Chapter 18 Charlie
CHARLIE
Ineeded to get out of the house.
Not because anything was wrong. Everything was aggressively right—Asher making eggs (still terrible, still endearing), Mia and Shane bickering about something involving a podcast and a deeply held disagreement about whether audiobooks counted as reading, and the mountain light pouring through the windows like it was auditioning for a tourism campaign.
The house was full of people I cared about and coffee I didn’t have to make and a man who kissed the top of my head when he passed me in the kitchen, casually, like he’d been doing it for years instead of days.
That was the problem. It felt like years instead of days. And I needed an hour that was mine—not ours, not the house’s, not the strange domestic dream I’d wandered into—to think clearly.
“I’m going into town,” I told Asher, who was at the sink scraping something that had once been an omelet out of the pan. “Coffee shop. Maybe a bookstore. I’ll be back by lunch.”
Something moved across his face. Brief. The same flicker I’d seen the night I mentioned Jax Shaw—there and gone, fast enough that I could have imagined it.
“I can drive you.”
“I can drive myself. You have calls.”
“I can reschedule—”
“Asher.” I touched his arm. “I’m getting coffee. In a town. In daylight. I think I’ll survive.”
He looked at me for a beat too long. Then he nodded and handed me the keys to the Range Rover and told me about a place on Cooper Street with good espresso, and the conversation moved on, and I filed the hesitation the way I’d been filing things for days—carefully, without looking too closely, in the folder I was calling “things that are probably nothing.”
The folder was getting full.
The coffee shop on Cooper Street was small and warm and smelled like roasted beans and baked goods and the particular kind of ambition that fuels mountain towns in the off-season.
I ordered a double espresso and a scone and sat at a table by the window and opened my laptop and for twenty minutes I was just Charlie Winters, marine biologist, working on a SEAS progress report and not thinking about anything except dissolved oxygen levels and sampling protocols.
Twenty minutes. That’s how long I got.
“Charlotte.”
The name hit me before the voice did. Nobody called me Charlotte. My mother had. Asher had, once, testing it out on the terrace in Roatan, and I’d told him the story—my mother’s name for me, the one that lived in her voice and nobody else’s. He’d never used it again.
Richard Sterling was standing beside my table.
He looked different than in the lab. Smaller, somehow, without the institutional lighting and the stainless-steel surfaces that had always made him look like he belonged.
Here, in a coffee shop in Aspen, in a charcoal peacoat and expensive shoes, he looked like what he was: a man who had traveled a long way to be somewhere he shouldn’t be.
“Mr. Sterling.” My voice came out level. Professional. The register I used for grant committee reviews and difficult colleagues. “What are you doing here?”
“Getting coffee.” He smiled. The same smile from the lab—warm enough on the surface, with something underneath that never quite matched. “May I sit?”
He was already pulling out the chair.
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
He sat anyway. Set his cup down. Arranged himself with the deliberate calm of a man who was used to being in rooms he hadn’t been invited into and staying until he’d gotten what he came for.
“I heard you were in Aspen for a bit,” he said. “Staying at Pierce’s place, up on Red Mountain. Beautiful property. I’ve always admired the ridgeline from town. You can just see the roof if you know where to look.”
The temperature in the room dropped.
He knew the house. He knew the road. He knew where I was staying, and the casual way he dropped it into conversation—like it was small talk, like it was the kind of thing anyone might know—made my skin prickle.
“What do you want, Richard?”
“To talk to you. Just a conversation.” He leaned back, crossed one leg over the other.
The posture of a man at ease. Everything about it was wrong.
“About SEAS. About the direction the project is taking under Pierce’s management.
I have concerns—legitimate concerns, Charlotte—about the timeline restructuring. ”
The timeline restructuring.
I hadn’t heard anything about a timeline restructuring.
“I’m not sure what you’re referring to,” I said carefully.
Something shifted in his expression. Satisfaction, maybe. The look of a man who’d just confirmed something he’d suspected.
“Interesting. So, he hasn’t told you.” Richard tilted his head.
Studied me with an attention that felt like a hand on the back of my neck.
