5. Zuri
ZURI
Three weeks into the Cavanaugh contract, and I'd stopped counting the days until it was over. That was either growth or surrender. I hadn't decided which.
I still hadn't signed the retainer. It sat in the bottom drawer of my desk, under a folder of expense reports, like a thing I could pretend I'd forgotten about if I never looked directly at it.
Twenty-four months. Benefits. A non-exclusive clause that would have let me keep Meridian's other three clients without so much as a scheduling headache.
Every rational part of my brain — the part that had built a firm out of nothing, the part that read every contract twice and every ambiguous clause four times — knew it was a good deal.
Better than good. The kind of deal you'd tell a client to take without a second thought.
I hadn't signed it because signing it meant admitting I wanted the twenty-four months more than I wanted the exit ramp.
The Jasper analysis — my assessment of a regional logistics firm Cavanaugh was considering acquiring — had seventeen pages of careful argument: Cavanaugh's strategy was solid but geographically rigid, leaving eight-figure opportunities on the table in three Southeast markets.
Liam's instinct was sharp. His execution lacked imagination.
I'd been typing the same sentence for six hours, and my lower back was staging a mutiny against a chair that had, mysteriously, stopped hurting sometime last week.
I hadn't asked him about it. I wasn't ready to know the answer, because I already knew the answer, and knowing it out loud would require me to do something about how it made me feel.
The office was a cathedral of silence at 11:47 PM on a Saturday.
I'd told myself I was coming in to finish the Jasper deck before Monday.
That was true. It was also not the whole truth, and I knew it the way you know a lie you've told yourself so many times it's grown its own furniture.
Weekend security was a skeleton crew — lobby guard, one rover doing hourly rounds on alternating floors.
The only light on this floor came from my office and the Atlanta skyline beyond it, a circuit board of amber and white spreading out like someone had spilled jewels across black velvet.
None of this was part of the plan.
The baby had opinions too. Sharp little jabs low and to the left, which my OB assured me was perfectly normal at seven months, going on eight no matter what my back believed. I rubbed the spot and tried to focus on the cost-benefit analysis blurring at the edges of my vision.
The elevator dinged.
I didn't look up. My fingers found the keyboard by muscle memory, though I was suddenly hyperaware of every nerve ending. Don't let yourself think about who it might be.
The footsteps were deliberate. Heading somewhere specific.
Toward my office.
I knew before he appeared that it was Liam. My body knew. Saturday night, nearly midnight, and he'd come to the thirty-fourth floor looking for me. The thought should have been a warning. Instead it sat next to the warmth in my chest and refused to feel like one.
A part of me — the part that had survived Callan and his need to know where I was at every hour, the part that catalogued every time a man showed up where he hadn't been invited — noted that he knew I was here.
The same way he checked my schedule, the same way he'd rearranged his calendar all week without ever making it obvious enough to call out.
I'd noticed anyway. I noticed everything. It was the entire premise of my career.
"You're going to hurt yourself," Liam said from my doorway.
I finished my sentence before I acknowledged him. "I'm seven months pregnant, not an invalid. Pregnant people work."
"Pregnant people also sleep." He was holding a small container, the kind that comes from actual restaurants. My traitorous stomach growled. A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. "Your mother called my office."
"Excuse me?"
"She asked if you were eating. Said you get stubborn about meals when you're working.
" He stepped in, closed the door behind him with a soft click.
"You texted her at ten-thirty that you were finishing the Jasper deck here.
When you stopped answering, she called the main line and told the after-hours operator her daughter and granddaughter were upstairs.
Security checked your access badge. The operator routed her to the executive floor, and I was the only one here. "
"You happened to be the only executive here when my mother called at eleven PM."
"I was finishing the Nakamura board deck for Monday. The call came through. Your mother is very persuasive." He said it like this was a normal thing that happened to CEOs. "She was right, by the way. About the meals."
"You have my mother's number." I was stalling. Buying time for my pulse to return to normal.
"I do." He set the container on the edge of my desk, careful not to disturb the papers.
The smell hit me — shrimp and grits, butter and garlic and enough pepper to warm the back of my throat.
