Chapter 21
Avery
Five months after the city decided not to collapse under the weight of our scandal, Callum Rowe sent me a text that nearly made me walk into a glass wall.
I was at work, carrying a stack of revised Hartwell community access summaries from Dana’s office to mine, feeling dangerously competent in a royal blue dress and low heels, when my phone buzzed in my hand.
Callum Rowe: Dinner tonight.
That by itself was not alarming. Callum took me to dinner often enough now that the city had mostly finished pretending to faint over us.
The first month after the Vanity Fair article had been strange.
People watched us differently for a while.
Some with curiosity. Some with judgment.
Some with the hungry disappointment of spectators who had been promised a scandal and received, instead, a well-lit profile about grief, consent, corporate safeguards, and civic development.
Rowe Structural kept the Hartwell contract.
Lang bled lawyers. Grant Vale disappeared.
Jules went to therapy, then brunch, then therapy again, which she called emotional cross-training.
Dana kept giving me more work and fewer compliments, which meant I was improving.
Benjamin stopped calling me a sentimental variable and started calling me ‘Ms. Hale’ in the tone of a man who had emotionally adopted a raccoon and had regrets.
So, dinner was not alarming, but the second message was.
Callum Rowe: I’m going to ask you something.
I stopped walking. Unfortunately, physical barriers did not stop existing.
I narrowly avoided colliding shoulder-first with the glass wall outside Conference Room C and made a noise that caused Marcus to look up from inside the room with visible concern.
I smiled through the glass as if I had meant to test its integrity and my phone buzzed again.
Callum Rowe: Wear a pencil skirt.
I stared at the message as the papers in my arms slid one inch. Then two. Then the entire stack hit the floor in a soft, humiliating avalanche of public access language. Benjamin appeared beside me so quickly he must have emerged from the carpet.
“Structural failure?” he asked.
I crouched too fast and nearly knocked my forehead against his knee. “I dropped a few things.”
“Yes, I witnessed the debacle.” He bent with me, picking up several pages. His gaze flicked to my phone, which I had stupidly left face up on the floor. For once, I was faster. I snatched it up quickly and Benjamin’s eyebrows lifted.
“That’s private,” I huffed.
“A word people use when they have failed to hide things.”
“Do you want to help me pick up the papers or narrate my downfall?”
“Must I choose?”
I glared at him.
He handed me the pages he had collected, expression bland, eyes far too amused for his own good. “You are flushed.”
“I almost walked into a wall.”
“Many women do when summoned by billionaires with subtlety issues.”
“I hate you.”
“No, you’ve become fond of me in a way that embarrasses us both.”
I stood, clutching the unruly documents to my chest. “I have to go to my desk.”
“I assumed. Desks are where we go to pretend phones haven’t ruined us.”
I made it three steps before he called after me.
“Ms. Hale?”
I turned. Benjamin stood with one hand in his pocket, his tablet tucked under his arm, his expression doing that strange thing it had begun doing lately, where the viciousness softened around the edges but refused to admit it had.
“If he is asking what I suspect he is asking,” he suggested, “breathe before you answer.”
My heart stopped.
“What do you suspect?” I didn’t mean to whisper, but I’m pretty sure I did.
“That Mr. Rowe has finally decided subtlety has run its course.”
“Ben.”
His mouth curved by one millimeter. “Also, wear waterproof mascara.”
I walked away before my face could become a corporate incident.
At my desk, I opened my phone again and read the messages. For the next ten minutes, I accomplished nothing. Then I did the only sensible thing.
I texted Jules.
Me: He said dinner tonight. He’s going to ask me something. He told me to wear a pencil skirt.
Her response came so quickly I suspected she had been waiting somewhere in the atmosphere for exactly this crisis.
Jules: Oh!
Me: Oh?
Jules: Oh.
Me: Use language.
Jules: That man is proposing or firing you and I choose proposing.
Me: Don’t say that.
Jules: Why? Because you already thought it and now you want to throw your phone?
I set my phone face down on the desk. Then I picked it up again because I was weak.
Me: What do I doooo?
Jules: Are you asking as a feminist, an employee, a girlfriend, or a woman?
I looked across the operations floor toward one of the conference rooms. The door was closed.
The blinds were half drawn. Through the sliver of glass, I could see him standing near the center table with Dana, both of them bent over a set of Hartwell plans.
He wore a dark suit today, but the jacket was draped over a chair.
