8. Taryn
TARYN
I've started keeping a tally in my head of how little this man sleeps, and the number's gotten ugly enough to scare me.
I notice it the way you notice a kid running a fever before they'll admit it.
The coffee that's gone from one cup to four.
The way he holds the kitchen counter for a second longer than a steady person needs to.
The gray light under his office door at two in the morning when I get up for water, still on, every night, like a lighthouse run by a man too proud to call it drowning.
Helena's seen it too — she pressed a thermos of something into my hands this morning and said, "He listens to you better than he listens to me.
Make him stop," and then walked off before I could ask how I was supposed to make a billionaire do anything.
So when I come down past midnight to fill Chloe's water cup and find his office door cracked, I push it open.
And there he is, slumped sideways in his enormous leather chair, cheek against his own shoulder, three monitors still glowing, one hand open on the desk over a contract he never finished.
Asleep. Out cold in his clothes at his desk like a man who collapsed mid-sentence.
The exhaustion that he hides so well in daylight is written all over him now — the shadows, the stubble, the deep furrow between his brows that doesn't smooth out even in sleep.
I should let him rest. Instead I'm so unexpectedly furious at the sight of it that I set the water cup down hard enough to wake him.
He comes up fast, disoriented, one hand already reaching for the phone. "What. What is it, is Chloe?—"
"Chloe's asleep. Like a normal person. At midnight. Which is what you should be doing." I cross my arms. "How long, Graham?"
"How long what?"
"Don't do that. Don't play dumb, you're the smartest man I've ever met and it's insulting to both of us.
How many hours a night are you actually sleeping?
" He doesn't answer, which is an answer.
"Two? Three? You're up here every single night running yourself into the ground, and you think nobody can tell, but I can tell, and Helena can tell, and pretty soon that little girl is gonna be able to tell, and the one thing she cannot afford to lose right now is one more grown-up falling apart. "
"I'm managing." He stands, scrubbing a hand down his face, reaching for the armor and finding it won't quite go back on.
"I have a company hanging by a thread, a board that's measuring me for a coffin, a custody situation circling, and a six-year-old who needs me to be — everything.
All of it. There aren't enough hours, so I take them from sleep.
It's the only column I can borrow against."
"You can't borrow against yourself forever.
That account comes due." I step closer, into the lighthouse glow, and the air between us goes tight the way it always does now, charged and impossible.
"What is this really about? Because nobody works themselves half to death over a quarterly vote.
You ran this place fine for nine years. So what changed? "
"You know what changed."
"Say it anyway."
And maybe it's the exhaustion stripping his guard, or maybe it's just two in the morning and the rest of the world asleep, but something in him gives.
His voice drops, rough and raw. "I'm terrified," he says, the word landing like he's never let it out loud before.
"Of failing her. Chloe. Of doing to her exactly what I did to Celeste — being present on paper and absent everywhere that counts, telling myself the providing was the loving until one day it's too late and there's a phone call and a hospital and a child clutching a rabbit and I realize I never actually showed up for a single thing that mattered.
" He's shaking, just barely. "I failed my sister.
I let pride and a calendar cost me the only person who ever saw through me, and now her daughter is asleep down the hall, and every night I lie awake doing the arithmetic of all the ways I'm going to ruin her too.
So no. I don't sleep. Sleeping feels like the thing I did while Celeste was still alive and reachable and I let her go. "
The fight goes right out of me. Whatever I came down here to say dissolves, because you can't argue with a grief that honest. I close the last of the distance between us and I do the thing I have no right to do, the thing that isn't in any contract — I reach up and lay my hand against the side of his face, against the rough stubble and the tired heat of him, and I hold it there.
"Hey," I say softly. "Listen to me. You did not fail Celeste by being you, and you are not failing Chloe.
You know how I know? Because the Graham who failed his sister wouldn't be sitting up at two in the morning sick over a kid.
He wouldn't have learned to braid hair. He wouldn't have ended a board call early to watch her laugh.
The man who couldn't show up doesn't lose sleep over showing up.
That's not who's in front of me." My thumb moves along his cheekbone, and he leans into my palm like a man who hasn't been touched gently in years, and probably hasn't.
"You came in, Graham. You came in. That's the whole job, remember? You're doing it."
His hand comes up and covers mine, holding it to his face, and his eyes are wet and locked on mine and there's no boardroom left in them at all, just want, naked and enormous. The space between us has gone to nothing. I can feel his breath. He tilts his head down, slow, giving me every chance to step back, and I don’t, because God help me I want this, and his mouth is a hair from mine?—
And then he stops. Pulls back like he's touched a live wire, drops my hand, steps away until there's a desk and a foot of cold air between us.
"I can't," he says hoarsely, not looking at me.
"You work for me. You're under my roof, in my employ, and Chloe is — there's a custody case, and if I — I won't do that to you.
I won't be one more powerful man who blurred a line because he wanted to.
" He drags in a breath. "I'm sorry. You should go to bed. "
It stings. I won't pretend it doesn't. But under the sting I see it clear as the light on his face — he didn't pull away because he doesn't want me.
He pulled away because he does, so badly it scared the control right back into him.
That's the whole man, isn't it. He's never once in his life let himself have a thing he wanted without a contract permitting it.
"Okay," I say, gentler than he probably expects.
"But Graham — wanting something isn't the same as taking it badly.
You can want a thing and still be a good man about it.
Those two can live in the same body." I pick up Chloe's water cup.
"Go to sleep. Borrow that column back from somebody else for once. "
I’m at the door when I see her. Chloe, standing in the hallway with Buttons tucked under her arm, up for the water I never brought.
I can’t tell how long she’s been there. But she's looking between the two of us — at Graham, gutted by the desk, and at me in the doorway — with those grave gray eyes that miss nothing, and there's something settling into her small face that isn't worry.
It's the opposite. She looks at us like she's doing her own arithmetic, and the sum she's reaching is these two, together, mine.
She slips her free hand into mine without a word and leans, and tips her head toward Graham, like she's waiting for him to come complete the set.
“Come on, you two,” I say, not quite steady. “Everybody’s up past their bedtime. Even the ones who think they don’t have one.”
And Graham comes — across the room, into the hall, into the small warm cluster of us — because apparently, at last, that's a thing he can do.