Hate me harder

Dead ends

By Friday evening Mara had hit a wall.

Not a slow, gradual realization — a full stop, forehead against brick, nothing left to try kind of wall. Every angle she'd pushed on this week had either collapsed or led somewhere she couldn't follow without more resources, more time, or more access than she currently had. She closed her laptop, pushed back from her desk, and sat in the quiet of her office for a long moment.

The floor had emptied out. Most of the Black Enterprises staff left by five-thirty with a punctuality that suggested Ethan ran a tight ship even when he wasn't visibly watching. Her own team trickled out between six and six-thirty, Priya being the last, pausing in the doorway to give Mara the look that meant go home without saying it out loud.

Mara had waved her off and stayed another hour anyway.

Now it was nearly eight and the only sounds were the ambient hum of the building and the distant city noise coming through the glass, and she was sitting in a chair that used to feel like hers in an office that used to feel like hers and trying very hard not to feel the weight of that.

She wasn't built for self-pity. Never had been. Her mother used to say she came out of the womb already problem-solving, already looking for the next move, and most of the time that was a strength. Tonight it just meant she was sitting alone in an empty office running the same dead ends over and over and finding no new exits.

Her phone buzzed. Jay.

Team drinks. Non-negotiable. We're already here.

She looked at the message. Then at her notebook. Then at the ceiling.

She picked up her bag and went.

The bar was the kind of place that had no business being as comforting as it was — low lighting, sticky menus, a jukebox in the corner that someone had loaded entirely with early 2000s music. Jay had been coming here since before Nexara existed and the staff knew his order and the table in the back had probably absorbed more of their team's bad days than any therapist.

She walked in and the noise hit her first. Warm, familiar, the sound of people who genuinely liked each other. Her team had pushed two tables together and someone had already ordered a plate of fries that was being disputed loudly at one end. They made room for her without fuss, without the careful tiptoeing she'd been getting from everyone all week, and something in her chest loosened slightly.

Jay slid a drink in front of her without asking. She took it.

"You look terrible," he said cheerfully.

"Thank you Jay."

"I mean it in a caring way."

"I know." She took a sip. "How's the team holding up?"

"Better than expected." He leaned back, turning his glass in his hands. "You staying helped. A lot of them were ready to walk when they heard — but you staying told them it wasn't over yet."

She didn't say anything to that. She looked at the table instead, at the people she'd hired and trained and stayed late with and celebrated with, and felt the familiar weight of responsibility that had lived in her chest since the day she'd first made someone else's livelihood her problem.

She wasn't doing this for herself. She needed to remember that on the days the walls felt closest.

Priya materialized at her elbow with the quiet efficiency she brought to everything. "Stop thinking about work," she said without looking at her.

"I'm not."

"You have your work face on."

"This is just my face Priya."

Priya gave her a look and moved away.

The evening loosened as it went on. Mara let herself be pulled into a debate about the worst client they'd ever had — a conversation that had been had many times before and improved with each retelling — and for stretches of twenty, thirty minutes she forgot about acquisition documents and dead ends and the particular quality of silence that filled a room when Ethan Black was thinking.

That last thought arrived uninvited and she set her glass down.

She did not need to be thinking about him here.

She thought about him anyway. Briefly, against her will — the way he'd looked at her work on Thursday evening, that focused unhurried attention that made her feel simultaneously seen and studied. The way he'd told her the third phase timeline was two weeks too optimistic and been exactly right. The way he said things that should have made her angry and instead made her think, which was somehow worse.

She picked her glass back up and finished it.

"Another?" Jay asked.

"Water," she said. "And then I'm going home."

She was in bed by midnight, which was early for her on a Friday, and she lay in the dark and thought about the week with the kind of clarity that only arrived when she finally stopped moving.

The investigation was stalled but not finished. She just needed a different angle — something she hadn't tried yet, a door she hadn't found. It was there. It was always there. She just had to be patient enough to find it.

Her mind, unhelpfully, did not linger on the investigation.

It lingered on the eighteenth floor. On a corner office with two walls of glass. On the way a man who had taken everything from her had looked at what she'd built anyway and said send it to Clara without hesitation, like her work had simply earned its place in his schedule without him needing to make a point of it.

She didn't know what to do with that.

She closed her eyes and told herself firmly that it didn't matter. That he was the enemy. That whatever small, inconvenient, completely irrational thing her brain was trying to do right now was the result of stress and exhaustion and nothing else.

She was asleep before she finished the thought.