16. Chapter 16 This Is Better
Trevor Turner
Sunday dinner with Cole had already become dangerous in ways I had not anticipated.
Not because anything dramatic happened.
Because it felt easy.
Elise arrived just after six carrying a tote bag full of magazines and wearing one of the oversized sweaters that made something in my chest loosen on sight. Cole launched himself at her before she was fully inside the apartment.
"You came," he announced.
"I said I would."
"People still cancel sometimes."
Elise looked at me over the top of his head.
"That's bleak for a five-year-old," she said quietly.
"Maverick says realism is emotionally healthy," Cole informed her. "I don't really understand what that means, though."
"Maverick should not be mentoring children," she said.
Cole laughed hard enough that I had to look away briefly.
Dinner was pasta because it was the only thing Cole reliably ate without negotiation. Elise stood beside him while he aggressively over-applied parmesan and corrected his spelling homework between bites.
I watched both of them too much.
Elise noticed eventually.
"You are being weirdly quiet," she said.
Cole looked up immediately. "I said that yesterday."
Traitor.
"I'm working," I said.
Elise's eyes narrowed slightly at that.
Not convinced.
And because she knew me too well already, she waited until Cole disappeared down the hallway to brush his teeth before she spoke again.
"Something happened," she said quietly.
Not a question.
I looked at her.
Then she reached into her bag and handed me her phone.
The photograph filled the screen immediately.
Elise through the restaurant glass.
Taken from outside.
Too far away to feel accidental.
I felt something cold settle carefully into place behind my ribs.
"When did you get this?"
"Last night."
"And you waited until now to tell me?"
Something in my tone must have sharpened too much because she folded her arms immediately.
"I wasn't hiding it," she said. "I just didn't want this dinner to become about security teams and surveillance before Cole even finished dessert."
Fair.
Annoyingly fair.
I handed the phone back carefully.
"If you want me to, I'll have Webb start tracing it tonight," I said.
Her eyebrows lifted slightly.
Not because of the offer.
Because I had asked.
"Okay," she said after a second. "Yes."
I nodded once and reached for my phone.
Webb answered on the second ring.
"I need a vehicle trace," I said.
I gave him the visible portion of the plate number and watched Elise carefully while I spoke.
No tightening in her shoulders.
No immediate retreat.
Good.
"Run connections through Ashford investor traffic too," I added. "Quietly."
Webb understood what quietly meant.
I ended the call and looked back at Elise.
"We'll know more tonight," I said.
Elise went still.
"You think it's her?"
"I think someone around her is interested in us for reasons that stopped being gossip a while ago."
Cole's footsteps sounded faintly down the hallway before either of us could say anything else.
Elise looked toward the sound automatically.
Then back at me.
"We are not discussing this in front of him," she said quietly.
"Agreed."
So we didn't.
We ate dinner. Cole spent ten uninterrupted minutes explaining a playground disagreement that involved Pokemon cards and moral betrayal.
Elise helped him study spelling words. I cleaned the kitchen while she sat cross-legged on the living room floor helping him build something structurally impossible out of magnetic tiles.
And through all of it, underneath all of it, the photograph remained between us.
Waiting.
Cole finally fell asleep halfway through a chapter of Charlotte's Web with his hand still curled in Elise's sleeve.
By the time we stepped quietly back into the hallway outside his room, neither of us was pretending the conversation could wait any longer.
But Elise looked toward the front windows instead.
Then down at herself.
"I should probably go home for a little while," she said quietly.
I frowned slightly. "You don't have to."
"I know." A small smile touched her mouth. "But I do need clean clothes "
That surprised a quiet laugh out of me.
"Fair."
She leaned back lightly against the hallway wall.
"I'll come back later," she said. "I just need to feel like a person who occasionally returns to her own apartment first."
Something about the honesty of that landed harder than it should have.
Because I understood it.
The strange fragile balance of wanting someone enough that your life started rearranging around them before you'd consciously agreed to let it.
"Okay," I said.
Elise left twenty minutes later with one of my hoodies over her arm and a promise to text me when she got home.
She did.
Home safe.
Two words.
