Twelve Months To Ruin You

Midnight

The penthouse at three in the morning was a different place entirely.

During the day it had a rhythm, coffee, schedules, doors opening and closing, two people moving around each other . At three in the morning all of that was gone. No rhythm. No system. Just the city lights coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows and the kind of quietness that made you aware of your own breathing.

Anne had been sitting at the kitchen island for forty minutes with a mug of tea that had gone cold and a file she hadn’t read a word of.

She wasn’t sure why she’d come downstairs. She’d woken up at two thirty for no reason and lain in the dark for a while and then given up and come to the kitchen because at least the kitchen had a view.

She heard footsteps at twenty past three, she’d forgotten, genuinely forgotten that she wasn’t alone in this building.

Derrick appeared in the kitchen doorway in a grey t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, hair slightly off, eyes not fully committed to being open yet. He saw her. Stopped.

“….Why are you awake?” he said.

“Why are you?”

He looked at her for a moment. Then he walked to the kettle, filled it, and switched it on without another word.

****

He made himself tea and sat across from her and looked at the cold mug in front of her. “How long have you been down here?”

“Forty minutes.”

“And the tea?”

“It got away from me.”

He got up, poured it out, made her a fresh one. She watched him do it. He put it in front of her and sat back down.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Mm.”

They sat with that for a bit. The city outside. The quiet. Two people at a kitchen island at three in the morning with nowhere to be.

“What were you reading?” he asked, nodding at the file.

“Client restructuring. Supposed to be. I haven’t actually started.”

“At three in the morning.”

“It seemed like a good idea at two thirty.”

“It wasn’t.”

“No,” she agreed. “Probably not.”

He wrapped both hands around his mug. “What’s the restructuring?”

“You wouldn’t know them.”

“Try me.”

She looked at him. “Baako Holdings. They’ve got overlapping asset classifications across three subsidiaries and nobody noticed for two years because the auditor was signing off on everything without actually reading it.”

Derrick was quiet for a second. “The auditor just… didn’t read it?”

“For two years.”

“How?”

“Same way people get away with most things. Nobody was looking.”

He considered that. “What happens to the auditor?”

“Not my department. I’m just here to fix the structure.” She picked up her tea. “The actual fallout is someone else’s problem.”

“You don’t seem bothered by that.”

“I’m very bothered by it. I just can’t do anything about it, so I’ve filed it under things that are not my fault and moved on.” She looked at him. “It’s a useful folder. I recommend it.”

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. “You have a whole filing system.”

“I have several. You’d be surprised what fits in *not my fault* once you stop being precious about the categories.”

He almost smiled. She could see him stopping it.

“What’s in your *not my fault* folder?” she asked.

“Nothing I’m telling you at three in the morning.”

“Fair.”

***

They kept talking. Not about anything connected to the marriage or the company or Humphrey or any of it. He told her something about Dallas in summer that his father used to say, she didn’t ask him to, it just came out of something she said about the heat, and she told him about her first client, a woman who ran a textile business from her living room and cried when the numbers finally balanced after three years of chaos.

“She cried?” he said.

“Full tears. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never had a client cry before.”

“What did you do?”

“I gave her a tissue and pretended I needed to check something on my laptop until she was done.”

“That’s terrible.”

“I was twenty three and she was my first client and I’d never been trained for crying.” She shook her head. “She called me a week later to say thank you and I panicked and told Maya to take the message.”

He laughed. A real one, short and genuine and gone quickly, the way his laughs went when they caught him off guard. Anne heard it land in the room and felt something warm move through her chest that she was not going to examine right now.

She told another story instead. He told one back. The tea went from hot to warm. The city outside stayed exactly the same, indifferent, going about its business.

At some point she looked at the clock on the microwave.

“It’s nearly five,” she said.

“I know.”

Neither of them moved for another ten minutes.

****

She went first. Picked up her mug, rinsed it at the sink, picked up the file she still hadn’t read.

“Goodnight,” she said. Or good morning. She wasn’t sure which one was accurate.

She was halfway down the hall when she stopped.

She didn’t plan to stop. Her feet just did it.

She turned around. He was still at the island, both hands around his mug, not looking at anything in particular.

“You’re not what I expected,” she said.

He looked up.

“The night we met,” she said. “On the balcony. I told you I expected someone louder.”

“I remember.”

“I meant it differently then.” She looked at him for a second. “I still think you’re not what I expected. But I mean it differently now.”

He didn’t say anything. She went to her room.

****

He sat at the island for a while after that.

Not thinking about anything specific. Just sitting. The city was starting to get that pre-dawn quality where the dark went slightly blue at the edges and the first delivery trucks appeared on the roads below.

He went back to his room eventually. Lay down.

His phone lit up on the nightstand.

Gerald. A message, not a call.

*Don’t lose focus.*

Derrick looked at it. Three words. Gerald had a way of doing that, landing exactly where the bruise was without needing to be told where it was. Twenty years of that. Twenty years of Gerald knowing before Derrick had said anything.

He typed back: *I haven’t.*

Put the phone face down.

Looked at the ceiling.

The thing was, an hour ago that would have been true. An hour ago he’d been lying in this same bed thinking about the brake line timing and the delay and how to adjust the approach. Clean. Focused. On track.

Now he was lying here at five in the morning and Anne Wheeler had stopped in a dark hallway and told him he wasn’t what she expected and looked at him like she meant something by it and he was thinking about that instead of any of the things he was supposed to be thinking about.

He put his arm over his eyes.

Gerald’s text sat on the phone face down beside him. *Don’t lose focus.*

The problem was he’d just told Gerald he hadn’t and somewhere between typing that and right now he’d had to admit to himself that it was the most dishonest thing he’d said since this whole arrangement started. Because a man who hadn’t lost focus would not be lying awake at five in the morning replaying a ten-second moment in a hallway. A man who hadn’t lost focus would not have noticed the way she’d looked at him when she said it. A man who hadn’t lost focus would not be feeling whatever this was that had settled into his chest sometime around three thirty and shown no signs of leaving.

He was starting to have a problem.

He knew it. He just wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet.