Chapter 35
The Heart Wants…
Max
The flight home feels like mourning. When the cabin door seals shut, the heavy thud reminds me of the final lock of a coffin just before burial.
It’s a dark thought, but it matches the hollow ache of everything I’m leaving behind.
In the span of a single week, I’ve been dismantled and put back together, only to walk away from the one person who finally saw the real me.
The jet engines maintain a low, unrelenting drone that matches the vibration in my chest. I stare out the tiny oval window at a sea of clouds, watching the moonlight bounce off the wing, but all I can see is the set of Eli’s jaw as I walked out of the hospital.
I can't sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I feel the phantom pressure of his hand on my neck or hear the way he says my name or calls me his Mama. My heart is still back in the mountains, tucked under a weighted blanket in a room that smells like cedar and complicated promises.
But as the pilot announces our descent into Hartsfield-Jackson, the softness in me begins to calcify.
By the time the wheels hit the tarmac, the “closet romantic” who has been crying over a bearded man in the woods is gone. She is packed away in my carry-on.
The humidity of Cinnamon Grove hits me the second I step off the plane, thick and heavy, but I’m already moving.
I don't head for baggage claim; I head for the rideshare line, my thumb scrolling through three dozen missed Slack messages.
My brain is already re-mapping the security features that need to be reinforced at MatchSense.
I am exhausted, bone-deep and aching, but the adrenaline of the "fix" is taking over. By the time I walk into the conference room to meet Timantha and Anastasia, my shoes are moving against the floor with lethal precision, even though there is nothing lethal about me right now. I slide into the empty chair at the head of the table, my eyes locking onto the monitors before I’ve even said hello.
The data is already moving, swirling in a way that makes my pulse spike.
“—which means this isn’t a curiosity poke,” Anastasia says, tapping the screen like she wants it to confess. “It’s a campaign.”
I lean back in my chair, arms crossed, eyes locked on the scrolling logs projected onto the conference room wall. Timantha is pacing behind me, heels clicking sharp and irritated, the universal soundtrack of her being five seconds from flipping a damn table.
“How long?” Timantha asks. “How long have they had access?”
Anastasia doesn’t answer right away. She zooms in, highlights a cluster of timestamps, then another. Her mouth tightens.
“A while,” she says finally. “Long enough that this asshole knows your system’s personality. Long enough to get comfortable.”
My stomach sinks. Comfortable isn’t good. Especially on my watch.
“He wasn’t trying to break in at first,” Anastasia continues. “He was watching. Mapping. Learning how you respond, Max. Which defenses you prioritize. Which ones you rotate.”
Timantha stops pacing. “So he’s been chasing us.”
“Exactly,” Anastasia says. “And every time he comes back, he adjusts. Like he’s filing mental notes.”
I stare at the screen, recognizing patterns I wish I didn’t. The pauses. The deliberate retreats. The way he disappears the second I get too close.
“He was flirting with me. He wanted me to see him,” I say quietly.
Both of them look at me.
“He leaves breadcrumbs,” I continue. “Just enough for me to chase. Just enough to make me think I’m one step behind when I’m not.”
Anastasia nods slowly. “He’s testing you specifically. And it isn’t external,” she says, dragging a new file onto the screen. “Not really.”
Timantha goes still. I feel her panic before she fully processes it. “What do you mean, not external?” she asks.
Anastasia zooms in on a permission map. “Your attacker never had to force his way past the outer layers. He was already inside the building. Just…not everywhere.”
I lean forward. “He only has level two access,” I say slowly, the realization settling in. “So anything beyond that, he’s been forced to come at from the outside. That’s exactly how I designed the security. He was never supposed to touch the core without leaving a trail.”
Anastasia’s eyes flick to me. “Right. Enough access to observe behavior. Not enough to touch the crown jewels without tripping alarms.”
Timantha’s voice turns sharp. “Reese.”
“Your cybersecurity manager,” Anastasia continues, methodical now. “Which means he’s perfectly positioned. He sees the alerts. He helps write the reports. He knows which breaches get escalated and which ones get waved off as noise.”
My jaw tightens. I replay every meeting. Every time he leaned back too casually and said, probably nothing, right before something very much was.
I feel sick now. Angry. Violated, even.
“I pulled a few favors and dug into his connections,” Anastasia says, queuing up the next screen. “People who owe me. People who don’t get curious when I ask them to follow money tied to corporate bullshit.”
Numbers flood the screen. Accounts. Transfers. Too clean.
“Cache Elite?” Timantha asks, recognizing one of the logos.
Anastasia nods. “Your largest competitor, who also happens to have deep pockets and zero shame. They planted Reese six months before your valuation talks went public.”
She highlights a column. Wire transfers. Regular. Substantial. Direct deposits routed through three intermediaries before landing in Reese’s personal account.”
