14. DOMINIC
Jealousy, I am learning tonight, does not require two separate people.
It only requires one man foolish enough to fall for both halves of the same woman before he’s ready to admit they were never separate people to begin with.
I walked the thirty feet of hallway back to my own room slower than necessary tonight, now that the east wing has finally cleared and Piper and I have doors of our own again, and I catalogued the ache of putting distance between myself and a door I have started,
against every professional instinct I own, thinking of as somewhere I would rather be standing outside of than away from.
I tell myself this is fatigue.
I have told myself a great many things this week that did not survive close examination.
I log into Blackline a little after midnight.
Atlas: Long day. How’s the case going on your end.
Cassandra: Complicated. The colleague situation has escalated.
Atlas: Escalated how?
There’s a pause longer than her usual rhythm, long enough that I picture her deciding whether to type the next sentence or delete it, the way I’ve watched her hesitate over a press statement when the stakes finally matter more than the optics.
I have learned to read her pauses almost as fluently as her sentences, the rhythm of hesitating over something true versus something merely inconvenient.
This pause belongs to the first category, and I brace for it the way I’d brace for incoming fire.
Cassandra: I think I’m attracted to him. Not in the abstract, professional-tension way I’ve been complaining about for a year. Actually attracted. The kind that makes it difficult to stand three feet away from him in a room and pretend I’m thinking about the case.
I read the sentence four times before I let myself respond, because some petty, undisciplined part of me that I do not recognize wants, for one absurd moment, to be jealous of myself.
Atlas: That’s a significant shift from “insufferable” and “concrete.”
Cassandra: He’s still insufferable. He’s still made largely of concrete. I didn’t say the attraction was rational.
Atlas: Does he know?
Cassandra: God, no. And he’s not going to, because the case isn’t finished and because I don’t currently trust my own judgment enough to hand it to a man who thinks every emotion is a liability to be managed.
I sit with the ugly little thrill of being told, by the one person I’ve trusted completely for a year, that she wants a man who is, undeniably, me; and with something far less flattering underneath it.
I am jealous.
Not of a stranger.
Of myself, split cleanly into two men she hasn’t realized are the same one, one of whom she trusts with everything and one of whom she is only now admitting she wants.
There is no rational framework for being jealous of yourself, and I have spent my entire career building rational frameworks.
I fail, tonight, to build one.
Atlas: Tell me about him. The real him, not the caricature you usually give me.
Cassandra: Why?
Atlas: Because I think you’ve spent a year making him smaller than he actually is, and I’m curious what’s left once you stop doing that.
Another pause.
When she answers, something in the rhythm has changed, slower, more careful, like she’s handling the sentence with both hands instead of throwing it at me.
Cassandra: He’s exhausting. He treats every conversation like a threat assessment and every silence like evidence of something.
But sometimes he looks at me like he’s not listening to the words I’m actually saying.
Like he’s listening to everything underneath them instead; the part I’m not saying, the part I’ve spent my whole career learning to bury under a better sentence.
Nobody’s ever done that. Not like he does it. Not without me asking them to.
I read it once.
Then again, slower, and my heart does something I would flag as a medical concern in a principal.
I have spent a year building a private mythology out of a woman I’d never met, assembling her one honest sentence at a time into someone I trusted more than almost anyone alive.
I did not expect that mythology to collapse into the exact shape of a woman I already, separately, could not stop thinking about.
Atlas: That sounds like more than attraction.
Cassandra: Don’t. I already know what it sounds like. I’m not ready to confront what it sounds like.
Atlas: Alright.
Cassandra: What about you? Anyone making you reconsider your entire personality lately?
The question sits there, patient, waiting, the way she waits for every honest answer I’ve ever eventually given her.
I have come close, twice now, to simply telling her, to writing yes, you, the version of you down the hall who fell asleep on the other side of a pillow wall two nights ago and letting the fragile architecture we’ve built collapse into whatever comes next.
I don’t do it.
I tell myself the case isn’t finished, that Roman is still circling, that this is not the moment to detonate the one honest thing either of us has left.
All of that is true.
None of it is the actual reason.
The sentence sits in my chest like a verdict I have already read and refuse to deliver, because delivering it means finding out, in real time, whether the woman who has spent a year trusting a stranger will forgive that stranger for being the man she already, separately,
decided not to trust with anything real.
Atlas: There’s someone. It’s complicated in the same direction as yours is.
Cassandra: The person you complain about, or a new one?
Atlas: The same one you’d assume, if you knew me well enough to guess.
Cassandra: I like to think I know you fairly well by now.
Atlas: You do. Better than almost anyone.
I copy the messages before I close the conversation.
Blackline discourages it; the rules exist precisely to prevent this kind of accumulating evidence, but I save the sentence about listening to everything underneath her words, because it is the truest thing anyone has ever said about me without knowing they were saying it to my face.
I have spent my entire adult life believing competence was the only currency I had to offer anyone, Ingrid excepted, and even that took years to earn.
Cassandra just told me, without meaning to, that the thing she actually values isn’t the competence at all.
It’s the listening underneath it.
The part I didn’t think anyone could see, let alone want.
I lie awake considerably longer than the hour warrants, turning over the vertigo of being jealous of a man who might not exist, envied by a woman who does not know she’s already chosen him.
I have spent twelve years building a life around the theory that the truth, however dangerous, is always the safer option.
Tonight, for the first time, I understand exactly why people choose otherwise.
It is not cowardice, not entirely.
It is the simple, human unwillingness to risk the one thing that has finally, after a year of careful anonymous honesty, started to feel like being known.
I fall asleep anyway, the coward’s version of resolve, and let tomorrow inherit a decision I am not yet brave enough to make tonight.