OFF LIMITS AFTER HOURS

CHAPTER 5: What Reed Knows

She sent the revised deck at seven fifty-eight on Monday morning.

Two minutes before she walked into the building. She had finished it Sunday night, later than she intended, sitting cross-legged on her bed with her laptop and a cup of tea that went cold beside her while she worked. She had fixed the secondary weight and while she was in there she had made three other small adjustments that she had been meaning to make since the first draft, nothing significant, just the quiet refinements that came from looking at something with fresh eyes after a few days away.

The weekend had helped. She had slept. She had gone to the farmers market Saturday morning with Maya and let herself be talked into buying vegetables she would probably not cook and a candle she absolutely did not need and she had laughed properly for the first time in two weeks and it had felt like setting something heavy down.

Sunday had been fine until about four in the afternoon when she sat down to work and found that the quiet of her apartment had a particular quality to it that she did not love, a stillness that her mind kept filling with things she was not trying to think about. She had put on a podcast to fill the silence and worked until the deck was done and then she had closed her laptop and gone to bed and stared at the ceiling for a while before sleeping.

She was fine.

She badged into the building at eight on the dot and took the elevator to thirty-eight and settled at her desk and opened her emails and told herself it was a normal Monday.

Her phone buzzed at eight nineteen.

A single line from Damien.

The revisions are correct. Good work.

She read it twice. Set her phone face down on the desk.

Picked it up again and read it a third time because she was apparently a person who did that now and she was not going to examine what that said about her.

She typed back. Thank you. Sent it before she could add anything or take anything away.

She put her phone down and got to work.

Reed Voss appeared in her doorway at half past ten with two coffees and the particular energy of someone who had decided to do something and was committed to it regardless of how it landed.

She had met Reed properly in her first week, beyond the panel interview. He had stopped by her office on a Wednesday morning with a folder of Meridian background materials she had not asked for but turned out to be genuinely useful, and he had been easy to talk to in the way of people who had decided not to be intimidating even when they had every resource to be. He was younger than Damien by four years and it showed, not in maturity but in looseness. Where Damien moved through a room like he owned it Reed moved through one like he was curious about it.

She liked him. She had been careful about that because he was the CEO's brother and she was new and liking people carelessly was how you said things you should not say to people you should not say them to. But she liked him.

He set a coffee on her desk without asking. "You look like you've been here since dawn."

"Eight o'clock," she said.

"That's dawn for some of us." He sat down in the chair across from her desk with the ease of someone who had decided they were staying for a while. "How's Meridian treating you."

"Well. We're in a good place with the creative framework."

"I heard." He wrapped both hands around his coffee cup. "I heard the framework meeting on Wednesday ran three hours."

"It was a productive three hours."

"I also heard the font argument on Friday."

She looked up from her screen. "How."

"I was two offices down and Damien's door was open for about thirty seconds before someone closed it." He said it without any particular weight, just information, but his eyes were watching her with a quiet attention that reminded her suddenly and uncomfortably of his brother.

"It was a professional disagreement," she said. "We resolved it."

"I know. He told me."

She paused. "He told you."

"He mentioned it. Which is unusual because Damien doesn't mention things. He just handles them and moves on." Reed looked at his coffee. "He said you pushed back well."

She did not know what to do with that so she let it sit.

"He doesn't say that about people often," Reed added, still looking at his cup, his voice easy and conversational in a way that she was beginning to understand was deliberate.

"Reed," she said carefully.

"I'm just talking," he said, looking up with a straightforward expression. "Making conversation. It's Monday."

"It is Monday," she agreed.

They looked at each other for a moment. He had Damien's grey eyes but they were warmer in his face, less guarded, the same instrument tuned to a different frequency.

"He works too hard," Reed said, and the conversational ease dropped just slightly, something more honest underneath it. "He always has. Since we were kids. Our father was the kind of man who made you feel like stillness was failure so Damien just never stopped moving." He paused. "He's good at the work. He's better at it than almost anyone I've met. But he's not always good at the other parts."

Lena held her pen very still.

"I'm not sure why you're telling me this," she said.

"I'm not sure either," Reed said, and he almost sounded like he meant it. "Probably just because it's Monday and I have coffee and you seem like someone who handles information well."

