9. Jo
— ? —
Jo
He hands me a file across the conference table, and our fingers don’t touch.
That’s how I know last night was real.
Yesterday he would have dropped it in front of me without a thought.
This morning he holds it out by the very corner, careful, deliberate, leaving a clean inch of air between his hand and mine, and his eyes lift to mine for half a second and then break away, controlled.
Around us the meeting drones on. Someone is talking about permit timelines.
Nobody else notices the careful inch of nothing he leaves between us.
Matthias is two seats down, charming a client, completely oblivious.
Only two people in this building know that last night, in his office, we came within an inch of crossing a line that doesn’t uncross.
And apparently, we’re just... not talking about it.
Which is its own special torture, because not talking about it doesn’t mean not feeling it.
It means feeling it constantly, in code.
The careful three feet of distance he keeps whenever anyone else is in the room.
The way his eyes find me across the open floor and then deliberately let go.
A reply to a work email that lands at eleven at night and says nothing and means everything.
We have become fluent overnight in a language only the two of us can read, and every word of it could end the career I clawed my way into.
That’s the part I can’t make peace with.
He signs my paychecks. He could decide, with one sentence, whether I keep this job.
I spent seven years refusing to need a single thing from a powerful man, and here I am wanting one so badly I can taste it, hating the imbalance of it, and completely unable to make myself want it any less.
The first few hours are spent doing mental gymnastics, trying to figure out what’s going on.
Did the family meeting go badly? Did Nick decide this was a mistake?
Did Matthias say something that changed his mind?
The questions spiral endlessly, each one worse than the last, and the work sitting on my desk might as well be written in ancient Greek for all the attention it’s getting.
By lunch, the avoidance strategy is in full effect.
Matthias goes left, so right becomes the only option.
Nick walks toward the break room, so the bathroom suddenly becomes urgent.
The building isn’t big enough for this, for the constant vigilance, the perpetual awareness of where both Anderson brothers are at any given moment.
By three o’clock, exhaustion is setting in. By four, the phone rings.
The caller ID shows Rory’s school, and ice floods through every vein.
“Ms. Holland? There’s been a situation.” The voice on the other end is calm in that practiced way school administrators have. “Your emergency contact, Grace, isn’t answering her phone. Your son is here in the office, but he needs to be picked up.”
“I’ll be right there.”
It doesn’t even occur to me to be angry.
Grace has been my emergency contact for six years and never once let me down, and I know exactly why her phone is silent today.
She has spent the last two months quietly, nervously falling for someone, a woman she keeps almost telling me about and then losing her nerve, and she finally let herself take an afternoon to enjoy it.
I’ll tease her about it for a year. Later.
Right now my son is sitting in a school office waiting for me.
The phone is barely back in my pocket before my feet are moving. Bag. Keys. Jacket. The elevator is too slow, the lobby too crowded, and the car is parked three levels down in the garage, and Rory is waiting, and...
Wait.
The Hargrove deadline is tomorrow. The files need to be handed off. There are notes that only make sense if someone walks through them, and the presentation boards are still on my desk, and...
The footsteps reverse direction. Back toward the office, back toward the desk, back toward the organized chaos of three weeks of work that can’t just be abandoned.
“What’s wrong?”
Nick’s voice comes from somewhere to the left, and turning reveals him standing in the hallway, brow furrowed, already reading the panic on my face.
“Rory’s school called. Grace couldn’t pick him up. I have to...”
“Go.”
“But the deadline...”
“Jo.” His hands land on my shoulders, steadying, grounding. The warmth of his palms seeps through my blazer, and for a moment, everything else fades. “Go get your son. Everything else can wait.”
“The presentation boards...”
“I’ll handle it.”
“The client notes...”
“I’ll handle everything.” His thumbs press gently against my collarbone. “Rory needs you. Go.”
The urge to kiss him is overwhelming and completely inappropriate, so instead, the only response is a nod before turning and running for the elevator.
The school is fifteen minutes away. The drive takes twelve, thanks to a liberal interpretation of speed limits and a prayer that no cops are watching.
Rory is in the front office when the doors burst open, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a pile of blocks, chattering at the secretary about the critical differences between Belgian waffles and regular waffles.
“Belgian waffles are fluffier,” he’s explaining with the gravity of a philosopher debating the meaning of life. “But regular waffles have better syrup absorption. It’s science.”
“Rory.”
His head whips around, and his face lights up. “Mom!”
The hug is too tight, arms wrapped around his small body, face buried in his hair, heart pounding with the residual terror of that phone call. He squirms after a moment.
“Mom, you’re squishing me.”
“Sorry, baby. I just. I missed you.”
“You saw me this morning.”
“I know. I still missed you.”
“I missed you too!” He grins, gap-toothed and perfect. “Can we get ice cream?”
There’s no time for ice cream. There’s no time to take him home and come back, not with the Hargrove handoff still looming. The files on my desk won’t explain themselves, and Nick can only cover so much, and the decision that follows will haunt me for the rest of my life.
“How about we go see where Mommy works instead?”
Rory’s eyes go wide. “Really? Your fancy office? With the shiny floors?”
“Really.”
“Can I press the elevator buttons?”
“Every single one.”
The building is quiet when we arrive, the clock pushing past five, most of the staff already gone for the day. Matthias should be long gone, he never stays past 4:30, too busy with whatever social engagements fill his empty life, so the coast should be clear.
Rory holds my hand as we walk through the lobby, his head swiveling in every direction, questions pouring out in an endless stream.
“Is this where you work? Why is everything so shiny? Are those real plants or fake plants? They look fake. Can I touch them? Why is the ceiling so high? Do birds ever get in here? That would be cool. Or scary. Maybe both.”
