Hate me harder

After hours

The weekend came and went like it hadn't happened.

Mara cleaned her apartment on Saturday with the focused energy of someone who needed to do something with their hands. She reorganized her bookshelf — not because it needed it but because arranging things in order gave her brain something small and completable to win at. She cooked a proper meal for the first time in two weeks, ate half of it standing at the kitchen counter, and put the rest in the fridge where it would sit until she threw it out on Wednesday.

Sunday she visited her grandmother.

Dorothy Voss lived in a small flat on the third floor of a building that smelled like old carpet and someone's perpetual Sunday cooking. She was seventy-one, sharp as a blade, and had the particular quality of stillness that came from a woman who had survived enough that very little could rattle her anymore. Mara brought her groceries and the specific brand of tea she refused to substitute and sat at her small kitchen table while Dorothy made two cups with the unhurried precision of someone performing a ritual.

"You look thin," Dorothy said, setting a cup in front of her.

"I look exactly the same."

"You look thin and tired and like something is sitting on top of you." Dorothy sat down across from her. "So tell me."

Mara told her. Not everything — she kept the investigation to herself, some instinct making her hold that back — but the broad shape of it. The acquisition. The job. Walking into her own building and finding it already half dismantled. Dorothy listened without interrupting, both hands wrapped around her cup, her eyes on Mara's face with an attention that had always made Mara feel simultaneously comforted and completely transparent.

When she finished Dorothy was quiet for a moment.

"And the man behind it," she said. "What's his name?"

"Ethan Black."

Something moved across Dorothy's face. Fast, subtle, there and gone before Mara could catch it properly. Her grandmother looked down at her tea.

"Gran?"

"Mm." Dorothy took a sip. "And what does he want with your company?"

"Expansion. Portfolio growth." Mara shrugged. "The usual reasons people like him do things like this."

Dorothy nodded slowly. Said nothing else about it. Steered the conversation toward other things — the neighbours, a book she was reading, a television programme she'd developed an unexpected attachment to. Mara let herself be steered, grateful for the ordinary of it, and by the time she left two hours later she felt marginally more like a human being than she had on Friday night.

It was only on the bus home that she replayed the moment. The way Dorothy's face had moved at the name. The way she'd looked down at her tea.

She filed it away and didn't know why.

Monday arrived with the specific cruelty of Mondays everywhere.

Mara was at her desk by seven, which meant she was there before most of the Black Enterprises staff and well before Ethan, whose presence in the building she'd learned to register the way you registered a change in air pressure — not something you saw, just something you felt. He usually arrived between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty. His footsteps in the corridor had a particular quality she refused to admit she'd memorized.

The day was long and full and she kept her head down and worked.

It was nearly nine in the evening when she finally sat back and noticed that the floor had emptied out again. The cleaning crew had come and gone. The city outside her window had shifted into its nighttime register, all amber and blue, the office towers across the street lit in irregular patterns depending on who was still at their desk.

She was stretching her neck, eyes closed, when she heard footsteps stop outside her door.

"You're still here."

She opened her eyes. Ethan was in the doorway — jacket off for the first time she'd seen, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, a coffee cup in one hand. He looked, fractionally, like a person instead of a controlled corporate event.

"So are you," she said.

He looked at her for a moment then did something she didn't expect. He leaned against the doorframe instead of walking away. "The third phase revisions," he said. "I read them over the weekend."

"And?"

"They're good." He said it the way he said most things — plainly, without decoration. "Better than the original."

She hadn't expected that either. She kept her expression neutral. "I know."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. He looked out at the empty floor then back at her. "Have you eaten?"

The question landed strangely. Too ordinary for the space between them. She blinked. "Sorry?"

"It's nine o'clock," he said, with the patience of someone repeating something obvious. "Have you eaten dinner."

"That's not —" She stopped. "Why?"

"Because I haven't and there's a place two blocks over that's still serving and it seemed efficient to ask."

She stared at him. "You want to have dinner."

"I want to eat food," he said. "You're welcome to do the same thing in the same location. It doesn't have to be complicated."

It was such a strange way to extend an invitation that she almost laughed. Almost. She looked at him in his rolled sleeves with his coffee cup and thought about her empty fridge and the half-eaten meal from Saturday still waiting patiently to be thrown out.

"I'm not talking about work," she said.

"Fine."

"I mean it. If you bring up anything work related I'm leaving."

"Noted." He pushed off the doorframe. "I'll be downstairs in ten minutes."

He left before she could change her mind.

She sat at her desk for a full thirty seconds questioning every decision that had led to this moment. Then she closed her laptop, checked her reflection in her darkened screen, decided she didn't care, and picked up her bag.

The restaurant was small and warm with the kind of menu that committed fully to comfort food and didn't apologize for it. They sat across from each other at a corner table and ordered without ceremony and for a few minutes there was nothing but the sounds of the restaurant around them.

It should have been awkward. Somehow it wasn't.

"You grew up in the city," he said. Not a question — he'd said it the way he said things he already knew and was simply choosing to acknowledge.

"Born and raised," she said. "You?"

"Here. Then boarding school at thirteen. Then back."

"Did you like it? Boarding school."

He considered that with the same care he seemed to give everything. "I liked the structure," he said finally. "I was less fond of the people."

She almost smiled. "That sounds lonely."

"It was educational," he said, which was such a perfectly Ethan Black answer that she did smile this time, small and involuntary, and looked down at her water glass before it could become anything else.

They talked — carefully at first, the way you talked across enemy lines, testing for tripwires. But the food arrived and the restaurant hummed around them and somewhere in the middle of it the carefulness loosened slightly. He was dry and precise and occasionally said things that surprised a reaction out of her before she could stop it. She was direct and he seemed to find that either useful or interesting, she couldn't tell which.

She didn't bring up work. Neither did he.

At the end of the meal he paid before she could reach for her bag and she fixed him with a look across the table. "I can pay for my own dinner."

"I know," he said simply, signing the receipt.

"That wasn't an invitation for you to pay."

"I'm aware." He capped the pen and looked at her. "Consider it efficient. One bill instead of two."

She held his gaze for a moment.

"That's not what efficient means," she said.

He stood and held the door for her on the way out and said nothing at all, which was somehow the most infuriating response available to him.

They walked back to the building in the cool night air, half an arm's length apart, not talking. It wasn't uncomfortable. That was the thing that stayed with her afterward — that the silence between them on that two block walk had been the most natural thing that had happened between them since she'd watched his elevator doors open on the worst morning of her life.

In the lobby they went their separate ways without ceremony. She took the stairs. He took the elevator.

She was halfway up the first flight when she stopped and stood very still for a moment.

Then she kept climbing and told herself firmly that dinner had been nothing. Efficient. One bill instead of two.

She almost believed it.