Chapter 9
Jace
I heard her before I saw her.
The Meridian meeting had wrapped clean. Co-production deals solid, timeline agreed, budget within range.
I should’ve been thinking about the contracts that needed reviewing or the call with the Geneva distributor I’d pushed to Thursday.
Instead I was thinking about the fact that my assistant had excused herself five minutes ago and hadn’t come back.
I walked toward the corridor. That’s when her voice reached me.
"I’m Mr. Hunter’s assistant. Anna Wilson."
I stopped. Just around the corner, out of sight.
"If you have opinions about Mr. Hunter, you’re welcome to share them with him directly. He’s just down the hall. I can arrange the meeting right now. Walk you there myself."
Silence from whoever she was talking to.
"No? Then maybe keep it to yourselves. Because the man you just called a freak spent the last hour out-thinking every person in that room, including your boss. And the gloves? They are none of your business."
Footsteps. Heels on floor. She was walking away from them and toward me.
I stepped back. She came around the corner. Her face was flushed, her jaw set, her eyes still carrying the heat of whatever she’d just said. She saw me and the heat banked immediately, replaced by that careful professionalism she wore like a second outfit.
"I suppose we can leave now?" she asked, like nothing had happened.
I nodded, like I hadn’t just heard every word.
We walked to the car in silence. I held the door for her, which I’d never done for an assistant, and told myself it was because the parking structure was poorly lit and the steps were uneven—not because a woman I’d known for only a few weeks had defended me to strangers without knowing I could hear her.
In the car, I drove. She sat in the passenger seat reviewing her notes, pen moving across the page in quick, efficient strokes. Her hair was tucked behind her left ear and the afternoon light was coming through the window at a low angle, catching the side of her face.
I should’ve been watching the road. And I was watching the road. Mostly.
But my peripheral vision was doing things I hadn’t authorized.
Tracking the way the light hit her skin, the warm olive tone turning golden where the sun touched her cheekbone.
The curve of her mouth when she was concentrating, her lower lip caught between her teeth.
The line of her collarbone where her blouse sat, the way it disappeared into shadow.
I'd never noticed how someone's breathing changed when they were concentrating.
Never tracked the small movements of a person's hands or noticed their shoulders settle when they forgot they were being watched.
I could build entire worlds around the fall of light across a digital surface, spend hours perfecting a shadow to make a landscape feel alive.
I had never once felt that same pull toward a real person.
What was I doing? Why was I even noticing every little detail about her?
This was not a professional observation. I was aware of that. But the awareness didn’t stop it.
Back at the office, my Rubik’s cube sat untouched on my desk for the first time in months. I couldn’t pick it up because my hands wanted to do something else. My brain was stuck in a loop: the corridor, her voice.
I pulled up the security system on my laptop. Badge-in logs. Her record. Today: seven forty-two a.m. I scrolled back. Monday: seven thirty-eight. Tuesday: seven forty-one. Wednesday: seven fifty-four.
I stared at Wednesday. Fourteen minutes later than average. What happened on Wednesday?
Thursday: seven forty. Friday: seven forty-two.
I couldn't explain to myself why I was tracking my assistant's arrival times down to the minute. I was aware this wasn't normal. Aware that if Dr. Adler could see my screen right now, we'd be having a very different conversation on Thursday.
I closed the tab. Straightened my pen against the desk's edge. Aligned my phone parallel to the laptop. My hand was back on the trackpad before I'd made a conscious decision to move it, and her badge log was open again.
This wasn’t me. I didn’t fixate on people. People were variables I managed, accounted for, and kept at a distance. I didn’t memorize their schedules or study their profiles or recall the sound of their voices defending me in an empty corridor.
I picked up the cube. Solved it in nineteen seconds. Put it down. Picked it up and solved it again. Seventeen. Faster, and it didn't matter. The click of the final face snapping into place usually quieted something in my head. Tonight it was just noise.
I opened the Meridian file. Read the same paragraph three times without absorbing a single word. Closed it. Pulled up the environmental design specs for Act III instead and got halfway through a lighting note before I realized I was thinking about the sun catching her cheekbone in the car.
