7. Killian
KILLIAN
Iadded three additional duties to Raphael’s contract this morning.
Stage equipment inventory. Post-event sound checks. Attendance at all vendor coordination briefings. Things that needed doing anyway. Completely legitimate. The fact that they collectively account for most of his free hours between now and August is simply good resource management.
I’m not explaining myself to anyone about it.
The conference room is set up for Sophia’s presentation when I walk in.
Laptop, projector, printed materials at each seat, a level of preparation that tells me she’s been working on this for weeks and took it seriously enough to bring reinforcements.
Asher and Maddox are already seated on one side of the table.
Maddox had accompanied Sophia and Harper to just outside the doors. My daughter is much more nervous than I’d anticipated and needed another moment to collect herself, but I’m not worried. My daughter could take over the world if she were to set her mind to it.
I take my usual chair at the head and note, in the precise and completely neutral way that I note all things, that Maddox has positioned himself where he’ll have a direct sightline to the presentation screen and also to the chairs on the opposite side.
He’s not here purely for Sophia’s benefit.
Neither is Asher, whose attention went to the door the moment I walked in, which means he was already watching it before I arrived.
I hadn’t seen why my two best friends were so determined to be present, only Sophia taking deep breaths by the window with her back to me.
Harper must have stepped away, even though the thought of her hiding from me made me possessive as hell.
Imagining her hiding behind a pillar because she’s nervous to see me makes it hard to stay neutral about how much I’m attracted to her.
I’m aware I have no standing to be irritated by this. I’m aware of that completely. I’m irritated anyway.
The door opens and Sophia comes in ahead of Harper, talking, the way Sophia does everything, leading with her whole self.
She’s in pinstripes and gold and she looks like exactly what she is, a young woman who built something from nothing and knows its value.
I feel it the way I always feel it when she walks into a room I’m in, this specific warm tightness in the chest that I’ve never found adequate language for.
That’s my daughter.
Harper follows her in and I keep my eyes on Sophia and that is where my eyes stay because I made a decision this morning and I’m keeping it.
I’m aware of the peripheral shift when she takes her seat.
I’m aware of Maddox going very still in the way he goes still when something’s gotten his full attention.
I’m aware of Asher sitting slightly straighter.
I focus on Sophia.
“Good morning.” Sophia sets her portfolio on the table with the confidence of a woman who has prepared for this and knows it. “Thank you for your time, Dad.” She glances at Asher and Maddox. “Uncles.”
“Good morning,” I say. “Whenever you’re ready.”
She nods once and begins.
She’s extraordinary.
I knew she would be. I’ve watched Sophia build this boutique from a side project in a dorm room into a functioning international brand with a real customer base and real revenue, and I’ve been proud of every step even when she refused to let me fund it.
Especially when she refused to let me fund it, actually, because it meant she’d figured out something I’d spent years trying to teach her without saying it directly: that the thing you build with your own hands means something different than the thing someone hands you.
But knowing she’d be good and watching her be good are different experiences.
She’s standing at the head of this table talking market demographics and luxury consumer trends and foot traffic conversion data like she was born to it, which I suppose she was, given that she grew up listening to me run a business from across the dinner table.
She pulls up slides that are polished and well-sourced.
She talks about the Thorne Estates brand alignment, the existing clientele overlap, the underutilized retail potential of the estate’s visitor footprint in a way that is genuinely analytically sound.
Asher is leaning forward with his elbows on the table and I can tell by the set of his shoulders that he’s not performing attention. He’s actually in it. Maddox has his arms crossed and the expression he gets when something is impressing him and he’s deciding how much to let that show.
Our goddaughter grew up.
I ask her about projected seasonal revenue variance. She answers cleanly. I ask about her supplier contracts and turnaround windows. She answers cleanly. I ask about insurance, liability, the physical footprint requirements, and she—
She pauses.
I watch her go still in the particular way Sophia goes still when she’s hit something she hadn’t fully prepared for, the way she used to freeze on math problems at eleven years old, that same flicker of I know I know this somewhere crossing her face.
She reaches for her portfolio and starts moving through it and I feel the specific guilt of a man who has pushed too hard on instinct.
Then Harper stands up.
She does it quietly, without announcement, stepping up beside Sophia and pulling something up on her tablet and setting it flat on the table so Sophia can see it.