“Your Phase Two deliverable window has been moved up by six weeks. The amended filing went to the grant commission two days ago. New milestone schedule, resource reallocation, the whole package. Signed off by Pierce Industries, not by you.”
The espresso was cooling in my hands. I held it anyway. Something to hold.
“I have contacts on the commission,” Richard continued. “They flagged it because the original timeline had your name on it. This one doesn’t.”
I didn’t move. I didn’t speak. I was running the math in my head—six weeks, Phase Two accelerated, what that would mean for the sampling schedule, the lab capacity, the team’s bandwidth—and under the math was something colder.
He changed my timeline. He restructured my project. And he didn’t tell me.
Richard watched me process it. He was enjoying this.
“I know how that feels,” he said, softer now.
The voice of understanding. Of shared experience.
Of a man who knew exactly where to press.
“To have someone take the thing you built and decide they know better. Pierce does that. It’s what he does.
He acquires and he restructures and he tells himself he’s improving things, but what he’s really doing is making them his. ”
“You need to leave.”
“Ask him about Thomas Finch.”
My throat closed.
“You know the name.” Not a question. “Asher told you about Tommy. The diving accident. The eleven minutes. I’m sure he told you it was a terrible tragedy, an equipment failure, a thing that happened to him.
” Richard’s mouth did something that was not a smile.
“He trusted the wrong people. That’s what he told you, I imagine.
That a subcontractor cut corners. That a system failed.
All true, by the way.” He leaned back. “What he didn’t tell you is that he knew.
Not about Tommy—nobody knew that was coming.
But he knew me. Knew what I was. Known it for years.
” A pause. “He chose not to look too hard. Because the mission mattered. Because the timeline couldn’t slip.
Because it’s easier to trust a system than to look the man running it in the eye.
” His voice dropped. “He hates me. But he hates himself more. For not seeing through me when it counted.”
He leaned forward. The hurt-look was gone, replaced by something more familiar—the negotiating face, the one I’d watched across conference tables for ten years. He’d been building to this the whole time. The Tommy story wasn’t a grenade. It was softening fire.
“Drop the complaint,” he said. “Walk away from Pierce. I’ll set you up independently—your own lab, your own funding structure, full legal ownership of every patent.
SEAS under your name, not a corporation’s.
No oversight. No timelines you didn’t set.
Just you and the work.” He paused. “That’s what you actually want. You know that.”
I stood up. My chair scraped the floor. The woman at the next table glanced over.
“Don’t contact me again.”
He stood. And something in his face changed—the careful corporate surface dropping away to something underneath that was rawer and wrong. He wasn’t angry. That was what made my skin go cold. He looked hurt.
“You don’t have to do this.” Quiet. Certain.
Like he was explaining something obvious to someone who’d gotten confused.
“I’ve watched you for three years, Charlotte.
I know what you need better than he does.
Better than anyone. What we could build together—what we’ve been building, whether you’ve seen it or not—don’t throw that away for a man who only knows how to acquire things. You don’t have to choose him.”
The music was still playing. The woman at the next table was still on her phone. The world was still turning. And I understood, standing in a coffee shop in Aspen with Richard Sterling looking at me like I owed him something I had never once offered, that this had never been about SEAS.
“Charlotte—”
“My name is Charlie. And you need to leave me alone.”
I picked up my laptop, my bag, left the scone and the espresso, and walked out. My hands were shaking. I got to the Range Rover and sat in the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel at ten and two and breathed.
The timeline restructuring. Six weeks. Signed by Pierce Industries.
Tommy’s gear should have been pulled from service.
I pulled out my phone and opened the SEAS grant portal. Logged in. Navigated to the project dashboard.
The amended timeline was there. Filed two days ago. New milestone schedule, new deliverable windows, resource reallocation memo attached. Everything clean, professional, thorough. The kind of work that would look, to anyone reviewing it, like a well-managed acceleration. An operational decision.
My name wasn’t on it.
I sat in the car for a long time. The steering wheel was cold under my hands. The mountains were enormous and still outside the windshield and I could see, if I turned my head, the ridgeline where Asher’s house sat against the sky.