Chapter 15
Anna
His office stayed closed the next morning.
I noticed at ten a.m. Priya told me he never came in.
He didn’t come in the next day either.
Miles was in and out, handling the press fallout with a level of calmness that told me this wasn’t his first crisis.
The PR team was working overtime. The tabloid photos were being challenged, buried, scrubbed from sites through legal threats and NDAs.
Every time I refreshed a gossip page, there were fewer copies of that picture.
Miles’s team was efficient. But you can’t fully erase something the internet has already swallowed.
The office functioned without Jace because he had designed it to. It was either a sign of excellent leadership, or the architecture of someone who assumed he would not always be present.
I kept his schedule running. Fielded calls.
Answered emails with the same clipped, professional tone he used, which I’d absorbed without meaning to.
Developers came to me with questions I forwarded to Miles.
The narrative team sent another Meridian revision and I filed it in the folder marked for his review and the folder grew thicker every day he didn’t come in to open it.
Days blurred. I’d catch myself reaching for my phone to text him about a schedule change and then remember there was nobody to text. His office stayed locked and I walked past it every morning and every evening and the emptiness of it sat in my chest like a stone.
I ate lunch at my desk now. I used to go to the break room, but the break room had a view of the corridor, and I couldn’t deal with the stares from co-workers. So I stopped going. I ate a sandwich at my desk and stared at my screen.
I didn’t want to miss him. Missing him meant I cared, and caring meant I’d crossed a line I’d told myself was uncrossable, and crossing it meant everything I’d said about being just his assistant was a lie I’d been telling myself louder than I was telling him.
The things I’d said on the balcony came back to me in pieces.
At night, on Miley’s couch, staring at the ceiling.
In the morning, brushing my teeth. During lunch, sitting at my desk with his empty office in my peripheral vision.
I moved across the country to be invisible.
I’d blamed him for making me front-page news, and accused him like he’d done it on purpose when I was equally at fault.
I asked Miles on the fourth day and kept it professional. Casual. Just checking in on the schedule situation.
Miles looked at me like he could see what I was actually asking underneath the question I was pretending to ask.
"The paparazzi's attention triggered him," he said. "Cameras. Being watched. His image circulating without his consent. It connects to something in his past." He paused. "Exposure is… it’s not just uncomfortable for him, Anna. It’s dangerous. For his mental health."
"Triggered by what?"
He looked away and rubbed the back of his neck.
"It’s not my place to tell you. Jace should tell you himself.
If he chooses to." He turned back to me. "Look, Anna. I don’t know what happened between you two. And I’m not asking.
But if you don’t care about him, the kindest thing you can do is leave him alone.
He’ll come back when he’s ready. Jace runs on logic.
He’ll compartmentalize, show up, act like nothing happened. " He paused.
"But if you do care about him, then you need to figure out what that means. Because he’s not the kind of man who does this halfway."
He held my gaze for a beat longer, and walked away.
If he chooses to.
When he’s ready.
Two phrases that sounded reasonable and felt like being told to sit still while someone I’d hurt was hurting somewhere I couldn’t reach.
The employees’ whispers hadn’t helped.
I heard them in the break rooms and in the corridors when they thought nobody was listening.
Today, I heard fragments. Is he okay? Someone said it might be a long time before he shows up again. I heard it was about the photo. Did you see the photo? Are they really in a relationship? She started here like a month ago.
They talked about him like he was a weather event. Something that happened to them, not a person who was going through something. I wanted to walk into the break room and say the same thing I’d said to those Meridian employees.
Then it struck me—I wasn’t defensive about myself. My concern was Jace. Not my reputation, not the gossip about me, not even the photo. Just him.
Priya found me in the break room on Friday afternoon, staring at the vending machine, lost in thought.
"Are you alright?"
I forced a smile. "Yeah. I am. I mean… I think so."
She held my gaze for a few seconds, then nodded.
"He does this," she said, leaning against the counter.
"Disappears. Has done it twice since I’ve been here.
First time was about a year ago, after a security breach leaked some internal emails.
He was gone for three weeks. Came back like nothing happened.
Second time was shorter, maybe a week, after a board meeting that apparently went sideways. "
I looked at her. "You’ve been here a year?"
"Fourteen months." She sipped her coffee. "The art department is a good place to be invisible. Nobody notices you unless you miss a deadline."
"How do you know so much about him?"
She was quiet for a second. Then she smiled, and it was different from her usual polite ones.
"My girlfriend told me."
"Your girlfriend works here?"
"Not exactly." Priya set her coffee down. "My girlfriend is Mona. Mona Hunter."
I stared at her, mouth hanging open. Priya was dating Jace’s sister.
"He doesn’t know," Priya said, reading my face. "That’s the arrangement. Mona and I agreed on it before I was hired. I’m here because of my portfolio, not because of who I’m sleeping with, and the last thing Mona wants is for Jace to feel like she planted someone to watch him.
He’s got enough paranoia about people in his space without adding that. "
"So you just… work here. And nobody knows."
"Nobody knows. And I’d like to keep it that way." She held my gaze. "I’m telling you because you look like you’re carrying something heavy and you don’t have enough people to carry it with. And because Mona told me you’re good for him."
Did Jace talk about me with his family?
