Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Sutton
Ispend Sunday night unpacking slowly. Not because I have much to unpack — I was only gone two nights. Moving through the ordinary motions of it gives my hands something to do while my head does what it's been doing since the plane touched down.
Going over it all; the terrace. The way he stepped toward me. The one second his eyes dropped and the city glittered below us and everything contracted into that single moment before the door opened and he walked away. I hang the emerald gown in the back of the closet. I don't look at it anymore.
Maggie's out — a friend's birthday dinner, home late.
Which is fine. I'm not ready to talk about Dallas yet.
Maggie has an uncanny ability to extract things I haven't decided to share just by looking at me for too long.
I need one night to put everything in the right place before I let anyone near it.
I make tea I don't drink. I sit at the kitchen counter.
I'm honest with myself for exactly as long as I can stand it.
Something shifted in Dallas. Not in a way I manufactured or imagined — in a way that was real and mutual and witnessed by both of us and then deliberately walked back.
He walked it back. I watched him do it, smooth and efficient, the mask back in place before we'd crossed through the terrace doors.
I did the same because the room required it.
Because that's what you do when you're performing a role that has started to feel uncomfortably close to not a performance.
What I won't do is sit here on a Sunday night and pretend I don't know what I felt when he stepped toward me.
What I also won't do is follow that thought anywhere further.
He is my boss. Caleb is his brother. Wanting something and being allowed to have it are two different things, and I've never confused them.
I pour the tea down the sink and go to bed.
Monday morning I'm at my desk by 7:55. When Logan walks in at eight our eyes meet briefly across the corridor. I give him the same professional nod I always give him. He gives me the same contained acknowledgment he always gives me. We both turn back to our screens. We are both very good at this.
The crisis surfaces on a Tuesday..
I'm coordinating three correspondence threads when Keith stops by the corridor with the look he gets when something is wrong enough to matter but not wrong enough to panic.
He and Logan exchange a few words at the office doorway.
Logan's expression doesn't change — it never does.
But something in his posture sharpens, and within twenty minutes the day has reorganized itself entirely.
A systems integration for one of Drake Industries' major enterprise clients.
Complications that surfaced late and badly, the kind with a cascading effect on timelines and contracts and relationships built over years.
Logan pulls a small team together — four people from development and client relations.
By early afternoon we're in the smaller conference room on the north side of the floor with laptops open and the understanding that nobody is going home at 5:00.
Nobody goes home at 5:00 for the rest of the week…
I become the operational center of gravity for everything outside the technical problem itself.
Dinner orders when it hits seven and people are still at the table.
Presentation decks updated as the strategy evolves.
Timeline analysis. Client communication threads.
I'm good at this — the clarity that comes with a real problem, a room full of people who need things, the satisfaction of making sure nothing falls through. I was made for this kind of pressure.
What I wasn't fully prepared for is how much of it puts me in close range of Logan.
We're in and out of the same conference room for hours at a stretch.
I'm at his shoulder reviewing the revised integration timeline, close enough to catch the clean, masculine scent of him — something understated, just warmth and something faintly cedar — before I redirect my attention back to the document.
When he's at the whiteboard walking the team through the adjusted rollout strategy, I watch him think.
I watch him move. I understand for the first time with complete clarity that I am in serious trouble.
He gives me more eye contact than he used to.
I notice it the way you notice a change in light — not dramatic, just different.
A held gaze a beat longer than before. Eyes finding mine across the conference table when a point lands.
A look in the corridor that doesn't have a professional explanation and doesn't reach for one.
He's not performing anything. It's just there. Then it isn't. We both move forward.
I do this every day for a week and a half.
The late nights blur together. Home at 10:00 one evening, 10:30 on another, and once at nearly 11:00.
Maggie leaves a plate covered in foil on the counter because she is Maggie and that is what she does.
I fall asleep fast and wake up already thinking about the client timeline before the day has started.
Caleb and I have not spoken. Not really.
A handful of texts across the week — his saying he caught my voicemail, mine saying I've been buried, his saying no worries.
We are orbiting each other from a distance and I tell myself it's circumstance.
The time zones, the hours, the pace of the project.
I believe this mostly — except for the moments at eleven at night in the back of a car going home when the silence is honest in a way I can't argue with.
***
It's a Thursday—almost two weeks out from Dallas. I'm picking up a working lunch order for the team — a place three blocks from the office. It's cold out, properly cold, the wind off the bay sharp and opinionated. I'm standing on the sidewalk outside the café when my phone rings.
Caleb.
I stare at it for one ring. We haven't actually spoken in over a week. I pick up.
"Hey," I say. "I was going to call you tonight."
"Yeah." His voice is flat. Not tired — compressed. Like someone who has been in a bad mood long enough that it has become his default setting.
"I figured I'd just call."
"Is everything okay?"
"Not particularly." A beat.
"I've been trying to reach you."
"I know — I'm sorry. This project at work has been completely consuming. The whole team has been—"
"Sutton." He says my name with the specific impatience of someone who has already decided they don't want the explanation.
"I called three times last week. Every time it went to voicemail."
"I was in briefings. I texted you that. We've been working until—"
"I really don't need your schedule broken down for me," he says. The edge is fully present now, no longer underneath anything.
I stop. Take a breath. The wind cuts down the street.
"What's going on with you, Caleb?"
A pause. "The Meridian project fell through."
"I'm sorry—"
"Eight months," he says.
"Eight months building toward that credit and they went with someone else at the last minute." Another beat.
"I've been trying to talk to you about it. But you're never available."
"I understand you're frustrated about Meridian." I keep my voice even.
"And I do want to hear about it. But I haven't been unreachable because I don't care — I've been managing a genuine crisis at work. Late nights, long days, a team depending on me to keep things running. My work matters too, Caleb."
The silence that follows is a specific kind. Not the silence of someone processing what you've said. The silence of someone who has already decided what comes next and is just finding the moment to say it.
"I know it does," he says. Then: "I just don't think this is working."
I go still on the sidewalk. The street keeps moving around me — a couple passing, a cab, someone on a bike. The world entirely indifferent.
"What?"
"Us," he says. Quietly. Cleanly.
"I don't think it's working. The distance, the timing — it was already a lot before you moved. Now it's just — we're not really in each other's lives anymore."
There's something almost rehearsed about it.
Not cruel — Caleb isn't cruel. He's something more specific.
Finished. He sounds like a man who arrived at this conclusion a while ago and has been waiting for the right window.
He found it here, on a Thursday afternoon, while I'm standing outside a café in the cold.
"You're ending this," I say. Not a question.
"I think it's the right call. For both of us."
The anger comes fast and hot. Not the devastated kind — not the kind with tears underneath it. The kind that comes from being managed. From being someone else's tidy resolution. From watching a person look at something real and decide it's a loose end.
"That's very clean, Caleb," I say. My voice is level. I'm proud of that.
"Very efficient."
"Sutton—"
"I hope the next project goes better," I say, and I hang up.
I stand on the sidewalk for a full minute.
Maybe longer. The café door opens beside me and someone calls my name — the order is ready.
I go inside. I pick it up. I tip generously because the woman behind the counter has had nothing to do with any of this.
I walk the three blocks back to the office with the bags in my hand and the wind in my face and something locked very tightly in my chest.
I am not devastated.
That's the part that undoes me. Standing in the elevator on the way back up, watching the floor numbers rise, I take an honest accounting.
I find anger. I find indignation. I find the sharp sting of being dismissed.
What I don't find — no matter how far down I look — is heartbreak.
And the absence of it asks a question I'm not ready to answer out loud.