Off Limits

Chapter 2: A Favor Between Family

Damian Cole was three hours into a Sunday he'd deliberately kept clear for site drawings when his phone lit up with his niece's name, and he answered it the way he answered everything from Sophie — immediately, and with the specific, unguarded warmth he reserved for almost no one else in his life.

"If you're calling to tell me the venue fell through again," he said, "I've already told your mother I'm not getting involved in the seating chart negotiations. I have limits."

"The venue's fine. I need a different favor." Sophie's voice carried the particular brightness she got when she wanted something and had already decided he'd say yes. "My best friend Elena just moved to the city. New job, doesn't know anyone, brilliant but stubborn about admitting she needs help. I told her you'd take her to dinner this week, make some introductions. You basically already said yes before I finished the sentence, for the record."

Damian set down the drawings, giving the request his full attention despite himself. "Elena. The roommate from college."

"The same. She's starting at Halbrook Capital next week, and you know that floor eats new analysts alive if they don't have someone in their corner early. You know people there. It would take you an hour, Damian, maybe two."

He should have said no. He recognized, even as Sophie kept talking, the shape of the thing he was about to agree to — another obligation stacked onto a week that was already overfull, another dinner spent making small talk with someone twenty-odd years younger than him about career trajectories he'd stopped finding interesting to discuss somewhere around his own fortieth birthday. He had a standing rule about exactly this kind of favor, cultivated carefully over the last decade: keep the circle small, keep the obligations minimal, protect the little unclaimed time he actually had left after the company finished eating the rest of it.

"Send me her number," he said instead, surprising himself slightly with how little resistance the decision actually required. "I'll set something up for Thursday."

"You're the best. Seriously, Damian, I owe you." Sophie's relief was audible, warm and easy in the way she'd always been with him, going back to a childhood where he'd been more reliably present for her specifically than for almost anyone else in the family's sprawling, complicated orbit. "She's sharp, by the way. Don't underestimate her because she's new to the city. She got through her MBA program while working full-time and helping raise her younger siblings. She doesn't need charity. She needs a door held open, and then she'll do the rest herself."

"Noted," Damian said, and meant it, filing away the detail with the same careful attention he brought to any piece of information about people who mattered to Sophie. "Thursday, then. Tell her seven, and tell her not to dress up. I'm not taking her somewhere that requires performance."

He hung up and returned to his drawings, and told himself, with complete and genuine conviction, that the dinner would be exactly what it appeared to be on paper: a straightforward favor for his favorite niece, an hour or two of career advice dispensed to a stranger he'd likely think about only in passing for the rest of the week.

It was, he would think much later, one of the few genuinely inaccurate predictions he'd made about his own life in longer than he could remember.

He spent the rest of that Sunday afternoon the way he spent most of them — alone in the converted warehouse loft he'd bought and renovated himself a decade ago, drawings spread across a worktable that had seen considerably more use than his actual dining table, a single glass of wine going slowly warm beside him as the light shifted gold and then gray across exposed brick he'd stripped bare with his own hands the first year after his divorce. It was, by any reasonable measure, a good life — successful, ordered, entirely his own, built without depending on a single person who might eventually decide to take it apart.

He did not examine, that evening, exactly why the prospect of Thursday's dinner had lodged itself somewhere more persistent in his thoughts than a simple career-advice favor should reasonably occupy. He simply noted, distantly, that he was looking forward to it more than he'd looked forward to very much at all in longer than he cared to admit, and set the thought aside, unexamined, the way he'd trained himself to set aside anything that threatened the careful, deliberate solitude he'd spent ten years building.