Chapter 2 #2
“Benjamin Mercer officially. Ben in emergencies. Mr. Mercer when someone is trying to impress me. You may choose based on confidence level.”
“Ben, then.”
His eyes swept over me from damp hair to my heels. “Aggressive choice.”
“I’m running on panic and half a mint.”
“That is common in this building before ten. You are four minutes early. That is not impressive, but it is less disappointing than anticipated.”
“Thank you?”
“You’re welcome. Most nepotists arrive late.”
I blinked. “Most?”
“You would be surprised how many people with last names attached to buildings believe punctuality is for others.” He glanced at my visitor badge, then at the folder under my arm. “You brought paper. Excellent. I prefer a tangible record of disasters.”
“My resume isn’t a disaster.”
“No?”
“It’s more of a series of tragic weather events.”
For the first time, his mouth twitched. It was not a smile exactly, but more like his face had considered the possibility and filed it away for later.
“This way,” he said.
He moved fast, and I had to lengthen my stride to keep up.
We crossed the lobby toward a private bank of elevators guarded by a second security checkpoint.
Ben shifted the things in his hands and flashed a badge without breaking pace.
I followed him through, aware of the faint click of my heels and the fact that my pulse had begun to climb again.
He pressed the button for forty-seven. The elevator doors closed with a soft, luxurious sigh.
For three seconds, we stood in silence.
Then Ben said, “Mr. Rowe values candor.”
I looked at him.
“He values preparation more, but candor is the one people tend to pretend they have.”
“Is this the part where you warn me not to waste his time?”
“That was implied by the text.”
“It was implied with a machete.”
His gaze slid toward me, assessing. “Mr. Rowe received your email at 11:48 p.m. He read it, then forwarded it to me at 5:19 a.m. with the words, ‘Make room.’ That does not happen often. His calendar is not an open meadow. It is a fortified city. So yes, Ms. Hale, I am warning you not to waste his time.”
I tightened my grip on my folder. “I don’t intend to.”
“Good. Intentions are adorable. We will see about execution.”
I should have been offended. I was offended, actually.
Somewhere underneath the panic, a small, offended version of me had stood up and begun gathering stones, but the larger part of me understood, with a reluctant and immediate clarity, that Benjamin was not being cruel for sport.
He was a guard dog in cufflinks. He had put himself between Callum Rowe and the world, and for reasons that were probably both practical and personal, he had decided the world included me until proven otherwise.
The elevator climbed without feeling like it moved. The numbers changed in a silent rush. My stomach dropped somewhere around nineteen.
“Does he know you texted me?” I asked.
Ben did not ask which part. “Mr. Rowe trusts me to protect his time.”
“That sounds like a no.”
“It sounds like a man who understands delegation.”
“Does delegation usually include calling women handout girls before breakfast?”
“Only when breakfast has been threatened.”
The elevator doors opened. The forty-seventh floor was quieter than the lobby.
The reception area was all pale oak, glass, and black steel, with one wall opening into a view of the city so wide and high that the rain looked decorative from up there.
Beyond a set of double glass doors, I could see an office floor already in motion.
There were people at standing desks, someone carrying rolled plans, and a woman in safety boots and a blazer laughing into a phone.
Ben led me past reception with a nod to the woman at the desk, who looked at him with the sort of weary fondness of someone who had seen him wage war over printer toner.
“Mr. Rowe is finishing a call,” Ben said. “You’ll wait here.”
‘Here’ was a small seating area outside a set of matte black double doors.
There were two leather chairs, a low table with architectural journals arranged too perfectly to have ever been read, and a framed black-and-white photograph of a bridge mid-construction, all cables and fog.
I sat because my knees had made a private request. Ben remained standing, tapping something into his tablet.
“Do I get any advice?” I asked before I could stop myself.
He looked up.
“For the interview,” I added. “Since you’re apparently the ferryman.”
Another almost-half-smile. “Do not perform humility. Mr. Rowe hates that. Do not perform competence either. He hates that more. Tell the truth, but do not confuse the truth with an emotional hostage situation.”
“That is horrifyingly useful.”
“I am horrifyingly useful.” He checked one of his phones. “Also, do not call him Callum unless he asks you to.”
“He’s my godfather.”
“And this is his office.”
