Chapter 9
Ross
My office is a fishbowl for the exhausted.
As I sink into my Aeron chair, the mesh seat groans under a weight that feels far heavier than my own.
The monitor glares like a blue eye, staring me down.
On the screen, the Dubai project sits in a three-dimensional rendering: a cantilevered monstrosity that looks less like a building and more like a silver thorn tower, poised to pierce the sky. Beautiful in its own way.
The blueprints are spread across my desk.
But when I look at them, my cynical self feels nothing but cold revulsion.
This is what I almost traded Margot for, this series of geometric calculations and sustainability specs.
I pick up my coffee mug, but the liquid inside is a dark, oily film, cold since yesterday.
The “nuclear solution.” Chan’s words hum low in my brain. To walk away from the partnership, the corner office, the life Arthur Keane dangles like a golden carrot, it’s the only currency I have left to buy her back.
Last night, I found myself parked down the block from Wren's place at two in the morning, the engine idling. I stared at her dark window until my vision blurred, my hand hovering over the car door handle. Every instinct screamed at me to go to her, to beg. But I couldn’t go to her empty-handed.
I couldn’t show up with mere apologies, I’d already done that.
I need the win, the title, the security, the proof that I did it all for her. Until I can lay that at her feet, I have no right to knock.
I check my watch. 8:12 a.m. The seconds hand sweeps in a jagged, stuttering motion.
My fingers twitch on the keyboard. I try to focus on the north-facing atrium, but the numbers remain static. Yet every time I close my eyes, I see the ghost of Margot’s face in the bedroom. I hear my own voice betraying her.
Tabitha.
Focus, Ross.
But there’s no time, the door to my office opens.
I don’t look up immediately. I assume it’s an intern with a fresh set of site plans, or a courier with a delivery. But the air in the room changes. It sharpens. The scent of vanilla and expensive stationery drifts across the desk. Not a courier.
I glance up.
Tabitha Moreno stands in the doorway. She is, as always, a masterpiece of professionalism. Her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail so tight it looks painful, her sharp features sharpened by the harsh fluorescent lights. She wears a charcoal blazer that fits as if tailored.
When I notice the stack of thick folders against her chest, I relax.
Good, because I don’t have the emotional capacity to discuss anything but work right now.
She doesn’t speak at first. She only studies me, her eyes tracing the wreckage of my face, the rumpled mess of my shirt, the desperation I can no longer hide behind a monitor.
Then she steps inside.
“What do you need?” I ask.
Rather than answer, she reaches behind her, her hand finding the handle. She pulls the door shut before twisting the lock.
Click.
The sound is as loud as a scream, Margot’s scream inside my head. It echoes off the glass walls, a definitive, percussive end to my privacy. My pulse quickens.
“Ross,” she says. Her voice is calm, but there’s a resonance I haven’t heard before.
“Tabitha,” I say, and the name feels like a hot coal in my mouth. Immediately, I want to spit it out.
I pull my hands back from the keyboard, fingers curling into fists. “The door. Why did you lock it?”
“We need to talk about the Dubai adjustments,” she says, ignoring my question.
She walks toward the desk, stride confident, and sets the folder down on top of my blueprints, covering the north-facing atrium with a stack of new demands.
“Arthur is leaning on the engineering team. They want to shave another four percent off the structural steel in the core. It’s a gamble. ”
“Everything is a gamble,” I mutter. I check my watch again, 8:14 a.m. Two minutes feels like two hours.
She moves closer, circling the edge of the desk. “You look terrible. Did you sleep at all?”
“I’m fine,” I snap, not to be rude, but because she’s not my wife, and that’s the only woman I want. “Been a long night. The specs are almost done.” I reach for the mouse, trying to look busy, trying to retreat into the safety of the Silver Thorn Tower.
“Don’t lie to me, Ross.” She reaches out, her hand hovering near the sleeve of my shirt. Heat radiates from her. “I know how much pressure you’re under. Arthur is a monster. And you’ve been carrying this entire firm on your shoulders while everyone else just watches.”
“It’s the job,” I say, jaw set in a permanent clench. “It’s what we signed up for.”
“Is it?” She leans over the desk, her face coming into focus under the glare of the lights. I see the slight parting of her lips, the intensity in her gaze. “Yesterday I saw you in the breakroom with Chan. You were seconds from falling apart. You can’t keep doing this alone.”
