Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
George
Evelyn stands at the whiteboard, leading the meeting. Tessa sits beside me, legal pad open, pen already moving before Evelyn has finished her first sentence. I notice, without meaning to.
Noah is across the table with his arms crossed and the expression of a man who is physically present and mentally somewhere considerably more interesting. Marissa has already opened her laptop, radiating confidence.
"Let's talk about potential clients," Evelyn says, and the meeting moves from preamble to purpose.
"If we're expanding the portfolio, we should look at high-visibility bachelors." Marissa is already typing before anyone responds.
"High-visibility bachelors," Noah repeats the phrase under his breath in a tone that suggests he finds it faintly absurd, which it is.
"I don't think we need to do that," I say.
No one looks up.
Tessa writes something on her legal pad, and I find myself wondering, briefly, what she made of Marissa's phrasing.
Whether it struck her as efficient or reductive.
Whether she has opinions about that kind of thing.
I file the question away, which is becoming a habit I haven't examined closely enough.
"Let's see — eligible billionaire bachelors in Firth City." Marissa says this mostly to herself and hits enter with the energy of someone solving a problem that didn't need solving.
I clear my throat. "We don't typically recruit clients by internet search."
Noah snorts. "That's subtle," he says, earning a complete absence of acknowledgment from Marissa, which doesn't appear to bother him.
The results populate in a neat, impersonal column of names and thumbnail photographs, the kind of listicle that gets assembled by algorithm and mistaken for journalism. Marissa scrolls slowly, tilting her head the way people do when something almost registers but hasn't quite landed yet.
Then her finger lifts off the trackpad.
The scrolling stops.
She leans slightly forward, frowning at the screen with the focused attention of someone trying to confirm what they think they're seeing.
Tessa, still looking at her legal pad, says quietly, "You've stopped typing, Marissa," without any particular inflection.
Noah covers his mouth with his fist.
Marissa turns the laptop slowly.
My name is on the screen in clean sans-serif text, beside a photograph I did not choose, above an article I did not approve.
The Maddox Foundation is listed beneath it, and then the net worth estimates, which are, as always, both inaccurate and close enough to be uncomfortable.
The room holds its breath. I can smell the faint chemical bite of dry-erase markers and I focus on that, briefly, because it is neutral.
Noah leans forward, elbows on the table, and looks at the screen, then at me, then back at the screen, with the focused attention of a man doing very careful arithmetic.
"Hold on," he says. "Is that you?" Which is a question, technically, though we both already know the answer.
I exhale slowly and say nothing. In my experience, silence is its own kind of answer, and Noah is perceptive enough to read it.
"Wait. Are you—" Marissa starts.
"A Maddox?" Noah finishes, in the tone of a man who has just won something and isn't entirely sure what.
I have known this moment was inevitable since my first week at ERS. I simply hadn't accounted for Conference Room A specifically, or the particular discomfort of watching it happen in front of Tessa, whose pen has stopped moving.
Evelyn cuts in cleanly. "George's family background is not relevant to client strategy." Her tone makes it clear that the subject is resolved.
Noah leans back in his chair slowly. "I feel like it's at least mildly relevant," he says, with the half-smile he uses when he's pushing just far enough to register.
I look at Tessa without meaning to. It's a reflex. The same one I have with everyone when information shifts, when I need to measure the small seismic changes that follow. I watch for the recalibration: the slight widening of the eyes, the new attentiveness, the unconscious lean-in.
She taps her pen once on the table.
"Can we focus?" She doesn't look at either Noah or me when she says it, her eyes already back on her legal pad, and somehow it lands harder than anything Evelyn said.
Tessa's tone is brisk, unbothered, entirely unimpressed by the drama of the last sixty seconds.
I can't tell whether she's helping me or simply annoyed that the meeting has gone sideways. The uncertainty is more interesting than it should be.
Evelyn redirects to client strategy with the efficiency of someone who has never once indulged a tangent she didn't sanction. Tessa's posture is unchanged. She's upright, angled slightly toward the whiteboard, and entirely professional.
I watch her for a second. Part of me still waiting for the crazy eyes, and the personality flip.
They don't come.
Noah is talking about PR response timing, and I'm nodding at appropriate intervals, and most of my attention is on the movement of Tessa's pen across the legal pad.
At some point she reaches across the table for the water pitcher.
Our hands come within approximately four inches of each other.
She doesn't appear to notice. I appear to notice considerably more than is warranted, which I note with some irritation and file alongside the handwriting observation and the question about her opinions on reductive phrasing.
The meeting continues as normal.
As Evelyn closes the agenda, Noah leans toward me, just quietly enough to be deniable. "You buried the lede."
I say nothing. He accepts this, because Noah has always known when a silence is intentional, which is one of the things that makes him useful and occasionally exhausting.
People begin gathering their things. Laptops close, pens are capped, notebooks are shoved into bags. It is the small choreography of a meeting ending. I watch Tessa through it, the familiar worry settling in like a splinter working its way deeper.
The pattern is consistent, and I know it the way I know my own name on a search result: once they know what I'm worth, they begin looking for the angles.
Tessa caps her pen. She aligns her legal pad with the edge of her laptop and says, "George, I'll send you the revised client notes," in exactly the same tone she used this morning when she asked if I wanted coffee.
It is such a thoroughly ordinary sentence that I find myself almost off-balance by it. As if I had braced for a wave and the water stayed flat.
She doesn't look at me any differently. Doesn't smile with any new intention behind it. Doesn't make the small unconscious adjustments that people make when they suddenly see potential where they previously saw a colleague. The adjustments I have learned, over years, to spot before they fully form.
There are none.
I recognize, with relief, that she and Evelyn just ran interference for me. They did it quietly, without fuss, without making a performance of the courtesy.
I gather my notebook slowly, giving myself time I'm not sure what to do with.
Across the room, Tessa is already at the door, exchanging a brief word with Marissa about the onboarding timeline.
She is the same as she was an hour ago, before the screen turned.
The same posture, the same measured economy of movement, the same expression that gives away less than it probably should.
I think, despite everything, that the most unsettling thing about Tessa Bloom is not that she might change.
It's that some part of me is already hoping she won't.
The Maddox name has a gravity I have spent years trying to move through unaffected, and I have never entirely succeeded.
I stand in Conference Room A for a moment, notebook in hand, the smell of dry-erase markers still faint in the air, and I watch her disappear into the hallway with the unhurried certainty of someone who has already moved on.
It never stays simple for long. And now that Tessa Bloom knows exactly what my name is worth, the only question I cannot answer is when she'll take advantage of it.