Dating My Brother's Best Friend .

Chapter 5 : The First sign.

By Friday I had a system.

Arrive at 8:50. Coffee already on my desk courtesy of Roman who I had stopped questioning about this because questioning it made it a thing and I did not want it to be a thing. Work until lunch. Lunch with Roman when required, with Zara when not. Back to the desk. Leave at 5:30. Do not think about any of it on the bus home.

The system was working perfectly.

Until Friday.

It started with the Harmon presentation.

Roman had asked me on Thursday afternoon to put together a preliminary visual concept for the Harmon account — something rough, something directional, just enough to show the team a possible approach before the full pitch process began. He said it casually, in passing, the way he said most things, like the request was obvious and he expected it to be met.

I had stayed until seven putting it together.

Not because I was trying to impress him. I want to be very clear about that. I stayed because the idea I had was good and I knew it was good and I wanted to see it properly realised on the page before I showed anyone. That was a Crestwood habit — my old tutor used to say that a half-finished idea is just a rumour, and I had never forgotten it.

I came in Friday morning with twelve pages of concepts, a colour direction, and a brand narrative that I thought was genuinely better than anything in the existing Harmon file.

I left them on Roman's desk at 9am while he was in a meeting.

At 10:17 he came out of his office and crossed the floor to my desk and stood beside it until I looked up.

"Where did this come from," he said. He was holding the pages. His expression was the careful, assessing one he wore when something had surprised him and he was deciding what to do with that.

"The Harmon brief," I said. "You asked for a visual concept."

"I asked for something rough."

"I know."

"This is not rough."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

He looked at the pages again. Then at me. "The narrative reframe on page seven — whose idea was that?"

"Mine."

"You got there from the brief alone?"

"The brief and the existing brand file," I said. "Their current identity is trying to say two things that contradict each other. Once you see it you can't unsee it. The fix is actually simple if you're willing to start from a honest place instead of building on what's already there."

Roman was quiet. He looked at the pages one more time with the focused attention of someone reading something twice to make sure they understood it correctly.

Then he said, "I'm presenting this to the senior team at two."

I blinked. "Today?"

"Today," he said. "I want you in the room."

"Roman, it's a preliminary concept. It's not ready for—"

"You just told me the idea is solid."

"It is solid. That doesn't mean I'm ready to present it to—"

"You're not presenting it," he said. "I am. You're in the room because you made it and you should be there when it lands."

He walked back to his office.

I stared at the space he had just left.

Then I opened my sketchbook and spent the next hour making the concept even better because if it was going into a senior team meeting it was going in perfect.

The two o'clock meeting was in the large glass conference room on thirty-eight.

Eight people around the table. Senior brand strategists, the head of client relations, one person from the finance side whose name I had not yet learned. And Roman at the head of the table, completely composed, presenting my work like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I sat at the far end with my sketchbook in front of me and tried to look like someone who belonged in this room.

Roman walked through the concept without rushing. He presented the narrative reframe clearly and precisely, giving credit where he was giving credit — at one point he said the intern on brand strategy found something in the brief that the existing file had missed and eight faces turned towards me with varying degrees of interest and surprise, and I held all of it without flinching because I had decided before I sat down that I was going to hold it.

The head of client relations — a woman named Diane who had been at the company since the beginning and had the kind of authority that did not need to announce itself — leaned forward halfway through and said, "Can you walk me through the colour rationale on page nine?"

She was looking at me.

Not at Roman. At me.

I looked at Roman briefly. He gave me nothing. Just that level, steady gaze that meant the floor was mine if I wanted it.

I wanted it.

I talked through page nine. Then pages ten and eleven because Diane had a follow-up question and then another one and by the time I finished the room was doing the particular quiet that means people are thinking rather than the quiet that means people are unconvinced.

"Good," Diane said finally. Just that. But the way she said it carried weight.

After the meeting broke up and people filed out Roman stopped beside my chair.

"That was well handled," he said quietly.

"You put me on the spot," I said.

"I gave you a room," he said. "You handled the spot yourself."

