Chapter 3
Callum Rowe
Hartwell had made weekends theoretical.
The city outside the windows of my office was still dark.
Rain moved against the windows in thin silver streaks.
Somewhere below, the lobby crews would have been polishing stone, security would have been changing shifts, and the first ambitious fools would soon start arriving with coffees in hand, ready to sacrifice sleep for a chance to get ahead.
I had been at my desk since a little after four, reading through another round of legal summaries on the Hartwell Civic Center mess, every page more irritating than the last. They were making a bunch of anonymous claims through carefully phrased insinuations.
There was nothing specific enough to sue over yet, but they weren’t harmless enough to ignore.
This was the kind of problem that required lawyers, patience, and a willingness to smile politely while someone tried to set fire to your reputation from across the room.
Then I checked my email.
At first, I thought it was a mistake. Her name sat there in my inbox like some different life, small and bright among the subject lines about risk exposure and bid integrity and council hearings. The subject line read ‘A favor.’
I opened it.
By the second paragraph, I had leaned back in my chair. By the fourth, I had stopped pretending I was reading it as a businessman, but it was not the words themselves that held my attention.
It was Avery’s honesty.
She had tried to make herself sound reasonable.
I could see the effort in every line from the apology for emailing late to the quick assurance that she did not want money, did not want a handout, did not want me to fix her life.
She had offered me all the escape routes before I had even needed one.
Then, between those careful little fences, the truth had broken through anyway.
She was embarrassed. She was tired. She had been trying too hard for too long to prove she did not need anyone, and now she had finally written to the one person her father had made promise, more times than necessary, that she could always count on.
I read the email twice.
Then a third time, though there was no practical reason for it.
The photograph on my shelf caught my eye when I looked away from the screen.
Robert Hale at thirty-eight, sunburned and laughing on a half-framed deck in Maine, one arm thrown around my shoulders, the other holding a beer he had later knocked over with a set of rolled drawings.
Avery’s father had been too easy with affection and too stubborn with everything else.
I had never known anyone so certain that love was meant to be loud in ordinary ways.
Pack a sweater. Call me when you get there.
Did you eat? Let me look at the contract.
Let Callum help if you need something and I’m not around.
He had said that last part long before he knew he would not be around.
I forwarded the email to Benjamin with two words.
Make room.
His response came within twenty seconds, because Benjamin Mercer believed sleep was an amateur hobby.
Benjamin: Define room.
Me: Nine o’clock.
Benjamin: Today?
Me: Yes.
Benjamin: You have Lang at 8:30, zoning council at 9:00, Dana at 9:20, and the mayor’s office circling like well-dressed vultures.
Me: Move them.
Benjamin: For your goddaughter.
I looked at that word for a moment.
Goddaughter.
It should have settled the matter. It should have put everything in a neat, respectable box with a properly labeled lid and returned me to the business of protecting the company from men who smiled into microphones while sharpening daggers under the table.
I had known Avery since she was born. I had held her at a baptism that had been more champagne than church.
I had watched her run barefoot through her parents’ yard, had seen her at sixteen pretending not to like the charm bracelet I bought her because liking it would have made her too easy to please.
I had stood in a black suit at her mother’s funeral and then again at her father’s, while she tried so hard not to fall apart that it had nearly broken my heart to look at her.
But the woman who had written that email was not a child.
And that, inconveniently, was where the trouble began.
Me: For Robert’s daughter. And because she asked properly.
Benjamin: Properly is doing heroic work there.
Me: Be kind.
Benjamin: I will be effective.
Me: Benjamin.
Benjamin: Fine. I will be effective with decorative kindness around the edges.
By the time he reported that she had responded and was on her way, his tone suggested he had personally dragged civilization back from the brink.
He appeared in my doorway at quarter to nine with a tablet in one hand, a coffee in the other, and the expression of a man prepared to defend a castle against a sentimental invasion.
“She answered,” he said.
