Chapter 3 #3
After he left, I tried to return to Hartwell.
I made it through two pages of legal notes before realizing I had read the same paragraph four times and absorbed none of it.
The rival firm’s allegations blurred into the shape of Avery’s face when I had said she was not a burden because her father loved her.
That had nearly undone her. I had seen it.
The quick blink, the way she looked away, the effort it cost her not to cry in my office.
I should have felt paternal.
I did. Partly.
Paternal concern existed in me. So did loyalty to Robert.
So did a genuine professional instinct that she could do the work if given structure and standards, but layered beneath those things, unwelcome and undeniable, was the awareness of her as a woman.
The delicate line of her neck where her damp hair curled loose.
The sharpness in her when challenged. The beautiful rose color her face flushed when she was embarrassed.
The fact that I had wanted, more than once, to lean back in my chair and see how far that blush could travel if I stopped being careful.
I was not a boy. I did not confuse wanting with permission. Still, wanting had entered the room, and pretending otherwise was a good way to let it make decisions from the dark.
Shortly before lunch, I opened a blank email to her.
Then I closed it.
Five minutes later, I opened a text instead, because text felt less formal and therefore somehow worse.
I set the phone down.
At noon, I sat through a call with the zoning council and gave answers crisp enough that no one could have guessed half my attention remained on a woman who had walked out of my office two hours earlier with a crooked visitor badge and hope she was trying not to trust. Shortly after lunch, Dana Keene came in and told me, without preamble, that if I was going to saddle her department with ‘a sentimental hire,’ she expected permission to ‘sand the girl down to a usable grain.’ I told her Avery was not sentimental.
Dana stared at me for five full seconds and said, “That answer was.”
By 1:15, I had signed off on her temporary onboarding.
By 2:30, Benjamin had sent me a calendar hold for Avery’s first week titled Variable Management.
By 4:05, I gave up pretending my restraint was noble when some of it was simply fear of scandal.
I ran a company with thousands of employees and projects that depended on public trust, private money, and the illusion that everyone involved was more virtuous than they were.
I knew exactly what a headline could do.
I knew what people would say if they saw me take my dead best friend’s daughter to dinner the night before she started working at my company.
I knew what Benjamin would say, and his version would be worse because it would be accurate.
But that was not the fear that held my hand over the phone.
This fear was simpler and more private.
I did not want to become another man in Avery Hale’s life who used a position of power to make her smaller.
That thought kept me still for a long time. Then I remembered how she had sat in the chair across from me and told the truth even when it cost her, and how she had asked if I thought she could do it, hating herself a little for needing the answer.
Dinner could be a kindness.
Dinner could also be a mistake.
Both things could be true.
At 4:18, I picked up my phone and texted her before I could turn restraint into cowardice and call it morality.
Avery, it’s Callum. You did well today. I know tomorrow is a formal start, but before that, I’d like to have dinner with you tonight if you’re free. It’s not an interview. Just dinner, so we can catch up properly. I’ll pick you up at seven.
I stared at the message.
Too commanding.
I changed the last line.
I can pick you up at seven.
Too soft.
I changed it back.
I’ll pick you up at seven.
Then, because I was not completely insane, I added:
Only if you’re comfortable with that.
I sent it.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. The message sat there beneath her name, delivered but unanswered, and I felt the unfamiliar irritation of being a man waiting on a woman’s text like some adolescent with a borrowed car and no plan.
Then three dots appeared.
Vanished.
Appeared again.
I leaned back in my chair and looked toward the window, forcing myself not to watch the screen.
The phone finally buzzed.
Avery: Dinner sounds nice. Seven works.
A second message followed almost immediately.
Avery: Should I bring anything? My resume? More paperwork? Emotional damage organized by category?
I laughed once, alone in my office, and the sound moved strangely through the room.
Me: Just yourself, Avery.
I set the phone face down on the desk before I could write anything else.
Outside, the rain had finally stopped, leaving the city washed and bright beneath a mottled sky.
Somewhere down there, Avery was probably standing in her small apartment, overthinking what to wear, what this meant, what it did not mean, whether dinner with her godfather on the night before her first day of work was harmless or dangerous or both.
I wished I could have told her.
I wished I knew.
But at seven, I would pick her up.
And until then, I had a company to protect, a scandal to avoid, a dead man’s promise to honor, and one very alive woman’s name sitting on my phone like a lit match balancing over a pile of tinder.