Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Tatum stared at the ceiling.
Again.
She was getting very good at contemplating this particular ceiling. The way the morning light moved across it. The exact shade of it in the early gray of before seven. She could probably draw it from memory at this point.
She turned her head. The other side of the bed was empty, the pillow barely dented, the sheet pulled back with the careful neatness of someone who had left deliberately and early and without wanting to leave a trace of himself behind.
She lay there for a moment and just let herself feel it.
She'd promised herself she wouldn't do this.
Wouldn't read things into it, wouldn't build something out of what was and wasn't there.
She was a grown woman, and she knew what this was.
She'd gone into it with her eyes open. She wasn't the type to fall apart over a man.
Except…
Except she was lying here staring at the ceiling, and the empty space beside her felt like a statement rather than just an absence, and the honest truth, the one she'd been pushing away for days now and possibly for much longer than that, was that she was in love with him.
There it was.
She closed her eyes. She was in love with Archer Gray.
Head of the Lock and Key Society. The most controlled, most dangerous, most emotionally unavailable man she had ever met in her life.
She was in love with him, and if she was being really honest, properly honest in the way she rarely allowed herself to be, it hadn't happened recently.
It had been happening slowly and quietly for a long time.
Since before any of this. Since the board meetings where he'd move through the room and she'd track him without meaning to.
Since the moments when he'd say something precise and unexpected, and she'd feel the particular pleasure of a mind encountering another mind that worked in a way she recognized.
Since the first time he'd looked at her, really looked at her, and she'd understood that being seen by Archer Gray was something different from being seen by anyone else.
She'd told herself it was admiration. Professional respect. The natural response to being in proximity to someone extraordinary. She pressed her palms against her eyes. She'd been lying to herself for months.
And now she was here, in his building, sharing her research with him, letting him bring her dinner and tuck her hair back from her face and kiss her like she was something he was afraid of losing.
He’d even said it, and yet, it was absolutely crushing her because she knew with the clear-eyed certainty that had always been her most reliable quality, that Archer Gray was not a man who fell in love.
He was a man who cared, in his controlled and precise and deeply guarded way, but caring and loving were different things, and she was not going to be the woman who confused the two and paid an emotional price for it.
She sat up as the rain started. A soft sprinkle at first and then a massive downpour. How fitting.
Enough.
She'd been avoiding her parents for days, and that had to stop.
They were infuriating, and her father was frightening in ways she'd never fully admitted even to herself, but they were still her parents.
She owed them a conversation. A real one, not the office standoff or the hallway retreat.
She needed to tell them about Gil and Anderson.
And she needed to tell them she was done with the firm, done with Anderson, done with all of it.
She needed to say it properly and then she needed to go.
Because that was the other thing she'd been circling and hadn't let herself land on.
She needed to leave.
She could work the Granite Industries case from anywhere.
The money trail was digital. The paperwork was in her files.
Archer had his resources, and he would keep digging with or without her in the building, and if she found something, if she traced the money to wherever it had gone, she could send him the information, and he would do what he did with it. She trusted him on that. She did.
But she couldn't stay here. She couldn't keep waking up in this apartment and checking the other side of the bed and feeling that particular hollowness. She couldn't keep having dinner across from him and feeling the strong attraction to him and lying to herself about what it meant.
She couldn't keep being in love with a man who was going to keep walking out before dawn because that was simply who he was and what this was.
She was not going to let it break her in a building that belonged to him, surrounded by people who worked for him, with nowhere to look that didn't remind her of exactly how deep in she'd gotten.
Florence, she thought. Or Ireland. Somewhere with no shell companies and no board meetings and no ceiling she'd memorized from lying awake thinking about a man who didn't lose sleep over anything.
She got up, showered, pulled on jeans and a sweater, and started making a mental list. What day was it?
Wednesday. Her parents would be at the office already.
They’d have had morning coffee and left their door open in case the staff had any questions or issues they wanted to talk about on Wednesday mornings.
She would go to her apartment to pack first, two bags; she traveled light, she always had.
It was one of the things her grandfather had taught her, don't accumulate more than you can carry. Then she would head to the office. She’d leave her bags with Carl while she told them.
Then gone. Flight booked from her phone on the way.
She wouldn’t text Archer.
She sat with that for a moment. The not texting felt significant, and she knew it.
She told herself it was because he was busy, because there was nothing specific to report, because she didn't want to interrupt whatever he was dealing with regarding the board meeting and Davis and Fisher and all of it.
But the truth, the honest truth, was that she didn't tell him because she didn't want him to know she was leaving. Not because she thought he would try to stop her.
Because she was terrified that he wouldn't.
That he would say something careful and measured and probably kind, something about her being safe and the case continuing and keeping in touch, and she would have to stand there and hear it and nod and pretend it was fine.
It would not be fine. It would be the final confirmation of everything she already knew, and she was not ready to have it confirmed out loud by the man himself.
She picked up her bag and her key fob and left the apartment.
The Society was quiet in the early morning. She passed the dining room, considered coffee, but decided against it. She wanted to be out before anyone who knew her well enough to ask questions was awake.
She went through the lobby and pushed through the front door into the cool morning air.
Behind her, she heard the locks engage.
She turned. The heavy doors had sealed, the electronic panel beside them glowing amber. She frowned. Amber meant lockdown.
She stood on the sidewalk for a moment and looked at the building. Nothing visible. No alarm, no commotion. After a moment, she turned and kept walking.
Drill, she thought. They had them occasionally. Every few months, Archer ran security protocols, testing response times, and checking the systems. She'd been caught in one before, years ago, before any of this. It was nothing.
She kept walking.
Her apartment building looked the same as it always did. The doorman nodded to her, and she rode up in the elevator and stood outside her door for just a moment before she put the key in.
She'd been back here. She knew what to expect.
Archer had restored everything. But standing here with the intention of packing to leave was different from coming to get files.
The trauma of what had happened here and what it had set in motion and where it had all led felt like a weighted blanket settling over her shoulders.
She unlocked the door and went in.
The apartment was exactly as it should be. Quiet and clean and restored to itself. She stood in the living room for a moment and looked at it, at the bookshelves and the replaced furniture and the pictures back on the walls, and felt a complicated grief for it that she hadn't expected.
She loved this apartment. She'd worked for years for this apartment. She'd chosen every piece of furniture and every frame on these walls. She'd been happy here, genuinely happy, in the way that being alone in a space that was entirely yours could make you happy.
She was going to miss it.
She went to her bedroom and pulled two bags from the top shelf in the closet, and started packing.
She was methodical about it, the way she was methodical about everything, folded rather than stuffed, the things she actually needed rather than everything she owned.
Clothes, her laptop, her charger, the last few research files from the secret room, and her passport.
She paused on the passport. Held it for a moment.
Florence, she thought again. Or Ireland. She'd figure it out on the way to the airport.
She zipped the second bag and straightened up and looked around the bedroom one more time.
She thought about Archer. About his hands and his voice and the way he'd said her name in the low light of the apartment last night and the look on his face in those last few seconds before he kissed her.
I can’t lose you.
He’d said it, but he hadn’t meant it, not really. She thought about all the things he never said and all the things that were somehow present anyway underneath the careful surface of him. She thought about how she had never in her adult life let herself want something she couldn't have. Until now.
She picked up her bags and walked out of the bedroom.