Chapter 14 Tessa
Chapter fourteen
Tessa
The glass door swings shut behind me and I'm already losing the battle with my bag, strap sliding off my shoulder, coffee tilting at a dangerous angle, when I see Noah.
He's leaning against George's office doorframe with his arms crossed and a smile that has absolutely nothing innocent in it. The kind of smile that means he's been sitting on something and waiting for an audience.
"So this is the 'strictly professional' situation," he says, and somehow manages to make audible air quotes without using his hands at all.
My stomach drops like an elevator.
I keep walking, because stopping would be an admission, and I haven't decided what I'm admitting yet. I set my coffee on my desk with great deliberateness and do not look at him.
"If this were real," I say, arranging my bag like its contents are suddenly fascinating, "I'd have negotiated better perks."
Noah's laugh is loud, genuine, and the kind that rolls across the whole open office and makes three people look up from their screens.
I finally glance toward George's doorway, where George is standing with a tablet in his hand and an expression that tells me absolutely nothing.
He doesn't deny it. Doesn't clarify, deflect, or offer any kind of rescue.
Somehow that's so much worse than if he had.
The tips of my ears go warm. I open my laptop with more force than necessary and stare at the screen like it owes me something.
"For the record," George says, still looking at his tablet, still perfectly calm, "the arrangement is working beautifully."
Noah nearly chokes on his coffee.
I pull up the operations dashboard before anyone can see my face do whatever it's currently doing.
The monitors blink to life around me with social feeds scrolling in real time, news alerts stacking in thin columns, the relationship metrics dashboard pulsing soft blue across the screen.
George's system. His numbers. His quietly terrifying ability to quantify how love looks from the outside.
I pull up the Camden and Lila feed first. My chest tightens before my brain even catches up to why.
The paparazzi clip has already cracked two million views. It's a photo of Camden's hand cupped around the back of Lila's head, her face turned into his shoulder. The whole image is achingly, accidentally perfect.
"Public sentiment jumped four points in ninety minutes," one of the analysts calls out from the far desk.
George moves to stand beside me without announcing himself, close enough that I catch the faint smell of whatever soap he uses.
"Affection display shifted the narrative from accusation to relationship," he says, in the tone of someone reading a weather report.
"Good," I mutter, eyes on the screen. "That buys them breathing room."
His shoulder is almost touching mine. Neither of us moves away. I become very, very focused on a comment thread I do not care about at all.
Across the room another alert fires. I check it and see a paparazzi video, grainy and vertical, of Seamus stepping between Rosanna and a camera lens with one hand raised and the other steady at the small of her back. The kind of gesture that feels genuine and protective.
The headlines are already spinning: Protective Billionaire Husband? and Seamus O'Malley Defends Wife in Viral Moment.
Around the room, the team exchanges looks. George pulls up the sentiment ratio. His expression doesn't change, which means it's fine. George's face is an extremely reliable instrument.
"Positive across the board," he says. "People respond to protection."
"That's the Irish hero effect," I say, meaning it as a joke.
George tilts his head slightly, like he's considering logging it as an actual variable.
I have to look away from him before I do something embarrassing, like laugh.
Then someone hits a podcast link without warning and Lindsay Smith's mother's voice fills the office.
"He married her for the money."
The words sit in the air like smoke. Nobody moves for a second.
George glances at me sideways. "Romance is still winning the data," he says quietly.
I stare at him. I think he might be the strangest person I have ever met, and I think I mean that as a compliment, and I think that's a problem.
I check the metrics myself because I need something to do with my hands. The public isn't buying the mother's narrative. Not even a little. The comments are overwhelmingly, enthusiastically on Lila's side.
"Lottery winner finds love with billionaire," I say. "Of course they're rooting for her."
We divide up client outreach — who needs a fire put out, who needs a reassuring call, who just needs someone to tell them the internet is on their side today.
I sign off on the Lindsay response brief and slide it across the desk to George.
For one moment, both our fingers are on the same corner of the same piece of paper.
He picks it up. Business as usual. I remind myself to breathe.
The room settles into a quieter rhythm after that. Then for a while there is just keyboards and low voices and the soft percussion of alerts being triaged.
George and I fall into a kind of coordination that doesn't require much talking: him pulling metrics, me drafting language, passing things back and forth without ceremony, finishing each other's sentences in the margins of documents.
"Our communication efficiency has improved," he says, not looking up from his screen.
I stare at him for a full three seconds, trying to determine if that was a compliment, a data point, or accidentally the most intimate thing anyone has said to me in months. I decide not to answer. Which is, I'm aware, its own kind of answer.
The lull comes around eleven. That brief stillness between crises where the screens stop screaming and everyone reaches for their cold coffee and pretends they aren't exhausted.
I sit back in my chair and my mind does what it always does in the quiet.
It drifts somewhere I haven't given it permission to go.
His name was Brett. I had been so certain about him, the way you're certain about things before life quietly, thoroughly corrects you. He married my friend Lin six months later. She asked me to help pick the venue, and I did, because what else do you do.
Of course he didn't choose me in the end. The thought is so familiar it doesn't even sting anymore. It is something I note, and something I stop expecting to change.
I look across the desk at George without meaning to. At the line of his jaw. The way he holds a stylus like he's working through something challenging. The frown lines that appear when he's concentrating.
I look away.
Noah sees it. I know from his side eye that he noticed.
He murmurs something to George across the room. His voice is low enough that I only catch the shape of it, not the words.
Then, louder, "you really don't see it, do you." It isn't quite a question.
"See what?" George says.
He sounds genuinely puzzled. Genuinely, completely, unhelpfully puzzled. And somehow, of all the things that have happened today, that's the worst part.
Noah smiles and says nothing. I develop a sudden urgent need to take a long sip of very cold coffee.
George looks briefly in my direction, then back at his screen. It is just a glance, unreadable, over almost before it begins.
Before we all leave for the day, he pulls up the relationship dashboard one last time. All three columns trending upward, clean green lines ascending in tidy parallel, the system doing exactly what he built it to do.
"It's working," he says, with that careful, contained satisfaction of his, like he's confirming a hypothesis he never doubted.
"Let's hope it keeps working," I say, and I hear how quiet my own voice comes out. Quieter than I meant it.
He nods and looks back at the screen, already somewhere else in his head, already running numbers I can't see.
And I sit there thinking: at the end of the day, what George and I have is temporary. An arrangement. A clean, professional fiction with a built-in expiration date. Just like Brett, he would never actually choose me. Not for real. Not for keeps.
But for now, it's working.
I just haven't decided if that's enough.