The words landed hard, and I hated how much I needed them.
I had spent the entire morning swinging wildly between histories, between the man who had sent flowers after my mother died and the man whose name was etched in bronze downstairs.
Ben, with all his theatrical unpleasantness, had found the seam and pressed on it.
This was his office. This was not my parents’ kitchen or a birthday card and this definitely wasn’t a fantasy from a dark bedroom that I was absolutely not thinking about while sitting twelve feet from his door.
“Understood,” I replied.
Ben watched me for a beat, and his expression eased by a fraction, perhaps the beginning of a ceasefire.
Then the black doors opened.
“Send her in,” Callum said from inside.
My body knew his voice before my brain had time to prepare for it.
It was low, calm, slightly rough from use or morning or both.
It moved through me with the same private authority it always did, the same impossible steadiness.
I stood too quickly. Ben noticed because Ben apparently noticed everything.
“Breathe,” he said quietly, so quietly I almost missed it. Then, louder, with all the ceremony of a man presenting a tribute to a suspicious king, “Ms. Avery Hale.”
I walked into Callum Rowe’s office already off balance.
His office was ridiculous. There were two walls of glass that looked out over the city, the rain-soft skyline spread below like something he had considered, approved, and reinforced.
The third and fourth walls held bookshelves, a long credenza, and several framed plans I recognized as structural drawings, though I could not have read them if my life depended on it.
A model of a tower stood on a side table under a glass cover, all white ribs and delicate cross-bracing.
His desk was broad, dark, almost bare, with a laptop, a legal pad, a pen aligned too precisely, and a mug of black coffee that was only half full.
Callum stood when I entered, which should not have mattered to me.
Men stood all the time. My father used to stand when older women came into restaurants because his mother would have risen from the grave to smack him if he hadn’t.
But Callum standing almost seemed to create pressure within the room, like a storm was building inside it.
He was tall, broad through the shoulders, dressed in a charcoal suit and a white shirt open at the throat, tie absent, sleeves buttoned at the wrist. His hair was dark with silver at the temples, a little more than I remembered, and the lines around his eyes were deeper in the morning light.
He looked like exactly what he was: a man who had built things meant to outlast weather, money, and lesser men.
Then he smiled.
“Avery,” he said.
All the air I had been rationing left me at once.
“Mr. Rowe,” I managed.
His smile shifted. “Oh, that’s how bad Benjamin scared you?”
From behind me, Ben said, “I did no such thing.”
Callum’s eyes flicked past me. “You absolutely did.”
“She came, didn’t she?”
“Benjamin…”
Ben sighed in a way that suggested martyrdom. “I will be outside, protecting the civilized world from scheduling chaos.”
He closed the door behind him. For a moment, neither of us moved.
Then Callum came around the desk, not quickly, not slowly, just with that unhurried certainty I remembered and had apparently developed a very dangerous sensitivity to.
Up close, the impression he made on me became more complicated.
There was warmth in his face, yes, but also assessment.
“I’m glad you wrote me,” he said, with what sounded like sincerity.
I did not know what I had expected, but it was not that.
“You are?”
“Yes.” He stopped a few feet away from me. “May I?”
It took me half a second to understand he meant a hug.
The question itself undid me a little. The care of it. The fact that he did not assume, even with all the years behind us, even with the godfather label sitting invisibly between us. I nodded, and he stepped in and embraced me.
It was brief. Proper. One arm around my shoulders, his hand firm between my shoulder blades, his chest solid against me for exactly long enough to make me remember every inappropriate thought I had ever had and every appropriate grief that came before it.
He smelled like clean soap and coffee, with cedar beneath it.
My throat tightened so suddenly I immediately hated myself.
When he released me, he studied my face.
“You look like you didn’t sleep,” he observed.
“I slept a little.”
“That means no.”
“It means I closed my eyes near a pillow,” I smiled.
His mouth curved again. “Sit down, Avery.”
He gestured to one of the chairs opposite his desk, and I sat, grateful for the instruction.
He returned to his own chair but did not put the desk entirely between us in the way Marlena would have.
He angled himself slightly, one forearm resting on the arm of his chair, posture open but not casual.
Somehow that was worse. A closed-off man was easier to resist. A warm, attentive one was a kind of ambush.