"I do," she said. "I also know when a conversation has a purpose."

He looked at her for a moment and then he smiled, genuine and a little rueful. "Yeah," he said. "You two are going to be a problem."

"Reed."

"Not a bad problem." He stood up, unhurried. "Just the kind that doesn't resolve cleanly." He picked up his coffee. "The Meridian deck looks excellent by the way. I saw the revised version this morning. The secondary headline is exactly right."

She stared at him. "You saw the revision this morning."

"Damien forwarded it to the senior team at eight thirty." He said it simply, like it was ordinary. Like CEOs routinely forwarded creative decks to their senior teams ninety seconds after receiving them on a Monday morning.

She kept her face even.

"Good," she said. "I'm glad it landed well."

Reed nodded. Moved toward the door. Stopped with one hand on the frame and turned back, and his expression was lighter now, something genuine in it.

"My brother doesn't forward things," he said quietly. "Just so you know."

He left before she could respond.

She sat at her desk for a moment after he was gone, her coffee warm between her hands, the city grey and moving outside her window.

Damien had forwarded the deck.

She thought about what Reed had said about their father, about stillness as failure, about the other parts that Damien was not always good at. She thought about a man who checked access card logs and replaced cold coffees and forwarded work he admired without saying directly that he admired it, and she thought about how all of those things were the language of someone who had learned to say things sideways because saying them directly felt too much like risk.

She recognized that language.

She had been speaking it herself for six years.

That was perhaps the most dangerous thing she had discovered yet. Not that they were attracted to each other. She had known that since the moment the elevator opened on forty-two on her first day and the bottom dropped out of her stomach. Attraction was manageable. Attraction was something you could work around if you were disciplined and she was very disciplined.

What was harder to work around was understanding someone. What was harder to work around was recognizing yourself in them.

She turned back to her screen.

She had four and a half weeks left on the Meridian timeline.

She could do four and a half weeks.

She opened a new file and started working and did not let herself think about grey eyes or forwarded emails or the particular thing Reed had said standing in her doorway.

You two are going to be a problem.

She worked until noon without stopping.

It helped. A little.

Not entirely.

She ran into Damien in the lobby at six fifteen.

She had stayed later than she meant to, pulled into the current of the work the way she often was when something was going well, and by the time she surfaced and looked at the clock the floor had mostly emptied around her. She had packed up and taken the elevator down and walked out of the turnstiles and nearly into him.

He was on his phone. He held up one finger without looking at her, the automatic gesture of someone mid-conversation, and she stopped and waited because leaving felt rude and staying felt complicated.

He ended the call thirty seconds later and looked at her.

"Still here," he said.

"I could say the same."

"I live here," he said, and it was almost a joke, the driest possible version of one, and it surprised her enough that she felt her mouth curve before she could help it.

He noticed. His eyes moved to her mouth and back up and the lobby was quiet around them, the evening security guard at the desk across the marble floor, the city dark and lit through the glass doors.

"The deck is strong," he said. "I sent it to the senior team."

"I know. Reed told me."

Something shifted in his expression. A muscle in his jaw. "Reed came to see you."

"This morning. He brought coffee."

Damien was quiet for a moment. "What did he say."

"That it's Monday," she said.

He looked at her steadily, reading her the way he read everything, looking for what was underneath. She held his gaze and gave him nothing and after a moment he made a small sound that was not quite a laugh.

"I'll talk to him," he said.

"You don't need to," she said. "He was perfectly professional."

"Reed is never perfectly professional."

"He was today." She adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder. "He means well."

"He always means well," Damien said, and there was something in his voice when he said it, not irritation, something closer to affection with the warmth turned down low. "That's what makes him difficult to stay angry at."

She smiled at that, briefly, before she caught it. When she looked up he was watching her with an expression that was open in a way his face very rarely was in this building. Unguarded. Just for a second.

Then the security guard dropped something at his desk and the sound broke the moment and Damien looked away and straightened and became the CEO again, smooth and closed.

"Goodnight, Lena," he said.

"Goodnight," she said.

She walked through the glass doors into the cold evening air and did not look back and made it half a block before she stopped and stood on the sidewalk and breathed.

Four and a half weeks.

She was going to need a better strategy.