She says something low enough that it’s between the two of them, and I watch Sophia’s shoulders drop from her ears and her posture re-center and her hand stop moving through the portfolio.
Sophia looks up. Finds the question. Answers it.
Correctly. Completely. Like she’d known it all along and just needed a half second to locate it.
Harper sits back down.
I don’t look at her. I ask my next question.
The presentation finishes ten minutes later and Sophia is standing at the end of the table with both hands flat on it and the particular brightness in her expression that means she thinks it went well and is trying not to assume.
I let her wait approximately three seconds because I’m her father and some things are non-negotiable.
Then I lean back in my chair and say, “Sure. Let’s give it a shot.”
The sound Sophia makes is not a professional sound.
It is the sound of a twenty-five year old woman who has wanted this specific thing for a long time and is not currently interested in composure about it.
She rounds the table and I stand and she crashes into me and I catch her the way I always catch her, both arms, solid.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you—”
“You earned it.” I press a kiss to the top of her head. “That was a serious presentation, Soph. I’m proud of you.”
She pulls back beaming. Then she waves a hand at Harper. “It was all her. I would’ve been a duck without a pond in the middle of the ocean trying to convince sharks I was a soda can.”
I look at Harper.
She shakes her head, a small smile at the corner of her mouth. “Sophia was the star. I was just the nerd with the computer.”
The black-rimmed glasses are sitting on her nose and I noticed them when she walked in and I’ve been not noticing them for the last forty-five minutes with considerable effort.
I keep my eyes on the room.
Asher turns to Harper. “How did you know the insurance liability breakdown off the top of your head?”
“Luxury events and hospitality coordination,” she says. “I did it for four years in Manhattan. Vendor contracts, liability clauses, insurance riders, turnaround logistics. It’s basically muscle memory at this point.”
Maddox tilts his head. “How does someone with that kind of background end up between jobs?”
Something moves across her face. Fast, controlled, the practiced expression of someone who has answered this question enough times to have a version ready. She produces a light shrug. “Bad timing. Wrong place, wrong moment. It happens.”
It doesn’t happen to people like her. Not the way she said it. There’s a longer story living underneath that shrug and I file it away without asking, because this isn’t the moment and she didn’t offer it.
But I noticed.
“Send me the final contracts this week,” I tell Sophia. “I’ll have legal review them and get them back to you signed.”
Sophia is already gathering her things with the energy of a woman who has celebrating to do. “Done. Absolutely done. Harper, come on, we need to—”
“Actually.” I keep my voice level. “Harper, if you have a few minutes, I’d like to talk through something with you.”
She looks up from the table. Her eyes move to Asher, then Maddox, then back to me, a quick read of the room. She chews her bottom lip, brief and unconscious, and I put the observation somewhere I’m not examining right now.
“Sure,” she says.
She turns to Sophia. “We’ll celebrate later. Go. You’ve earned it.”
Sophia does not read the room. This is one of her more reliable qualities.
She practically skips to the door, squeezes Harper’s arm on her way past, and pulls it shut behind her.
Asher follows, quiet and unhurried. Maddox is last, and as he passes me he doesn’t say a word, just looks at me with an expression I’ve been on the receiving end of for twenty-some years and know better than to misread.
The door closes.
The conference room is very quiet.
I stand from my chair and move to the one to Harper’s right, the one nearest her, and pull it out from the table. She watches me do it.
“Please,” I say.
She sits.
I push the chair in gently behind her and straighten up and something settles in my chest that I have no intention of naming.
Good girl.
I move to the chair across from her and sit and I fold my hands on the table and I look at her directly for the first time since she walked in this morning, which is a mistake I’ve been putting off making because I knew, the moment I let myself actually look at her, that the self-discipline I’ve been running on for the past four days was going to start costing me more than it was worth.
I was right.
I look anyway.
“You salvaged that presentation,” I say. “You knew exactly when to step in and exactly how to do it without making Sophia look like she needed saving. That’s a specific skill and it doesn’t come from nowhere.”
She holds my gaze steadily. “Sophia didn’t need saving. She just needed a second.”
“I know.” I pause. “Which is why I didn’t ask you to stay behind to talk about Sophia.”
Something shifts in her expression. Alert, but not alarmed. Waiting.
I keep my hands folded on the table and I keep my voice exactly where it belongs and I say what I asked her to stay behind to say.