s behind it.
I’ll pull the security logs. Reconstruct the source code from last week’s rollback. Cross-reference usage anomalies. I know the system better than anyone. If something’s been tampered with, I’ll find it. Because I didn’t build Perfectly Matched to be perfect, I built it to be honest. And if someone’s using it to lie, then I’ll uncover the truth. Even if it means uncovering something I don’t want to see.