THE PROBLEM WITH HER(DAMIEN)
766 Words
Chapter 5 — The Problem With Her (Damien)
I don't lose focus.
Everything I've built comes down to knowing what matters, and giving it my full attention.
Until Monday morning.
I read the same paragraph three times and retained nothing.
That had never happened before.
I put the proposal down. Stood. Went to the window.
The problem was Nova Reyes.
I didn't have a solution.
I'd noticed her the moment she walked in on Friday.
That wasn't unusual, I noticed everything. What was unusual was the two seconds after.
Something stopped.
Not my thinking. My thinking kept moving, kept running the room the way it was supposed to. But underneath that, something went completely still.
Like recognition.
Like finding something you didn't know you'd been looking for.
I didn't know her. I was certain of that. My memory for faces is precise and unforgiving and Nova Reyes was not in it.
And yet.
Have we met before?
I'd asked her that and watched something move across her face: fast, controlled, gone. She said no with the steady eye contact of someone telling the truth.
I believed her.
I just didn't believe that explained it.
I noticed it within the first ten minutes.
She knew what her work was worth.
She knew I'd accept it.
She made me ask anyway.
She sees more than she lets on.
And she chooses what to react to.
I found that… inconvenient.
I don't know who she goes home to.
I find that irrelevant.
And not, at the same time.
I called her at two in the morning.
I want to be clear, I recognized that was a deliberate choice while I was making it. I am not a man who operates on impulse. I sat at my desk with the phone in my hand and considered it with the same measured attention I give decisions worth considerably more.
Then I called anyway.
She didn't answer.
I left a message. Moved the Monday meeting to breakfast. My office. Seven-thirty.
Put the phone down.
Celeste was asleep down the hall.
I didn't think about that for as long as I should have.
There's a conversation I've been avoiding for four months.
I know exactly how it ends.
I just haven't said it out loud.
That's not Nova's fault.
It's not Celeste's either.
Some things simply run their course. The only honest thing left is to say so.
Nova Reyes had nothing to do with a decision already made.
She simply made it impossible to keep deferring.
Breakfast Monday was not about the proposal.
I knew that before she arrived.
She knew it too, I could see it in the precise way she kept her walls in place. Every answer was clean. Every redirect was deliberate. She said we should finish the proposal with the tone of someone drawing a line.
I said we should and meant nothing of the sort.
Cancel them, I said about Thursday.
She left without answering.
I watched her go.
Then I stood at the window longer than necessary and thought about the specific quality of her silence. The way she held things close. The way she said, don't make this harder than it already is…
I stopped.
That thought had arrived from somewhere I couldn't locate.
I held it up and examined it the way I examine everything that doesn't compute.
I don't dream.
Or I didn't. Recently. Fragments.
A room. A presence.
Something I can't place.
I had put it down to the year. The weight of it. The conversation I hadn't been having.
I was no longer sure that was accurate.
The envelope went out at eleven fifty-eight.
Lena didn't ask questions.
I went back to work.
Read the same paragraph once.
Retained every word.
Put it down anyway.
Somewhere across the city, Nova Reyes was sitting at her desk with an envelope in front of her, deciding.
I thought, with the particular certainty of someone whose instincts have rarely failed him, that she was going to open it.
She was going to come Thursday.
Not because I'd asked.
Because whatever this was, it had no professional category. And we both knew it. One of us was going to stop pretending first.
I called Celeste at four o'clock.
"We need to talk," I said. "This week."
A pause.
"I know," she said.
"Wednesday."
"Okay."
I hung up.
Sat at my desk.
Picked up the proposal.
Thought about a woman with walls built exactly right and eyes that looked straight at me and a silence that felt… I don't know why.
I just know it does.
- Writer
