Chapter 1 #2
“Dr. Keating.” He shook my hand with the automatic warmth of a man who shook a hundred hands a week. “Impressive work. Your third paper — the one in The Lancet — that was yours?”
“Mine and my team’s. We had a good dataset.”
“You had a good eye. Most people would have missed that correlation.” He took a sip of his scotch. “I’m looking forward to your board presentation. Have you met the rest of the panel?”
“Not yet.”
“Let me introduce you.” He turned, scanning the room. “Where’s — ah, there he is. Liam. Come say hello.”
The steel door inside my chest buckled.
He was already walking toward us. He’d seen me — of course he’d seen me, he’d probably known I was a finalist before I did, the foundation was his family’s creation — and now he was crossing the room with that careful, measured stride, and Hale was waving him over like it was the most natural thing in the world, and I was standing perfectly still with a smile on my face and a glass in my hand and my heart trying to break out of my ribs.
“Hallie.” His voice. Low and steady, the same voice that used to say my name in the dark, the same voice that had said it didn’t mean anything in his office while I stared at the couch I couldn’t stop seeing. “It’s good to see you.”
“Liam.” I extended my hand. A handshake. Professional. The correct distance between two people who used to share a bed and a life and a future. “Congratulations on the foundation’s growth. Priya tells me the grant program has expanded significantly.”
His eyes were on mine. Dark, steady, searching for something I had no intention of giving him. He took my hand. His grip was warm and careful, like he was afraid of pressing too hard. I pulled back after exactly one second.
“Thank you,” he said. “Your research caught the committee’s attention early. The panel is excited to see the full presentation.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
Hale looked between us. If he sensed the voltage in the air, he was too polished to show it. “Liam’s been instrumental in shaping the grant criteria this year. He pushed for more emphasis on translational research — getting the science to patients faster.”
“Important work,” I said, and meant it, and hated that I meant it.
“It’s the direction the field needs to go,” Liam said. He was watching me with that careful new stillness. Like he was measuring every word before he let it out. Like he’d learned, somewhere in the last fourteen months, that words could cost him something.
Hale’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He glanced at it, made an apologetic face. “Excuse me — I need to take this. Liam, introduce her to the rest of the panel when they’re free?” He clapped Liam on the shoulder and walked toward the hallway, already lifting the phone to his ear.
And then it was just the two of us standing three feet apart while a hundred people circulated around us and none of them knew that I was holding myself together with my fingernails.
“Hallie—”
“Don’t.”
The word came out quiet and clean. Not angry. Not broken. Just a line drawn in the air between us.
He stopped. His jaw tightened. The thing in his eyes — whatever he’d been about to say, whatever rehearsed or spontaneous olive branch he’d been carrying for fourteen months — he swallowed it.
I watched it happen. The effort it cost him showed in the set of his shoulders, the way his hand clenched once around the glass he was holding and then released.
“I just wanted to say—”
“There is nothing to discuss.” I kept my voice low. The room was loud enough to cover us, but I wasn’t taking chances. “You’re on the board. I’m a finalist. We’ll interact when the schedule requires it and not a second before. That’s all this needs to be.”
He was quiet for a moment. I could see him working through it — the impulse to push, to explain, to do what Liam Buchanan had always done and bend the moment to his will.
And then something shifted behind his eyes.
The impulse died. He stepped back, not physically but in every way that mattered, and gave me room I hadn’t asked for.
“Understood,” he said. His voice was even. If it cost him, he didn’t let it show. “I’ll keep things professional.”
“Good.”
“Good night, Hallie.”
I nodded once and walked away. My heels clicked on the polished concrete.
I kept my stride even, my shoulders back, my face arranged in the pleasant neutral expression I’d worn to every one of his galas when I was dying inside.
Straight to the bar. Another sparkling water.
I held the cold glass against the inside of my wrist where nobody could see and counted my heartbeats until they slowed.