“I assumed she would.”
“You hoped she would.”
“Yes.”
“Dangerous hobby.”
I took the coffee from him. “What did you say to her?”
“Nothing inaccurate.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“I am rarely that.”
I looked at him over the rim of the cup.
Benjamin sighed. “I may have suggested that failure to appear would indicate she was merely looking for a handout from her godfather.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“She’s coming, isn’t she?”
“She’s twenty-five, recently fired, and already ashamed enough to write me that email. Did it occur to you that she might not need you to spear her with a bayonet first thing in the morning?”
“Yes. I rejected the thought as insufficiently motivating.”
I should have been angrier and I was, a little, but I also knew him.
Benjamin had built his career on spotting weakness in systems before the systems collapsed, and he had extended that habit to me with a devotion that was both touching and occasionally unbearable.
He protected my calendar as if it were a national border.
He protected the company because he loved it, but would have thrown himself under a cement mixer before admitting so.
And, in some strange fierce way, he protected me from the parts of myself most likely to make expensive mistakes.
“Avery is not a threat,” I said.
Benjamin gave me a look so flat it deserved engineering review. “Everyone is a threat until proven otherwise.”
“She is not a reporter. She is not a council member’s nephew angling for a consulting contract. She is Avery. She is my goddaughter.”
“Exactly,” he retorted. “A sentimental variable.”
I did not answer, which was unfortunate, because silence encouraged him.
“She matters to you,” he stated flatly.
“Her father mattered to me.”
“That was not what I said.”
I set the coffee down. “Bring her up when she arrives.”
Benjamin watched me for a second too long, then nodded. “Of course.”
When she walked into my office, every serious, sensible, well-constructed thought I had prepared shifted by about three degrees.
Avery looked nervous enough to break and determined enough not to.
Her brunette hair was pinned low at the back of her neck, still damp in places from a shower taken in a hurry, loose pieces curling at her temples.
Her blazer was good but not expensive, her blouse soft ivory, her visitor badge clipped a little crookedly to her lapel.
She held a slim black folder against her body like a shield she had decided at the last minute was not large enough.
She looked young, yes. Of course she did.
Twenty-five was young from where I stood.
But she did not look like the child in Robert’s kitchen, or the grief-stricken twenty-year-old who had let me hold her upright for twelve seconds after the burial because she had run out of strength and pride at the same time.
She looked like a woman who had lost a job, slept badly, gotten ready in under half an hour, been insulted by my assistant, and still walked through my door with her head held high, which all mattered to me.
“Avery,” I said.
Her chin lifted a fraction. “Mr. Rowe.”
I nearly smiled too much at that. The formality of my name sat stiffly on her tongue, and I knew at once Benjamin had gotten to her in the elevator. Good. Maybe good? Maybe necessary. There were lines here. There had to be. I had asked her into my office for an interview, not a look into the past.
I asked if I could hug her because not asking would have been careless and she let me.
It was brief. Proper. The way a godfather hugged the daughter of his closest friend after too much time and not enough contact.
That was what I told myself as I put one arm around her shoulders and felt her go still for half a heartbeat before she relaxed.
She was warm from rushing, smelling faintly of soap and wet city air and some light floral scent at her throat.
I released her quickly, but not too quickly.
That was the problem. I noticed the distinction.
I guided her to the chair and took my seat.
She sat very straight at first, knees together, hands folded around the edge of the folder.
She was trying to look composed. Trying, in the way young professionals tried when they had not yet learned that composure was not the absence of nerves, but the refusal to let nerves steer them.
She had no idea how much of herself she gave away.
I could see the pulse at her throat, the quick wetting of her lower lip before she answered a difficult question, the small flash of temper when Benjamin came up, and even how embarrassment made her spine go a bit straighter.
She had always had that. Even as a child, Avery had hated being pitied more than being scolded.
Robert used to say she came out stubborn and suspicious of comfort.