Sinfully Overqualified

The 2AM Email

The first time it happened Lucy thought it was a mistake.

She was asleep, barely two hours into the kind of deep exhausted sleep that comes after a day that wrung every last drop out of you, when her phone lit up the dark ceiling of her studio apartment with a sharp buzz. She reached for it with her eyes half closed and read the screen without fully sitting up.

It was an email from Ryker Bennett.

Sent at two seventeen in the morning.

She sat up.

The email was not long. Four sentences. A client in Hong Kong had moved a meeting to six the next morning, which meant the full briefing pack she had prepared for Thursday needed to be restructured and resent by five thirty at the latest. He had attached three new documents and expected the revised pack to reflect all of them.

He had not said please.

He had not said sorry for the hour.

He had simply stated what was needed the way gravity states its terms. Without apology and without negotiation.

Lucy stared at the email for a long moment in the dark of her apartment with the city making its quiet nighttime sounds outside her window. She thought about the warmth of her blanket. She thought about the alarm she had set for six. She thought about a lot of things in those few seconds.

Then she got up.

She made coffee first because that was non negotiable. While it brewed she opened her laptop at the small kitchen table that also served as her dining table and her desk and sometimes her ironing board and she pulled up the briefing pack. The three new documents Ryker had attached were dense. A revised financial summary, an updated contract clause and a market positioning report that needed to be distilled into three clean paragraphs for a man who did not have time for anything that was not essential.

She worked with the focused quiet of someone who had learned to find stillness inside pressure. No music. Just coffee, lamplight and the soft sound of her fingers on the keyboard while the rest of the city slept.

By four forty she had restructured the entire pack.

She read through it once, caught two inconsistencies in the financial summary that existed in the original document Ryker had sent, corrected them and added a clean note at the top flagging what she had found and why she had changed them.

She sent it at four fifty eight.

Thirty two minutes early.

She went back to bed for exactly forty five minutes, which she knew from experience was worse than not sleeping at all but was better than nothing. When her alarm went off she showered, dressed and was out the door by six ten.

She walked into Bennett Industries at six forty seven.

Ryker was already there.

She could see his office light on from across the floor, that steady glow behind the glass wall that she was learning meant he had probably never really left. She settled at her desk, pulled up the inbox and found his reply to the revised briefing pack sitting at the top.

It had been sent at five oh three in the morning.

She opened it.

There was one line.

You found the errors in the financial summary.

That was it. No well done. No acknowledgment of the hour she had sent it or the fact that she had been awake at two in the morning restructuring his documents. Just that one line sitting in the body of an email like a stone dropped into still water.

Lucy read it twice.

From Ryker Bennett she was already beginning to understand that one line meant considerably more than it appeared to.

She was still thinking about it when his office door opened at seven and he walked out with his jacket already on and a focus in his eyes that meant the day was already moving inside his head.

He stopped at her desk.

"The Hong Kong call is at six," he said.

"Conference line is set up. Dial in details are in your calendar and printed on your desk."

He glanced at the printed sheet she had placed there before he arrived. Something moved briefly across his face.

"The errors in the summary."

"The depreciation figures were calculated on last quarter's rate. The new rate was in the third document you attached. Easy to miss if you were working fast."

He looked at her for a moment. Really looked at her in that way he had that felt less like being seen and more like being assessed, like he was taking something apart quietly to understand how it worked.

"Were you working fast?" he asked.

"It was almost three in the morning," she said simply.

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. It never quite became a smile with him. But it was the closest thing to one she had seen in four days of working for the most unreadable man in the city.

He picked up his coffee from the edge of her desk, the one she had placed there without being asked, and walked back toward his office.

"Good morning, Miss Skye," he said without turning around.

Lucy looked at the back of his perfectly fitted jacket and felt something warm move through her chest that she immediately told herself was just the coffee.

Just the coffee.

She was not convincing herself very well.