My mouth watered. My throat tightened. "She said you've been craving it.
From that place on Peachtree. The small one, family-owned. "
I hadn't told him that. I'd mentioned it once, three weeks ago, in an elevator with four other people and half my attention on a spreadsheet. My eyes were hot. Burning.
"You remembered that?" I hated how unsteady the question sounded. I stopped before I could turn surprise into an accusation.
It wasn't the food.
It was that he remembered. It was that my mother had called and he'd answered — not with a message, not with a redirect, but with shrimp and grits at midnight.
It was that he was standing in my office holding a container of carefully chosen intentions like this was something that mattered to him.
Like I mattered to him. Which meant I had to care about him, and caring about him was the road to needing him, and needing him was something I could not afford.
"It's not a grand gesture," he said quietly, and there was real patience in his voice. "Sit. Eat. Let your back stop screaming at you."
I should have told him to leave. I should have maintained the careful distance and professionalism I'd been building. But I sat. I opened the container. The steam rose like a small prayer, and I felt something in my chest crack open.
The shrimp and grits were perfect. Of course they were. Creamy, buttery grits, shrimp with crisp seared edges, just enough pepper to make my eyes water. Liam leaned against the window frame, hands in his pockets, and watched me eat like I was the most interesting thing he'd seen all year.
"You're staring," I said, between bites.
"I'm aware."
"It's unsettling."
"I know."
He didn't look away. The Atlanta skyline outlined him in amber, and I had the sudden, violent thought that he looked like someone who mattered. Someone permanent. I nudged a shrimp through the grits with deliberate focus, trying to rebuild the wall.
"The retainer's still in my desk drawer," I said, mostly to change the subject, and immediately regretted it because it wasn't a subject change at all — it was the same subject, wearing a different suit.
"I noticed. I wasn't going to ask."
"You want to ask."
"I want a lot of things I'm not going to ask for." His voice was even, but something underneath it wasn't. "That's the whole exercise, Zuri. Learning which wants I get to act on."
I set down my fork. "I need to ask something personal. After the summit — did you ever go back?"
"Every night that week," he said. "Seven times. I sat at the bar, ordered bourbon I didn't want, and waited to see if you'd come back."
The room tilted slightly. Seven times.
"Liam—"
"I didn't expect to find you again." His voice was quiet, but there was something underneath it — admittance, like he'd been carrying this and finally putting it down. "I went back because I couldn't not go back. I don't usually operate that way."
"Neither do I." And it was true. That night was anomalous. A glitch in my programming. A moment of weakness that resulted in a seven-month-long consequence I would not, under any circumstances, call a mistake in front of her father.
"I know. That's what made it matter."
"You can't just tell me things like that," I said. "You can't just show up with food and honesty and expect me to?—"
"To what?"
"To feel something." The words came out sharp. "I don't want to feel something."
He stepped away from the window. Two steps. Close enough that I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes.
"Tell me you don't," he said quietly.
I should have lied. I was good at lies. But his face cracked my defenses right down the middle: nearly black eyes fixed on mine, silver at his temples catching the office light, that stern mouth softened by uncertainty he wasn't trying to hide.
"I can't want this," I said instead, and it came out truthful in a way I didn't intend. "It's not part of the plan."
"What is the plan?"
"Get through the pregnancy. Have the baby. Renegotiate the contract. Maintain distance. Maintain control. Maintain — myself."
He stepped closer. Close enough that I could smell his cologne. My throat tightened.
"Yourself," he finished softly. "You maintain yourself."
He was right, and I hated it.
"And if I told you that you didn't have to do that here? That you could just... be?"
I laughed then. A real laugh, too Atlanta, too familiar. "Don't," I said, catching myself mid-breath. "Don't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like I matter. Like this matters. We can't do this."
His hand lifted, stopped halfway between us, and fell back to his side. "Then tell me to leave."
I didn't answer. Instead, I stood — awkwardly, my back still complaining. The glass walls of my office left us exposed to the elevator bank, and there was nowhere to move except my desk chair. I caught his hand and led him across the empty hall.