4. Liam #2
I cut him off before he could say anything else by asking about his Q3 projections and then he and I were talking and Zuri was back to eating her halibut like she hadn't just committed a perfect murder on the guy's credibility in front of witnesses.
But I could see where her jaw was set. My hand wanted to reach across the table.
My hand wanted to do several things, none of them appropriate in a white-tablecloth restaurant full of Atlanta old money.
Somewhere behind my ribs, I put Callan on the permanent list of men I would never again mistake for harmless.
The drive back to her car took twelve minutes. For the first three, Zuri watched the city through the passenger window, her profile reflected faintly in the glass.
"You were quiet in there," she said.
"I was trying not to make your correction about me."
She looked at me then. "Most men in your chair would have rescued me so loudly nobody remembered I had already handled it."
"I'm learning. Slowly."
"Painfully slowly." But the corner of her mouth lifted.
At a red light, I reached for the climate control at the same moment she did. My knuckles brushed hers. Neither of us moved for one suspended beat. Her skin was warm. Her breath caught so softly I might have imagined it, except her eyes dropped to my hand and then rose to my face.
"What did you want before Cavanaugh?" she asked when the light changed.
The question landed somewhere business never reached. "My father's approval. Then, for a long time, not to want it."
She nodded as if I had handed her a figure she could finally place in the model. "I understand that kind of inheritance."
When I pulled into the garage, she touched my forearm before opening the door. Brief. Deliberate. "Thank you for not speaking for me tonight."
"Thank you for noticing I was trying."
Her fingers left my sleeve. The absence of them stayed all the way home.
The fury hit me later, after I'd returned to my empty apartment on Peachtree.
It wasn't clean fury. It was ugly — the kind where you understood that the world was going to grind against someone you cared about and you couldn't actually protect them from it because the system was the system and fighting it made you look unhinged.
I stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows and watched the city move below me. A Black woman in rooms full of white men who thought they were complimenting her when they called her articulate. My hands were flat against the glass and the night was cold through it.
So instead I lay in the dark and thought about what it would take to build something she'd actually want.
Not a world where I'd removed the obstacles for her — she'd have hated that.
A world where she didn't have to translate herself.
That's the thing you can't give her. The system is the system.
All you can do is stand next to her in it.
I'd be lying if I said the thought hadn't crossed my mind — whether she'd be safer working from Meridian's offices.
Whether distance would protect her from whatever the board was going to become once they noticed.
The thought arrived, and I let it sit there for a moment before I recognized it for what it was: the same impulse dressed in logistics.
Get her out. Move her somewhere smaller.
Call it strategy. I pushed it down. But it didn't leave.
It just went quiet, waiting for a worse week to come back louder.
Friday, 4:15 p.m. I was in my office with my door open — not an accident — when I heard her voice in the hallway. Not her professional voice. Warm. Bright. Atlanta-born in a way her consultant voice never was.
"Mama, that man is the work of the devil, I'm telling you?—"
She was on her phone, walking past my office. I could see her, if I positioned my chair right, but she couldn't see me because she wasn't looking.
"—and you know what? I handled it like I had good sense but he knew.
His eyes did that thing where men know they got caught being stupid.
" Her laugh hit different. Genuine — not the measured exhale of professional satisfaction but actual joy, unfiltered.
"No, Mama, he's not — we work together. It's just temporary.
You know I'm not — not interested in complicated right now. I got us, remember? That's the deal."
A pause, and then, softer: "I know, Mama.
I know you'd drive down here in an hour if I asked.
I'm not asking. Not yet. Tell your sister I said hey, and tell Auntie Ruth I'm not moving to Charlotte just because she found a house near both of you.
That listing is overpriced by forty thousand dollars, I don't care how good the schools are. "
She was gone. Down the hallway toward her office.
My chest pulled tight — a physical thing, like something was wrapping around my ribs and squeezing.
I'm not interested in complicated. I got us.
That's the deal. She's made a deal with the baby.
She's decided that she and the child are a unit and complexity is optional.
I wanted to unmake that distance. I wanted to take the 220 days between then and now and compress them into something smaller, something that didn't give her the space to build a deal with the baby that didn't include me.
I didn't follow her. I stayed in my office, door open, and thought about what it would take to become someone she wanted to let in on that deal.
Monday morning I had legal draw up what I'd been thinking about since Thursday — since the Henderson dinner, when she'd told Jennifer that her biggest fear as an independent consultant was that "one bad contract cycle could unravel everything I've built.
" She'd said it casually, between courses, like it was small talk.
She hadn't been talking to me. She'd been talking to another woman about the economics of independence. But I'd heard it.
You told yourself you'd stop doing this.
Standing next to, not in front of. And here you are, building a safety net out of overheard vulnerability.
I knew it was the same impulse. I knew it.
And I did it anyway, because the alternative was doing nothing while she carried everything alone, and I wasn't built for that.
The document wasn't a job offer. What legal had drawn up was an extended retainer agreement — twenty-four months, benefits package, healthcare, guaranteed quarterly minimums, and a non-exclusive clause that let her keep taking other clients.
The structure was institutional. The timing was personal.
I'd known the difference. I had done it anyway.
I put the folder on her desk while she was in a meeting. No note. Just centered so there was no missing it.
Then I sat in my office and did the only thing I knew how to do.
I waited.
Forty minutes later, I heard her office door close. Not a slam — worse. The careful, deliberate click of a woman who had read every page and was deciding what it meant.