The answers come on autopilot, my mind already on the files waiting at my desk, the notes that need to be organized, the thousand small tasks that need to happen before tomorrow morning.
The elevator doors open on our floor. The hallway stretches ahead, familiar and safe.
And then voices drift around the corner.
Familiar voices. Raised voices.
The feet stop moving. Rory tugs at my hand, confused by the sudden halt.
“Mom? What...”
The corner reveals them before the retreat can happen. Nick and Matthias, standing in the middle of the hallway, clearly in the middle of an argument. Their heads turn at the sound of Rory’s voice.
Matthias sees me first. Then his gaze drops to the child holding my hand.
And his face goes white.
“Mom?” Rory is looking up at me, confused.
Then his eyes follow my frozen stare, landing on Matthias, on the photograph behind him on the wall, the company portrait of both brothers, their faces larger than life.
Rory’s head tilts the way it does when he’s working through a puzzle, making connections the way clever children do.
The resemblance is unmistakable. The same dark curls. The same jaw. The same everything, except the eyes. The eyes are mine. Looking at them side by side is a photograph set beside its subject, separated by twenty-five years.
“Mom.” Rory’s voice carries in the silent hallway, loud and curious and absolutely devastating. “Is that man my daddy?”
The world stops spinning.
“You told me to stay away from him,” Rory continues, because children don’t know when to stop, don’t understand the bombs they’re dropping. “You said if I ever saw his picture, I should tell you. Is that why? Because he’s my daddy and he’s bad?”
The silence is absolute. Every muscle in my body has locked into place, frozen by the horror of this moment, by the realization that seven years of careful secrets have just unraveled in a single sentence from a six-year-old who doesn’t understand what he’s done.
Showing him that picture was supposed to be protection. A way for him to recognize the man if they ever crossed paths, to know to come find me. And now that precaution has backfired spectacularly, going off in the middle of this hallway.
Nick is staring at me. Matthias is staring at Rory. The weight of their gazes is crushing, suffocating, and looking anywhere but at the ground feels impossible.
“Jo.” Nick’s voice is rough, scraped raw. “Is this true?”
The eyes that meet his are full of tears. The hurt there, the confusion, the betrayal, it cuts deeper than anything Matthias ever did. Because Nick trusted me. Nick defended me. Nick held me in his arms and promised everything would be okay.
And I kept this from him.
“Yes.” The whisper barely makes it past the lump in my throat. “Rory is Matthias’s son.”
Matthias makes a sound, half laugh, half sob, the noise of a man whose entire understanding of reality has just shifted. “I have a son. I have a son, and you kept him from me for seven years...”
“You abandoned me!” The words tear out like they’ve been waiting seven years for release.
“You cheated on me! The day I found out I was pregnant, the day I took those tests and came to tell you, I walked in on Brittany riding you on our couch! You don’t get to play the victim here, Matthias.
You don’t get to pretend you were wronged! ”
“I didn’t know!” His voice cracks. “I didn’t know you were pregnant! You never told me...”
“Why the fuck should that justify you?! You were cheating on me! You were fucking another woman in our home! Whether I was pregnant or not doesn’t change what you did!”
“If you had just told me...”
“WHEN?!” The scream echoes off the walls. “When should I have told you? While you were still inside her? While you were laughing about how marriage couldn’t keep you away from her pussy? While you were KISSING her while I stood there watching?!”
Rory starts crying.
The sound cuts through everything, the rage, the grief, the seven years of pain that have been building to this moment. A small, scared child, caught in the middle of adult chaos he doesn’t understand, his face crumpling as tears stream down his cheeks.
The knees hit the floor without conscious decision, arms pulling him close, voice dropping to something soft and broken. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have yelled. It’s okay, Mommy’s here, it’s okay...”
Over the top of Rory’s head I make the mistake of looking at Matthias, and what I see there drops the temperature in my whole body.
What’s on his face isn’t grief, and it’s not the stunned wonder of a man who just learned he has a son.
He’s looking at my boy the way he used to look at a deal worth closing, a rival worth ruining.
Calculating. Already adding up what a child is worth to him.
A claim on me. A claim on the family money he’s so terrified of losing.
A leash he can pull any time he wants to watch me come running.
He doesn’t want Rory. I know him far too well to believe that for a single second.
He wants what Rory can be used for, and somehow that’s more frightening than if he had wanted nothing at all.
“I want to go home.” His sobs are muffled against my shoulder. “Mom, I want to go home. Please, I want to go home.”
“Okay. Okay, baby, we’re going home.” Standing takes effort, lifting him even more, he’s almost too heavy now, too big to be carried like this, but he clings like he’s three years old again and scared of the dark.
One last look at Nick.
His face is unreadable. Closed off in a way it hasn’t been since those first days, when he was just the grumpy boss who didn’t smile. The warmth that’s been building between us for weeks has disappeared behind walls I can practically see going up.
“I was going to tell you.” The words are desperate, inadequate. “When I was ready. I was going to...”
“But you didn’t.”
There’s nothing to say to that. Nothing that will fix this, nothing that will undo the damage of secrets kept too long.
So the only option is walking away. Past Matthias’s shell-shocked face. Past Nick’s wounded eyes. Down the hallway, into the elevator, through the lobby, out to the car where Rory can finally stop crying long enough to be buckled into his seat.
The drive home passes in silence.
Rory falls asleep against the window, exhausted from crying, his small face still blotchy and tear-stained. The streetlights slide past in orange blurs. The radio stays off. The only sound is the hum of the engine and the quiet, relentless drip of tears down my cheeks.
Seven years of secrets.
Seven years of protecting Rory from a father who didn’t deserve him.
Seven years of building a life that didn’t include Matthias Anderson.
And now it’s all gone. The job. The fresh start. The tentative, terrifying hope that had been building with Nick.
All of it.
Gone.