I stared at them longer than necessary before setting my phone face-down on the nightstand.
Then I turned the lights off and went upstairs intending to sleep.
Or at least attempt something close to it.
The photograph had not left my mind.
Not because I feared the person behind i, but because someone had been close enough to frame Elise's face through a car window and I hadn't known.
I spent Monday running traces through my security team while keeping Elise updated on anything that actually mattered.
Webb pulled nearby traffic footage from the block and traced the same vehicle to two separate events hosted by investors closely tied to Vivienne Ashford ,one fundraiser three weeks ago and a private dinner the week before that.
Not random drive-bys.
The car had been lingering outside both locations long enough to suggest someone inside was waiting for a specific person to leave.
By Tuesday morning we'd identified a consultant with recent ties to several investors in Vivienne Ashford's orbit.
Elise came to the office just after lunch and closed my office door behind her the second she saw my expression.
"What happened?"
I handed her the file Webb had prepared.
She read quietly for almost a full minute before looking back up at me.
"You think this is connected to Vivienne?"
"I think someone close enough to her world to attend private investor events has been watching us for weeks," I said. "And I don't believe in coincidences that expensive."
Something tightened in her face.
Not fear exactly.
Recognition.
"So whoever took the photograph had already been following us before that night," she said softly.
She looked back down at the still frames Webb had pulled from nearby traffic cameras, the same dark sedan outside three separate investor events connected to Vivienne's orbit.
"What do we do?"
The question landed differently now than it would have two weeks ago.
Not because she was handing me control.
Because she was asking me to stand beside her inside the problem.
I leaned back slightly in my chair.
"Webb wants to lean on the consultant immediately," I admitted. "Nothing illegal. Just enough pressure that whoever hired him decides keeping tabs on us isn't worth the trouble anymore."
Elise's eyes lifted immediately.
"And you don't want to do that."
"I want to," I said honestly. "I'm choosing not to."
That held her attention.
I looked at the folder between us.
"If this is connected to Vivienne, then pushing too hard too fast just teaches her we noticed," I said. "I'd rather understand what she actually wants first."
Elise was quiet for a second.
Then: "You think this is about you."
"I think it started about me," I said. "I don't think it is anymore."
The room went still after that.
Because we both understood what I meant.
Not Turner Capital.
Her.
I watched her absorb that carefully.
Then she closed the file.
"Okay," she said quietly. "Then we handle it carefully. Together."
The word landed somewhere deeper than I was prepared for.
Together.
I nodded once.
And for the first time since the photograph arrived, the situation stopped feeling entirely like a threat and started feeling dangerously like trust.
The conversation with Elise should have left me thinking about Ashford.
Instead, what I noticed was how the penthouse had reorganized itself around her presence without anyone directing it to. Cole's place at the table shifted closer to where she sat.
The throw blanket from the guest room migrated to the living room couch. I found myself checking the time at six-fifteen with a regularity that had nothing to do with my calendar.
I was not a man who waited for things.
I was learning that waiting for her was different from waiting. It was the only part of my day that felt settled before it even happened.
The Hargrove Media acquisition had been building for eleven months and it detonated on a Tuesday, because the universe had a cruel sense of timing, when opposing counsel attempted to compress the closing timeline into less than a week and one of the financing banks threatened to stall approval.
Elise was at her side table when the first call came in.
At first it looked manageable.
One financing bank delaying approval paperwork. Opposing counsel suddenly pushing for an accelerated close. Three executives talking over each other on speakerphone while legal teams rewrote timelines in real time.
The kind of corporate chaos I'd spent half my adult life surviving.
Then the second call came in.
And then another.
Shanghai refused the revised timing window. One of the media subsidiaries threatened to walk if the acquisition terms changed after signature review. Our board wanted an emergency briefing before authorizing the final restructuring.
By midnight the forty-second floor looked like a controlled disaster.
Coffee cups everywhere. Half-eaten takeout. Margaux rerouting calls from two phones at once while legal teams moved in and out of conference rooms carrying redlined contracts.
And through all of it, Elise stayed.
Not hovering. Not waiting for instructions.
Moving.
Absorbing pressure almost as quickly as it formed.