7. Edda #3
Bennett nods, but he still doesn’t move toward the door. He stays at the railing, gaze fixed on the city as it belongs to him in ways that go beyond ownership. The wind catches his hair, undoing the precision with which he usually wears it, and for a brief moment, he looks less untouchable.
“Thank you,” he says. “For the walkthrough.”
“It’s my job.”
“It’s more than that.” He turns to me fully now, and the weight of his attention settles in a way that makes it harder to think clearly.
“You see things other people miss. You noticed the foundation crack. You knew about the original staircase. You’re not just preserving buildings. You’re preserving history.”
My throat tightens before I can stop it. Compliments from Bennett Thornhill never feel simple. They land with edges I can’t quite find.
So I default to what I know.
“The staircase was obvious to anyone who bothered to look.”
“Most people don’t bother.”
“Most people aren’t being paid to.”
Something shifts in his expression, a flicker of something that might be disappointment. He turns back toward the door, and the moment breaks into the practical rhythm of descending three flights of stairs.
We part ways at the building entrance. Bennett moves toward a black car that seems to appear the second he needs it, while I head for the subway station four blocks away. The evening air is cool, laced with rain and exhaust, and I pull my jacket tighter as I walk.
Thomas Frey is gone from the sidewalk. I checked. Still, the awareness of him lingers, settling in my chest like a warning I cannot fully name.
Cassel is watching. Not just the press coverage or the public-facing version of us. She is tracking how we work together, studying the parts of this arrangement that were never meant to be seen.
I should tell Bennett.
The thought lands harder as I descend into the subway, pushed along by the evening crowd. He needs to know Cassel's surveillance has shifted, that whatever game we are in just changed shape.
But I do not reach for my phone.
I do not type the message that would be the rational, professional response.
Instead, my fingers stay still at my side, and I keep walking, letting the decision sit there unresolved longer than it should.
Because saying it out loud would mean admitting I noticed him.
That I was paying attention to more than the building, more than the assessment, more than the job I am meant to be doing.
And right now, with the echo of his voice still caught in my mind, that quiet certainty that I see things other people miss, I am not ready to look too closely at what that says about me.
The train arrives in a rush of stale air and screeching brakes. I slide into a seat near the door and pull out my phone, scrolling through emails I do not really read. Around me, the car fills the way it always does at this hour, business suits, shopping bags, tired faces already halfway home.
My reflection stares back at me from the dark window across the aisle.
Plaster dust in my hair. A faint grease stain on my jacket sleeve that I only just noticed.
The kind of detail I would usually catch before anyone else.
The kind I must have missed because I was too busy noticing everything else.
A woman who spent two hours alone with a billionaire in an empty building and somehow walked away feeling less certain than when she arrived.
The train jerks forward. I let my eyes close for a moment, but his voice does not leave with the movement. Neither did the way he looked at me when he said it, like he was trying to decide what I was before I had even figured it out myself.
Diana Cassel thinks she knows exactly what she is looking at. A fake engagement. A managed publicity stunt. A developer and his convenient prop. She is building her case photograph by photograph, waiting for the moment the story becomes undeniable.
But Cassel was not in that building today.
She did not see the way Bennett’s hand moved along the carved banister, careful in a way that felt almost reverent.
She did not hear how his voice dropped when he mentioned his mother.
She does not know that somewhere between the foundation crack and the rooftop skylights, something shifted in the space between us.
Something I am not ready to name.
The train rocks through the tunnel, pulling me back toward the shop and the life I have built without anyone’s help. Still, even as the distance grows between me and the Brennan Building, I can feel it, the pull of what happened there.
Bennett cleared his afternoon to walk through a building with me. His engineers will hate that. His assistant will be rearranging half his schedule. Mr. Chen of Chen Industries will be mildly insulted by a delayed call.
And none of that mattered to Bennett as much as seeing what I see.
I do not know what to do with that knowledge. So I file it away, the same way I filed away the medal in his pocket, the coffee he made without being asked, and the way his hand went still when I told him about my father’s shop.
I file it away. I don’t think about what happens when it gets too full to close.