Chapter 2- Control
She didn't follow me out.
I hadn't expected her to stop me. That wasn't Blaire.
She didn't chase. Didn't reach for things she wasn't certain she could keep.
And she sure as hell never let anyone see how badly she wanted something.
Still, I lingered outside her office longer than I should have, jacket in hand, staring at the closed door and listening to the silence behind it.
She was sitting very still in there. I knew it the way I knew her signs — her hand next to her pen, the deliberate straightening of her spine. She was reclaiming herself. Filing the last seventeen minutes somewhere she could lock them away.
She doesn't need you anymore.
I turned the phrase over as the elevator doors closed behind me. Whoever sent those photographs knew enough to use the right words. Not want. Need. As if they understood exactly what Blaire would never say out loud.
The lobby was all glass and marble, the kind of architecture designed to make you feel small and precise at the same time. Whitmore & Locke had always had that effect — her father had built it that way, and Blaire had learned to move through it like she owned it.
My car was at the curb. I didn't get in.
I had Declan's number pulled up on my phone before I reached the door. He picked up on the second ring.
"She took the photographs," I said.
"Good."
"She didn't take me seriously."
A pause. "Also expected."
I looked up at the building. Counted the floors. Her office was on the fourteenth. From the street, you could pick out her office window if you knew which floor, which corner. I did. I'd known for longer than I'd admitted to anyone, including myself.
"The car in the garage," I said. "You're sure it was moved deliberately?"
"Positive. Moved two spots over from where she'd parked it. No damage, no note. Nothing she could point to as proof. Just enough to make her wonder if she'd remembered wrong. Whoever this is, they're not trying to scare her. They're trying to make her feel like she's losing her mind."
Patient. Organized. Watching her the way I'd been watching her — from a careful distance, tracking her patterns, learning how she moves through her days. The difference being that I'd kept my distance because I thought it was what she needed.
This person had a different agenda entirely.
"I need to know who sent the envelope to my office," I said. "Not just who took the photographs. Who decided to send them to me specifically?”
"Working on it." Another pause. "You going back up?"
I looked at the lobby doors. At the elevator beyond them. At the fourteenth floor.
"Yes," I said.
I knocked this time. Out of courtesy, not habit.
"Go away, Richard." She didn't look up.
I opened the door anyway. Of course I did.
She was at her desk, contracts open in front of her, pen positioned with surgical precision parallel to the notepad edge.
Her hair was still perfect. Her posture was still perfect.
The only thing that betrayed her was her voice when she told me to go away.
Too flat. Too ready. She'd been expecting me to come back, and she'd already decided what her face would look like when I did.
"You know," I said, leaning against the doorframe, "most people at least pretend to process news like that before going straight back to reviewing contracts. News I brought you."
"I'm working."
"You're pretending to work." I stepped inside and closed the door. "There's a difference."
She kept her eyes on the page. "I have a Pure Barre class at six-thirty. I need to finish this first."
"Right. Tuesday and Thursday." I settled into the chair across from her desk — the same chair I'd occupied thirty minutes ago. "Because god forbid you deviate from the schedule."
"There's nothing wrong with having a routine."
"There's nothing wrong with having a pulse either, but you seem determined to prove you don't need one of those."
The pen slipped. Half a millimeter. She adjusted it. "I'm not doing this with you."
"Doing what?"
"This." She gestured between us, a small break in her composure she immediately regretted. "The thing where you show up uninvited and start excavating my psyche like it's an archaeological dig."
"That's a good line. You been saving that one?"
"Richard—"
"I'm not here to excavate anything." I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and watched her not look at me.
My voice dropped into the register I hadn't used with her in a long time — the one I saved for late nights, for honesty, for the version of her she only showed when she'd run out of walls. "I'm just asking if you're okay."
She didn't answer. That was its own kind of answer.
She should have leaned back. Put the professional distance in place. Instead, she stayed exactly where she was, and I made a decision I'd probably regret, and I came around the desk.
Every instinct she had screamed at her to stand — I could see it in the set of her shoulders, the way her jaw tightened — but she stayed. Sitting. Her spine was two inches from the chair back. Looking up at me as I closed the distance until I was standing right beside her.
Six inches. Maybe less.
Her gaze dropped to my mouth. Just for a second. Then back to my eyes.
I stopped thinking.
Four years of distance. Four years of driving past her building on my way to nowhere in particular, of hearing her name in rooms she wasn't in, of telling myself that leaving had been the right decision even when it felt like the worst one I'd ever made.
Four years of knowing exactly how to read her and not being allowed to use that knowledge.
She reached up, hooked her fingers in my tie, and pulled me down to her.
For one frozen second, I went absolutely still. Then my hand came up to cup the back of her neck, and I kissed her like I'd been wanting to. Because I had been.
I didn't know whose hands moved first after that. Her fingers slid into my hair, and she was rising from the chair, pulling me closer, and I forgot every reason I'd kept my distance. She tasted like dark roast coffee and raw need.
I turned her, backing her against the edge of the desk, and her hands found my tie again and loosened it without conscious thought. I traced the line of her jaw, slid my fingers down her throat, and felt her breath catch.
"Blaire—" My voice came out wrong. Rough. I pulled back just far enough to look at her.
What I saw in her face made my chest tighten. She was looking at me the way she used to before she'd learned to stop.
She pulled me back to her. Kissed me harder. And for a few minutes, I let myself believe this was something other than a door we were about to close again.
Then she went still.
Not the stillness of before — not the calculated, controlled quiet she used like armor. Something colder. The moment she remembered who she was and what she didn't do.
She shoved me back. Hard. I caught myself against the chair, and she was already moving, putting the desk between us like mahogany could undo what had just happened.
"You need to leave." Her voice shook. She pressed her palms flat against the desk to hide it.
I was breathing hard. My tie was loose, my hair disheveled where her fingers had been. I looked at her — the careful reconstruction already happening, each layer clicking back into place — and I understood that whatever she had just opened was already being sealed.
"Blaire—"
"Please." The word came out sharper than she intended. "Just — please go."
I straightened. Picked up my jacket. Didn't fix my tie, didn't smooth my hair. Just looked at her for a long moment, long enough that she had to look away first.
Then I walked to the door. Paused with my hand on the handle.
I could have said something and forced her to acknowledge it. Made her sit with what had just happened instead of filing it away beneath the expired protein bars, the backup heels, and all the other things she kept where she didn't have to see them.
Instead, I left. The door closed behind me with a sound that felt too final.
In the elevator, I pulled out my phone and typed:
I'm not giving up on this. Or you.
I stared at it for a moment. Sent it anyway.
Then:
Dinner moved to March 14th. Save the date.
No question mark. Not a request. She'd delete it, or she'd keep it, and either way she'd know I wasn't pretending the last twenty minutes hadn't happened.
The lobby doors opened onto the cold February evening. Somewhere up on the fourteenth floor, Blaire was straightening her pen and telling herself she was fine.
I knew her well enough to know she wasn't.
I knew her well enough to know she'd prove it to herself anyway — the contracts, the Pure Barre class at six-thirty, the careful reconstruction of every routine she used to convince herself nothing had changed. The full performance of a woman who had everything under control.
The difference between us was that I'd stopped pretending that performance was the whole story.
My phone buzzed. Declan.
Got something on the envelope. Call me.
I pulled my coat on and stepped into the street, already dialing.
Whatever was coming for Blaire, it wasn't going to wait for her to decide she needed help.
Good thing I'd never been very good at waiting.