Callum #2
He needed her. He needed her to fix the foundation, soothe the Morrisons, and keep legacy clients loyal while Laura stood in the spotlight. He needed her invisible and indispensable, the load-bearing wall he could stand in front of while taking credit for the design of the room.
And Laura, standing in his office with her unreadable eyes and her careful stillness, was starting to understand that.
"You need her." The words were flat. Not a question.
"I need the company to function. She's a part of that."
"She's the part of that you can't replace.
" Laura set the coffee cup down on his desk, and this time it made a sound, a sharp little click of ceramic on wood.
"You can replace the public face. You can replace the event appearances.
You can't replace the woman who knows every client's floor plan by heart and has seven years of relationships I can't simply replicate. That's what you were going to say."
Callum didn't answer.
Laura's lips barely moved when she spoke.
"You told me I was the future of this company.
You told me I'd be standing beside you at the gala.
You told me she was—" She stopped, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped to something almost conversational, which was worse. "You told me she was irrelevant."
"I never said irrelevant."
"You said she didn't want the spotlight.
You said she was happy in the background.
You said I was the partner you needed." Laura took a step back from his desk.
"You didn't say you needed both of us. You didn't say you were planning to keep her in the back room running the numbers while I stood at the podium. You didn't say that Callum."
The word hung in the air between them. Wife.
Laura had never used it before. Not in his office, not in meetings, not in the careful, coded conversations they'd been having for months about the future and the gala and what came next.
She'd always said partner. She'd always said the company.
She'd always kept the language clean enough that Callum could pretend he wasn't doing exactly what he was doing.
But she'd said wife now. And he watched the last of the practiced softness drain from her face, leaving something hard and clear behind.
"You’re not going to let her go, are you?"
His phone lit up on the desk, not with a new message, but with the lock screen showing the last text she'd sent. The one he kept rereading.
Holland
Mara Ellison represents me now. The petition for dissolution is being filed today.He'd read it a dozen times, but seeing it now felt like the first. Laura stepped closer to the desk, her eyes fixed on the screen, and when she looked up at him her jaw had set and her eyes had stopped blinking.
"She filed," Laura said. "She’s not coming back. She’s not going to answer. She’s not going to fix the Alden estate or call Elaine Morrison or contain the damage this is causing.
She’s done." She picked up her tablet. "And you’re still standing here waiting for her to pick up the phone, as if she’s going to walk back in here and solve this for you. ”
"That's not—"
"It is. It's exactly what's happening. And the worst part is, you know it." She turned toward the door. "I have a meeting with David in ten minutes. I'll tell him we're still waiting on the structural analysis. Again. For the fourth day in a row."
She walked out. The door closed behind her with a soft, final sound, and Callum was alone in his office with the unanswered text, the missing Morrison file, and the chilling certainty that the gap Holland had left was bigger than he'd let himself admit.
He'd spent five days telling himself she'd come around.
She always did. Loyal, practical Holland, who always put the work first. He'd imagined a period of anger, followed by a quiet negotiation—a way to manage the new arrangement, keeping Laura visible and Holland essential.
He'd assumed she would accept the logic of it. He'd assumed she would stay.
But she wasn't coming back. The attorney's email confirmed it. The petition made it legal. The gray text on his phone made it final. The silence on the other end of fourteen calls made it real.
And he could hear the sound of the company starting to groan under its own weight.
He could feel it. In the Morrison call, in the Alden estate stalling, in the way David's crew was standing around waiting for direction that wasn't coming.
In the whispers he'd heard in the hallway, two junior associates wondering aloud who was going to handle the Alden specs.
In the way Laura had looked at him just now, as if a number she'd been running for months had finally resolved to zero.
He picked up his phone. Holland's thread: fourteen blue bubbles from him, one gray one from her, sitting at the bottom like a single vote against a motion that had already passed.
Mara Ellison. The petition. Official channels.
Not a fight. Not even a goodbye. Just the clean, final language of someone who had already moved on to the next thing.
We need to talk about the projects. In person. Before this gets worse.
He stared at the words. They sounded like concern. They would read like concern. But he knew, and Holland would know, they were a summons disguised as an olive branch. A job offer wrapped in a threat.
He sent the message. The screen showed delivered. It didn't show read.
Outside his office window, the city looked the way it always did in March—buildings stripped of shadow, every facade equally dull, nothing worth drawing.
Callum sat at his desk and watched the light fade and thought about the gala, six weeks away, and the Alden estate, and the Morrisons, and all the other clients who knew Holland's name and not Laura's, who trusted Holland's judgment and not his promises, who had been with Crestline for years because Holland had made them feel seen and heard and understood, a trust built apart from any polished public appearances.
He'd told Laura she was the future. He'd told himself Holland was the past. But you couldn't build on a foundation you'd abandoned, and the foundation had stopped answering her phone. The future was standing in his doorway with flat eyes, realizing she'd been promised something he couldn't deliver.
Laura had just spent an hour figuring out what Holland had always known: the company needed her. He was the only one who'd pretended it didn't.
Callum set his phone face-down on the desk, as if the screen itself were an accusation. Outside, the light was failing. He watched the city dissolve into shadow and did not pick the phone back up.