His white shirt was crisp, top button undone, no tie, sleeves rolled to his forearms.
I guess no one in this company cared about my long-term survival.
His head was lowered, his expression serious, one hand braced on the edge of the table.
As if he felt me looking, he glanced up and from across the floor, through glass and work and all the public respectability we had fought like hell to earn, his eyes found mine and I forgot what oxygen was for.
He looked at me for one second. Then his gaze dropped, not to my body, not obviously, but to the phone in my hand, then back to my face.
One eyebrow lifted. I turned around so fast my chair squeaked.
Me: He knows I’m panicking.
Jules: Of course he does. That man built a career reading load stress.
Me: I am load stress.
Jules: You are load-bearing chaos.
Me: Should I wear the skirt?
Jules: Do you want the command or the choice?
That gave me pause. Jules had developed an irritating habit of becoming wise when I most needed her to remain ridiculous.
I stared at the message.
That had been the whole story of us, hadn’t it? Callum’s voice, his rules, his confidence, how he could tell me exactly what he wanted and make me melt with the wanting of it. But beneath that, always, when it mattered, there had been my choice.
He had never taken the choice from me.
Not even once.
* * *
That night, I did not wear the pencil skirt, but I brought it.
Jules came over at five with a garment bag, a devastating emergency lipstick, and the expression of a woman who had accepted that her life’s purpose was now ninety percent crisis styling and ten percent eating my snacks.
“You are aware,” she said, watching me stand in front of my closet in my bra and slip, “that defying his outfit instructions on proposal night is either extremely brave or a fast road to being bent over something expensive.”
“I’m bringing the skirt.”
“In a bag.”
“Yes.”
“So, you are arriving in one outfit and carrying the symbol of your surrender like a slutty little flag.”
“That is not what this is.”
“It is exactly what this is, and I support the troops.”
I turned and looked at her. She softened immediately.
It still did that to me sometimes, the softness.
Since the blackmail, since the confession, since the long ugly work of forgiving someone who had hurt me while being hurt herself, Jules and I had become more careful with each other, but also closer.
“You okay?” she asked.
“No.”
“Good. Honest answer.”
“I think he’s going to ask me to marry him.”
“I think he is too.”
My stomach swooped so hard I had to grip the closet door.
Jules crossed the room and took both my hands. “And?”
“And I want him to.”
Her smile trembled. It made mine tremble too.
“And that scares me,” I admitted.
“Of course it does.”
“I’m twenty-five.”
“Yes.”
“He’s Callum Rowe.”
“Also yes.”
“This started with me asking him for a job.”
“And turned into you helping save his company, surviving a smear campaign, making Dana respect you, and making Benjamin develop facial expressions that qualify as affection-adjacent.”
“I did do that.”
“You did.” Jules squeezed my hands. “You also love him.”
My throat tightened.
“I do.”
“Then maybe tonight you let yourself be happy before you cross-examine the happiness.”
I swallowed hard. “That was mature.”
“I know. I hated it.”
We chose a dress first. A red silk dress with long sleeves, a wrap waist, and a neckline that suggested I had lovely breasts without introducing them to the room individually. The black pencil skirt went into a garment bag with an ivory blouse and heels.
At quarter to seven, Callum texted.
Callum Rowe: I’m downstairs.
I smiled despite the panic.
Me: Of course you are.
Callum Rowe: Punctuality is still my least concerning condition.
I laughed.
Jules made a small, dying noise. “He quoted your banter. He’s proposing. I am calling it.”
“Stop.”
“I am wearing mascara and cannot survive this level of narrative closure.”
At the door, she hugged me hard. “Whatever happens,” she whispered, “you are not a girl being chosen by a billionaire. You are Avery Hale walking into the room with an answer all her own.”
I closed my eyes.
“Thank you.”
“Also, text me if there is table sex.”
“Jules.”
“What? It’s the finale. Tables are thematically important.”
I laughed all the way down the stairs. Outside, Callum stood beside the car in a black suit and white shirt, no tie, his coat unbuttoned despite the cool air. He looked up when I stepped out of the building, and I saw his eyes warm at the sight of me.
“Avery,” he purred in that delectable deep voice. “You look beautiful.”
I crossed the sidewalk to him, the garment bag folded over one arm. His gaze dropped to it, then back to my face, but he did not say anything. The driver opened the door. Callum helped me into the car with his hand at my back, and this time I leaned into the touch openly.