“I’m not alone. I have a team.”
“Yes, and me.” She moves to the side of my chair, effectively pinning me between the desk and the glass wall. “But you’re not treating me like a teammate, Ross. You’re treating me like a deadline. You’re treating me like a problem you have to solve.”
I try to swivel my chair away, but she places a hand on the armrest, stopping the motion. Trapped, the office feels smaller. The glass walls press in, the blue light of the monitor reflecting in her eyes.
“The deadline is noon, Tabitha,” I say, my voice straining for a professional register. “If we don’t have the revised core specs, Arthur is going to lose his mind. We need to focus on the work.”
“I know your wife left.” Oh God.
She reaches out again, her fingers brushing the cuff of my shirt. It’s a tiny contact, a mere graze of skin against fabric, but it feels like a breach.
“I heard you,” she says.
The blood drains from my face. My heart does a slow, heavy roll.
“What?” Oh no. Not now. I look away, staring at the dust motes dancing in the blue light.
I want to disappear. I want to dissolve into the pixels of the Dubai project.
She heard all of it, including how I whispered her name instead of my wife’s.
She takes another step closer, her hip brushing the edge of the desk. “I heard what you said about Valentine’s. About what happened at home. How you thought of me during,”
“Not during, and I didn’t mean for you to hear that.”
“But I’m glad I did.” She leans in, the vanilla scent of her perfume becoming a suffocating cloud.
“Because it confirms what I’ve been feeling for months.
We’re the same, Ross. We both live for this.
We both speak the same language. Your wife…
she doesn’t understand the sacrifice. She doesn’t understand the beauty of the build. Though I do.”
I look back at her, and the panic finally takes hold. The gaze in her eyes isn’t sympathy. It’s a terrifying, misguided hunger. She thinks the slip was an invitation. She thinks my destruction is her opportunity.
“Tabitha, you don’t understand.”
“I understand everything,” she interrupts. She reaches up, her fingers grazing my jaw, tracing the line of my stubble. “I understand that you said my name because I’m the only one who’s truly there for you. I’m the one who stays. And I’m the one who’s going to help you fix this.”
She’s too close. I can feel her breath on my cheek. The office sounds, the phones, the footsteps in the hall, the hum of the printers, all fade into a dull roar.
I am frozen.
Tabitha doesn’t move back.
In fact, she moves in.
She slides around the corner of my mahogany desk with a predator’s grace, her hip brushing the edge where the wood meets the glass.
She doesn’t care about the dropped files.
She doesn’t care about the revised specs or the Emperor waiting in the corner suite.
She only cares about the wreckage in front of her.
She leans against the desk, her body mere inches from mine. One hand rests on the surface, fingers splayed near my own twitching hand, while the other hovers a hair’s breadth from my face.
“I know things are hard at home, Ross,” she says.
Her voice drops to a register meant to be intimate, but it sounds like the scrape of an axe against stone.
“I know she doesn’t get it. I’ve watched you for years.
I’ve watched you give everything to these projects, and then I’ve watched you walk out that door like you’re going to a funeral.
It’s not fair to you. A man like you needs a partner, not a weight. ”
My jaw is so tight it feels like the bone might shatter.
I’m about to demand an apology when I realize this is all my fault. While I never did anything to lead Tabitha on, I’ve also been the one allowing my work to encroach upon my life.
“You think it’s a mistake, Ross, but it’s not. Your subconscious is trying to tell you what your ego is too afraid to admit. You don’t have to fight it.”
“Tabitha,” I croak. “You have this wrong.”
“Do I?” She smiles, a small, knowing curve of the lips that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Then why aren’t you pushing me away? Why are you sitting there looking at me like you’ve finally found a way out of the dark?”
The hell I am. She’s confused adoration with horror.
She reaches out.
I flinch back.
She redirects her hand, placing her palm flat against the center of my chest, right over my heart.
The heat of her hand burns through the thin, wrinkled fabric of my shirt.
Her fingers splay across my pectoral, firm and possessive.
I can feel the thud-thud-thud of my heart beneath her palm, a frantic, irregular beat she undoubtedly misinterprets as desire.
It isn’t. It’s the rhythm of a man trapped in a burning building.
“Feel that,” she whispers. “That’s life, Ross. Us. That’s what happens when you stop trying to be the perfect husband to a woman who doesn’t understand the pressure you’re under.”