“He wasn’t freelancing,” I say. “He was employed.”
“Yes,” Anastasia replies. “And he delivered exactly what they paid for. Behavioral intel. Defensive patterns. Weak points that aren’t actually weak, just waiting.”
Timantha swears, low and lethal. “He sat in this building. Ate our food. Smiled in our faces.”
“Tried to touch my booty,” I add.
“And tried to steal your company out from under you,” Anastasia finishes.
I exhale, but it does nothing to even my breaths or my temper. “So every time I felt like someone was testing me, it was because they were.”
Anastasia holds my gaze. “He underestimated you by trying to flirt with you like you were simple. That’s where he fucked up.”
I grin. God, I love her. Such a boss.
“Good,” I say. “Because now I know exactly where to aim when I fuck his four-eyes up.”
“Where the police will aim,” Timantha cuts in. “We’re letting the authorities handle this. Because we do not need you going back to jail, Max.”
That gets us all laughing.
Anastasia glances at her smartwatch, then snorts at whatever just came through. “Autika wants to know if either of us will bring her chicken and waffles and come over to put lotion on her feet. Apparently her belly’s blocking her view and Justice is out of town for a soccer match.”
“An emphatic hell no,” I say immediately. “She was your friend first.”
We crack up.
Timantha shakes her head, laughing. “I’ll take her the food. But I am not putting lotion on her damn feet. I will, however, take her to a nice, friendly nail salon and let them hit those things with a Brillo pad.”
Anastasia packs up a few minutes later, sliding her laptop into her bag, and somehow even that looks tactical.
She wears a sleek bob and polished business clothes, the kind of woman who could walk into a boardroom or disappear into the shadows without changing her expression.
She also has a literal license to kill, which feels worth noting.
I’m just grateful—deeply, sincerely grateful—she’s a friend.
Timantha and I thank her at least three times for coming in on such short notice, on a Sunday evening no less. She waves it off, already halfway out the door, because that’s who she is. Ride or die, with receipts.
Once she’s gone, the room settles into a quieter kind of tension. Timantha turns to me, studying my face the way she does when she already knows the answer but wants to hear it anyway.
“Have you heard from Eli?”
“Yeah. I have.”
Timantha’s expression softens, but she doesn’t interrupt.
“I told myself I was being practical. That I needed to come home because of work. Because of this.” I gesture vaguely at the conference room, the logs, the mess.
“But if I’m honest, I was also preserving myself.
I didn’t want to sit around waiting for him to remind me that whatever we had was temporary. ”
“And then?” she asks gently.
“And then I landed back in the States and my phone blew up,” I say. “Calls. Texts. Voicemails. He’d been trying to reach me for hours.” I swallow. “His mother had a heart attack. Everything happened fast. Hospital. Decisions. Fear.”
Timantha exhales. “Damn.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I feel like an ass. A worried ass. But still.”
“You can’t beat yourself up for that,” Timantha says. “That’s a normal human response. When your norm gets disrupted, your brain panics. It scrambles to fill the gap. It looks for a reason. A purpose. An exit, even.”
I shake my head. “That’s the part I don’t get. I could understand if this had been months. But it was a week. How do you even build a norm in that short amount of time?”
“The heart—”
“Bitch,” I cut in. “If you say some corny-ass nonsense like the heart wants what the heart wants, I swear—”
She bursts out laughing. “I didn’t know what else to say!
” She wipes under her eye. “But I did tell you, once you joined the book club, everything you thought you wanted would be called into question. And everything you actually need would just…show up. You just have to decide which one you’re going to choose. ”
Decide. What’s there to decide? I’m here. He’s there, with the people who actually need him right now.
I understand his need to be where he is.
I respect his dedication to even his personal peace.
I just hate that I can’t be there with him.
I hate that I didn’t give him a chance to lean on me, to let me carry some of the weight.
That I left before I had the opportunity to share his burden because I was afraid of saying three insane little words out loud.
I need you.
And that’s when the thought hits me.
What if I go back?
Timantha shifts gears. “What about the pitch?”
“Apparently Drake and Lara stepped in,” I say. “From what I hear, they were amazing.”
“Of course they were,” she says, half-smiling. Then she looks back at me. “Do you regret any of it? Your time with Eli?”
The answer comes immediately. “No.”
Not even a flicker of doubt.
“It was exactly what it was supposed to be,” I say. “And also, so much more.” I pause, letting that land. “Both things can be true.”
Timantha reaches over and squeezes my hand. “I’m glad you know that.”
As I get ready to head back to my apartment, unpack, still smelling faintly like Canada, my chest tightens. The silence hits harder than I expect. Because despite logic, timing, and common sense, my traitor-ass heart wants what it wants.
And right now, all it wants is Eli.