I looked up at him. He was close — closer than the professional distance we had been carefully maintaining all week, the way it happens sometimes when a room empties and the space between people contracts without either of them deciding it.

I could see the detail of his expression from here. The particular steadiness in his eyes that I was learning to read, slowly, the way you learn to read something written in a language you almost know.

"Why did you do that?" I said. "The meeting. You could have presented it without me there."

"Yes," he said.

"So why?"

He was quiet for a moment. He looked at the empty conference table and then back at me.

"Because in six months," he said, "when your internship ends and you go somewhere else and you are sitting in a room like this presenting your own work, I want you to already know what that feels like."

The room was very quiet.

Outside the glass walls the thirty-eighth floor carried on its afternoon. Phones and keyboards and the low hum of a company working.

In here it was just that sentence sitting between us.

I did not know what to do with it. With the particular care of it, the way it looked forward to a version of my future and decided to invest in it. Nobody had ever said something like that to me in a professional context. Nobody had ever looked at something I made and thought not just about the work but about where the work was going to take me.

I opened my mouth.

The conference room door opened and Claire leaned in with an apologetic expression. "Roman, the Singapore call got moved to four. They need you on thirty-seven in ten."

"I'll be there," he said. He straightened up. The moment closed like a book.

"Good work today," he said to me, professionally, already moving.

He left.

I sat in the empty conference room for a moment longer than necessary.

Then I opened my sketchbook to a clean page and I wrote down exactly what he had said, word for word, because I did not want to misremember it later and I was not ready to think about why that mattered to me.

I found Zara at her desk on the twelfth floor at 5:15.

She took one look at my face and pushed her chair back and said, "Sit down."

I sat in the spare chair beside her desk.

"Talk," she said.

"Something happened today," I said.

"Good something or bad something?"

"I genuinely don't know," I said. "That's the problem."

I told her about the meeting. About Diane and the colour rationale and the room going quiet in the right way. About Roman saying I gave you a room, you handled the spot yourself. About the conference room afterwards and what he said about six months from now.

Zara listened without interrupting, which was rare enough that I noticed it.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

"Lina," she said.

"I know," I said.

"That is not—"

"I know, Zara."

"A man who is simply doing a professional arrangement does not say things like that."

"I know."

"That is a man who is—"

"I know," I said. Louder this time. Then quieter: "I know. That's the problem."

Zara looked at me with the expression she wore when she was being careful with me. Warm and direct and not letting me off the hook.

"What are you going to do?" she said.

"Nothing," I said. "I'm going to do nothing because this is a professional arrangement with a very clear end date and feelings are not part of it. Feelings do not exist. Feelings are—"

"Item four on your list," Zara said.

I stared at her. "How do you know about the list?"

"You left it on the kitchen table at your apartment on Tuesday night," she said. "I was there for dinner. I read it. I wasn't going to mention it but you're currently reciting it from memory so."

I closed my eyes briefly.

"The list is good," Zara said kindly. "The list is very sensible. The list is exactly the kind of thing someone makes when they are trying very hard not to feel something they are already feeling."

"Zara."

"I'm just saying."

"Please stop just saying."

She pressed her lips together. She lasted six seconds.

"He said when you go somewhere else," she said. "Not if. When. He is already thinking about your future, Lina. He is already—"

"Goodnight, Zara," I said. I stood up and picked up my bag.

"I'm just pointing out—"

"Goodnight."

"Fine. Goodnight. Text me when you get home."

I took the lift down alone.

In the lobby I passed the spot where Roman had been standing on Monday morning when I walked in and saw him for the first time and stopped dead in the middle of the floor like an absolute fool.

Four days ago.

It felt like longer.

I walked through the revolving door and out onto the street and the evening city received me with its usual indifference and I was grateful for it. I walked to the bus stop. I sat down. I took out my sketchbook.

I did not draw anything.

I just sat with the clean white page open on my lap and thought about what it meant that a man who was supposed to be performing a professional arrangement had stood in a conference room and said something that nobody performing anything would ever bother to say.

The bus came.

I got on.

I thought about it all the way home.