1. Vera #2
“Could be days. Could be longer.” He stands, and I realize the meeting is over. “Remember — it takes courage to explore this part of yourself. That courage is admirable, not shameful.”
At the door, I pause. “What if I can’t actually do this when it’s real?”
His smile is gentle. “Then you’ll learn something about yourself. Discovery requires permission to not be perfect, Ms. Beckett. Can you give yourself that permission?”
I carry those words out with me into the October Chicago evening. To my car. Through streets that look exactly the same.
The city slides past the windows. Normal. Indifferent.
Discovery requires permission to not be perfect.
I say it out loud, to hear what it sounds like. My voice sounds different in the car. Smaller. More honest.
I don’t drive home right away. I sit in the parking garage for a few minutes, engine off, watching the light drop through the concrete levels until the city below goes amber.
The words from the room keep surfacing. Not the smart articulate things I said, the version of myself I managed even in there.
The other ones. He said I was the problem. He said that was the problem.
I said it out loud. To a stranger who nodded, and didn’t flinch, and told me that was wrong.
I don’t know what to do with that yet.
My phone sits in my bag. Sloane will be home by now. Nine years of telling her everything and this is the thing I’m going to drive home with alone.
I start the car.
That decision settles something, and I’m not sure whether it settles it in a good way.
The next afternoon I show up at Sloane’s with two iced coffees and an hour of my undivided attention.
She opens the door looking the kind of frazzled she only allows in private, hair in a perfectly executed messy bun, three different colored pens clipped to her collar, and takes the cup with both hands like it’s holy.
“You brought caffeine,” she says. “I could kiss you.”
“Save it. I need you coherent.”
She laughs and pulls me inside, and for the next forty minutes it’s easy.
Comfortable. She’s in the middle of a rebrand for a client who keeps changing the brief, and she needs a second set of eyes on the new copy, and so I give her that — line by line, flagging what’s working and what isn’t.
The kind of friendship that’s kept us whole through everything.
I’m mid-sentence when her phone buzzes on the table. She glances at the screen and her expression shifts, professional mask snapping into place.
“Shit. It’s the client.” She’s already standing, moving toward her bedroom. “I have to take this. Make yourself at home, there’s wine in the fridge if you want it. This might take a minute.”
She disappears into her bedroom, door clicking shut behind her.
I lean back against the couch, pulling out my phone, when I hear it.
The front door opening.
My pulse kicks, because even before I see him I register the quiet of someone who takes up space without making noise.
“Sloane, you ready?” That voice. Deep, controlled, and every nerve ending I have snaps to attention.
Kane Sinclair walks in and the air pressure changes.
Dark jeans. Gray henley. Vintage Rolex catching the light as he crosses the room.
His storm-gray eyes sweep the room — the small neat scar bisecting his left eyebrow, pale and old, the thing I always forget until I’m looking at him again. Like the face decided, just once, to let something through.
I drop my eyes back to my phone before he can catch me looking.
He stops and I can feel his gaze. “Oh. You’re here.”
“Observant as always, Sinclair.” I don’t look up from my phone. But I’m aware of him in the specific, unwilling way I’m aware of a fire in a room. Not looking directly at it, but knowing exactly where it is.
His cologne reaches me before he does. My jaw tightens. I glance up despite myself, and he’s already moving to the kitchen island — I look back down before he catches it.
“Sloane’s on a work call,” I say. “She said it might take a minute.”
“Okay.”
The silence that follows isn’t comfortable. It never is with us.
I should leave it alone. I should sit here quietly and wait for Sloane to come back and rescue us from ourselves.
But I’ve never been good at leaving things alone.
“I saw the Moretti building article,” I hear myself say, because apparently I hate myself.
His gaze flicks up. “And?”
“And nothing. Just saw it.”
“You have an opinion. You always have an opinion.”
That gets my eyes off the phone. “Fine. Pretentious minimalism without soul. All glass and steel, no humanity.”
He sets his phone down with care and turns to face me fully. “You wouldn’t understand the structural complexity required to achieve those clean lines.”
I stand. I’m not having this from a seated position. “Because I’m too stupid to appreciate your genius?”
“I didn’t say stupid.” He moves around the island. Closer. “I said uninformed. There’s a difference.”
“Right. I forgot, you need a degree in architecture to have aesthetic opinions.” I cross my arms. “Forgive me for thinking buildings should feel like something.”
“The Moretti building is —”
“It’s a glass box. A pretentious, soulless glass box that says nothing about the people who’ll work inside it.”
We’re closer now. Three feet of charged air between us.
“You approach everything emotionally instead of analytically.”
“And you hide behind ‘analytics’ and ‘structural integrity’ and jargon because actually having an emotional response might make you seem human.”
The space between us feels like a measurement. Neither of us has moved back.
“I feel plenty.”
“Funny. You hide it well.”
“Better than bleeding all over everyone and expecting them to clean it up.”
The words hit. I feel them hit.
“That’s not—“