Chapter Seventeen - Nora
She caught him in the stairwell before he'd finished his first sentence about Priya's office. Dana's conversation was still sitting hot in her, and his version landed on top of it instead of clearing it away.
"You told her to take you out of the running," she repeated, once he'd finished. "For the promotion."
"I told her not to let my personal life cost you something you earned."
"That's not what I asked. I asked if you told her to take yourself out of it."
"...Yes."
Something hot came up under her ribs, harder to sort than she expected. Gratitude tangled with anger, both fighting for the same space.
"You don't get to do that. Decide what's fair for me without asking me first."
"I wasn't trying to decide for you, I was trying to protect—"
"I know what you were trying to do. I get it. It's a nice instinct." Sharper than she meant. The stairwell threw it back at both of them. "But I've spent three years —"
She stopped. Reset.
"Three years getting looked at like I earned my seat.
And if I get this now, I need it to be because Priya looked at the work.
Not because my boyfriend cleaned up the optics for me.
" Her voice did something on *boyfriend* that she pushed straight past. "Do you see the difference? Tell me you see the difference."
He went quiet.
She watched him actually sit with it instead of arguing back, and she appreciated that even through the heat.
"Yeah," he said finally. "I do. I didn't think it through that far. I saw a mess and tried to clean it up fast."
"I don't need you cleaning up my messes. I need you to let me handle my own."
"Okay." Simple, nothing braced in it. "Noted. And I still think you should get the title, on merit, full stop. I just shouldn't have been the one deciding how that gets sorted."
Some of the heat went out of her. Not all of it. Enough to breathe around.
She leaned back against the rail with her arms crossed and worked through the tangle.
The anger, real, already cooling. And underneath it something warmer she was having a harder time staying mad through — that his first instinct, when a colleague came at this sideways, was to protect her reputation before his own advancement.
Clumsy. Overstepping. Not nothing.
"You called me your boyfriend," he said after a moment. Carefully. Testing whether she'd noticed.
She'd noticed. She'd said it in the heat of the argument, unplanned, and it had come out truer than she expected.
"Don't make this weird."
"Wasn't going to. Just clocking it."
"Clock it quieter."
He almost smiled, and the tightness between them eased into something more familiar.
"I'd have rather lost the promotion," he said, "than watched you spend a year wondering if people thought you didn't earn it because of me. That part I stand by. The not-asking-you-first part, I don't."
"That's a better apology than most people manage."
"I've had practice being wrong. I try to do it efficiently."
She laughed despite herself. The stairwell swallowed it the way it swallowed everything.
Then she reached out and took his hand. Not under a table. Not framed as a favor between colleagues. Just her hand in his, in a stairwell, where anyone could round the corner and read it correctly in half a second.
He didn't pull away. Didn't check the door first. Just let her hand sit in his like it belonged there.
"I'll talk to Priya myself," she said. "Tell her what I want. Not what you decided for me."
"Good."
"And if I don't get it, that's on the work. Not on you."
"Also good." He squeezed her hand once and let go. "Go handle your business. I'll be at my desk being appropriately chastened."
"See that you are."
She walked back toward Priya's office with her spine a little straighter. The problem wasn't solved. She'd just said the true thing out loud instead of swallowing it, and it had cost her nothing that mattered.