I put the cube down. Lined it up with the corner of my desk. My thoughts kept circling back to her anyway, persistent and impossible to shut off.
The next morning, I noticed her desk before I entered my office.
Her workspace was different. The surface gleamed.
Someone had gone beyond the usual office wipe-down, scrubbed it with a thoroughness that took real time and real intention.
And there, beside her monitor, was a bottle of hand sanitizer.
My brand. The green label. The unscented formula I ordered from a supplier in London because every American brand had fragrance in it.
Her keyboard had been wiped down. I could see the faint streak marks from the cloth. Under her desk, her outdoor shoes were tucked neatly to the side. She was wearing different ones. Indoor flats. Clean soles. Shoes that hadn't touched the pavement.
I walked into my office and went straight for the coffee machine. I made my own coffee. Always had. My machine, my beans, my process. A roaster in Bath who’d been supplying my grandfather’s household for decades. Nobody touched it. Nobody poured from it. Some things are non-negotiable.
I was measuring the beans when she appeared in the doorway.
"Mr. Hunter, your nine-thirty confirmed and the Meridian revision notes are on your desk."
I turned around.
Her curls were down today. Loose around her shoulders, dark brown shot through with copper where the sun from the window behind me caught them.
The light fell across her face and brought out the warmth in her skin, golden and clean, and her eyes were that shade of brown I'd been noticing against my will since the elevator.
She was wearing a simple blouse, nothing remarkable, and yet I was standing there with a coffee scoop in my hand forgetting how numbers worked.
Beautiful.
She was beautiful.
I’d known that since the market, since the half second between her crashing into me and the coffee ruining my shirt.
But knowing it from across a desk was one thing.
Knowing it at six feet in a doorway with morning light on her face was a different problem entirely.
The kind of problem I didn’t have a protocol for.
"New shoes," I said, because my mouth needed something to do that wasn’t making it obvious I’d been staring.
She looked down at her feet. Back up at me. "Yeah. I brought indoor ones."
"You changed them."
"The ones I walked in with are under my desk." She said it like it was nothing.
It wasn’t nothing. She was apparently not aware of that.
"I know you don’t like mess or tardiness," she said. "So I’ll be clean, on time, and organized. No plants. I sanitize my workspace every morning so you won’t have to worry about my area when you walk past."
My fingers stopped on the coffee scoop. Mid-pour. Beans scattered across the counter and I didn’t care.
I didn’t care about loose coffee beans on my counter.
That should have been my first indication that something was seriously wrong with me.
Nobody had ever said this to me. Every assistant before her had treated my requirements as a list of eccentricities to endure—a checklist of weird things the boss needs that they’d tolerate until they couldn’t anymore, and then they’d quit, and I’d start the whole process again.
She wasn’t tolerating it. She was respecting it. And the difference between those two things was everything.
"Why?" I asked.
She looked at me. And then she smiled. It reached her eyes, stayed there, and it was directed at me. My body responded by sending every drop of blood in my system straight to my head.
For a horrifying second, I thought my nose was bleeding again. I nearly touched my face to check. I wasn’t bleeding. It was just my pulse, which had apparently decided to abandon all professionalism along with the rest of me.
"Because I need this job," she said. "And because you’re a human being, not a puzzle to solve. You have your reasons. I don’t need to know them. I just need to respect them."
She turned and went back to her desk. I stood in my office. Coffee beans on the counter. Scoop still in my hand. The machine behind me did nothing because I’d forgotten to press the button.
That evening, I was back in my penthouse. The city lay below the windows, all glass and light and distance. I sat in the chair by the window with my phone on speaker and Dr. Adler’s voice filling the room.
"How was your week?" he asked.
"Productive."
"You know that’s not what I asked."
I turned the cube. Click, click. "There’s a woman."
Silence from Adler. The particular kind that therapists deploy when they want you to keep talking without being prompted.
"My assistant," I said. "She’s been here a few weeks. She’s chaotic, disruptive, and brought pollen into my office—I should have fired her after the first day."
"But you didn’t."
"Miles made that difficult."
"Miles made it difficult, or you let Miles make it difficult?"
I didn’t answer that.
"Tell me about her," Adler said.