I opened my mouth to ask how. How was I good for a man I’d yelled at on a balcony and shut down in his own office. But Priya was already picking up her coffee and the question stayed where it was.
I stood in the break room processing the fact that Jace Hunter’s world was smaller and more interconnected than I’d realized and that the people who loved him were quietly, carefully, watching over him from angles he couldn’t see.
The whole week ended without Jace appearing at the office.
Miley watched me mope throughout the weekend.
I loaded the dishwasher. Opened my phone, stared at his contact, typed nothing, closed it.
Opened it again ten minutes later and did the same thing.
Stared at the ceiling. Pushed food around my plate at dinner.
Picked up my camera for the first time in months, held it for ten seconds, and put it back down.
By Sunday evening, she set her wine glass down hard.
"Go find him."
I looked up from the couch. "What?"
"Whatever this is. Whatever happened. Sitting in this apartment overthinking it is making you miserable and honestly it’s making me miserable too because you’ve been sighing and making sure I feel how depressed you are.
" She pointed at me. "Go talk to him. Sort it out. Or don’t sort it out. But do something."
"I can’t just show up at his house, Miley."
"Why not?"
"Because it’s inappropriate. He’s my boss."
"More inappropriate than kissing him?" She raised an eyebrow. "Because that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and sunk. You’re past appropriate, Anna. Way past."
She was right. Miley was always right about the things I most wanted her to be wrong about.
I stared at my phone and thought about the line. The one between boss and assistant. The one I’d drawn on the balcony in the wind, the words I’d said in his office after seeing his confession to his brother about me. Nothing more, I’d told him. You’re my boss. Nothing more.
If I went to find him, that line was gone. Not blurred. Gone. And if I crossed it, there was no coming back to the safe side. Lines, once crossed, don’t redraw themselves. They just become the ground you stand on, for better or worse.
But the alternative was another night on the bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the silence when his voice replayed in my head. And I was tired of that. I was tired of empty offices and the question of whether the things I’d said on that balcony were the truth or just fear overshadowing it.
I called Miles and asked for Jace’s address.
He hesitated. A long pause that I could hear him thinking through. "You can’t go to the city penthouse. He’s not there."
"Where is he?"
"His cabin. In the mountains. Remote. A couple hours north." Another pause. "I told you to figure out what it means if you care about him. I didn’t mean drive into the mountains on a Sunday night."
"You said if I don’t care, leave him alone."
"Yeah."
"I’m not leaving him alone, Miles."
"You’ve decided what to do then?"
I didn’t have an answer for that. Not one I could say out loud, anyway. What I was going to do was drive to a cabin in the mountains because a man I’d told was just my boss hadn’t come to work and the emptiness where he used to be was louder than anything I’d felt since leaving Charlotte.
Jace wasn’t Tobias. I knew that in my bones, in the part of me that had held his face in the dark and felt his pulse slow under my fingers.
Jace Hunter was a lot of things. Difficult. Cold. Impossible.
But he wasn’t dangerous. Not to me. The most dangerous thing about Jace was how safe he made me feel, and that terrified me more than anything Tobias ever did.
Miles sent the address.
I was pulling on my jacket when I looked out the window. The sky over Miami had turned the color of bruised metal, clouds piling up from the west, heavy and low enough to swallow the tops of the buildings downtown. It was going to rain hard and soon.
Miley appeared in the hallway. I asked, "Can I borrow your car?"
"You’re driving into a storm."
"I’ll be there before it starts. And I don’t mind getting a little wet."
She studied me for a long moment. Then she walked to the closet, pulled out an umbrella, and handed it to me.
"Be safe. Text me when you get there. And Anna?"
"Yeah?"
"Don’t come back until you’ve figured out what you actually want. Because the sighing is killing me."
I took the umbrella and walked out the door.
The first drops hit the windshield before I reached the highway.
The drive was long. Miami fell away behind me, the skyline shrinking in my rearview mirror, the highway stretching out ahead.
The rain came down in sheets, heavy and relentless, turning the road into a gray blur.
The wipers worked overtime and my headlights carved tunnels through the dark.
The heater was on but I was still cold. My fingers were stiff on the wheel and the windshield kept fogging at the edges. But I kept driving.
The highway narrowed to two lanes. Then to mountain roads that wound through trees so thick the canopy would’ve blocked the sky if it hadn’t already disappeared behind the rain.
The GPS lost signal twice. I pulled over once to check the directions Miles had texted me—landmarks and turns, because cell service this far out was a suggestion, not a guarantee.
I almost turned back three times. At the gas station where the attendant looked at me like I was crazy for driving into the mountains in this weather. At the fork in the road where both options looked equally likely to lead nowhere. At the final stretch—a dirt road turned to mud by the rain.
The cabin appeared through the trees like something from another world. Larger than I expected. Modern, wood and glass, perched on a ridge with a valley dropping away behind it. A blacked-out SUV sat in the driveway.
He was here.
I parked. Cut the engine. Sat there for a minute with the rain hammering the roof and my heart hammering my ribs and the full weight of what I was about to do pressing down on me.
I got out of the car. The rain hit me immediately, cold and hard, soaking through my jacket in seconds. I grabbed the umbrella Miley gave me, fought it open against the wind, and walked to the porch. My hands were shaking and it wasn’t from the cold.
I knocked.
Footsteps inside. A pause. Then the door opened.