FIND ME AGAIN

CHAPTER THREE - FIVE O CLOCK

LINNA

The day passed the way days pass when you are waiting for something you cannot prepare for.

Slowly. Then all at once.

Claire walked me through systems and processes and department structures with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely loved her job and I sat across from her and absorbed everything and asked the right questions and took the right notes and did everything that Lin Carter, Senior Operations Manager, was supposed to do on her first day.

I was good at being who I needed to be in rooms that required it.

By four thirty Claire had released me back to the temporary desk Sophie had assigned me on the tenth floor and I sat there for twenty minutes pretending to read the company handbook while my brain did something I had spent ten years training it not to do.

It went backwards.

Not all the way. Just to the edges. To the smell of cedar in the lobby this morning and the way it had stopped me half a second before I caught myself. To the specific quality of the quiet in this building, purposeful and unforgiving, that felt like someone I used to know had designed it from the inside out.

I closed the handbook.

I had seven years of professional experience, a degree I had fought for alone in a city that did not know my name, and a consultancy I had built from nothing twice over. I had survived things that would have ended other people. I had walked into this building this morning with a plan and I had executed every part of that plan with precision and I was not going to let a smell and a feeling undo any of it.

I was Lin Carter.

I was fine.

Sophie appeared at my desk at four fifty eight.

"Mr Blackwell is ready for you."

I stood. Smoothed my blouse. Picked up my notebook because having something to hold was not weakness it was strategy.

We rode the elevator in silence. Sophie was the kind of person who understood when conversation was not required and I was grateful for that. The numbers climbed. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Forty two.

The doors opened.

The forty second floor was different from the tenth the way certain things are different from other things not in degree but in kind. The ceilings were higher. The light was warmer and more deliberate. The carpet was dark and absorbed the sound of my heels in a way that felt like the building was asking me to be quiet.

I was quiet.

We passed two closed doors and a corner office with glass walls where a man in shirtsleeves was on the phone gesturing at something on his screen. We passed a kitchen that smelled like expensive coffee. We passed a wall with the company name on it in brushed silver letters, Blackwell Enterprises, clean and authoritative, and I looked at it the way I had been looking at it all day, the way you look at something that should mean nothing and keeps meaning something anyway.

Sophie stopped outside a set of double doors at the end of the corridor.

She knocked once.

"Come in," said a voice from the other side.

I know that voice.

The thought arrived before I could stop it, before I could file it or flatten it or put it anywhere useful. It arrived with the specific clarity of something that had been waiting a long time to be acknowledged and had finally found its moment.

I know that voice.

Sophie opened the door.

I walked in looking at the floor the way I always looked at the floor in the first second of entering a room, taking the measure of the space before I took the measure of the people in it. Marble. Dark wood. Floor to ceiling glass with New York spread out beyond it in the early evening gold.

Then I looked up.

The world stopped.

Not metaphorically. Actually stopped, the way it stops when something happens that your body understands before your mind catches up, when every system you have goes quiet simultaneously because they all need a moment to process what they are receiving.

He was already looking at me.

Adams.

Sitting behind a desk that suited him the way the building suited him, like it had been built around him rather than the other way around. Older. Sharper. The boy I had known had grown into something that the word handsome did not adequately cover, something more specific and more dangerous than that. His jaw was set. His shoulders were straight. His hands were flat on the desk and completely still.

His eyes were on me.

And in the first unguarded second, before his face arranged itself into something controlled, I saw it. The thing I had put there ten years ago. The thing I had rehearsed for three nights and delivered on a Friday evening in October and walked away from and tried not to think about every November 15th for a decade.

I saw what I had done to him.

And then his face closed and he was someone else again and I was standing in the middle of his office with my notebook in my hand and absolutely nowhere to go.

ADAMS

I knew before she looked up.

Something changed in the room the moment Sophie opened the door. A shift in the air, subtle and sourceless, the kind of thing I would have dismissed as imagination on any other day. I did not dismiss it. I sat very still and watched her walk in and I knew before she raised her head that whatever had been sitting at the edges of my awareness since this morning was about to resolve itself.

She looked up.

And the floor disappeared.

Not the actual floor. The floor was where it had always been, solid and expensive and indifferent. The floor I had built my entire adult life on. The floor that was supposed to hold.

Linna.

Not Lin Carter. Not the name on the file I had read twice and set down and picked up again. Linna. The name I had not said out loud in ten years. The name I had buried so completely that I had genuinely believed it was gone, that I had done what I set out to do which was to take everything connected to it and put it somewhere it could not reach me and build walls around that place and then build a company around the walls.

She was standing in my office.

She was standing in my office and she was looking at me and she was not the girl I remembered. She was something harder and more composed and more devastating than the girl I remembered and some part of me that I had believed was permanently closed registered all of that in the space of a single second and then registered it again because once was not sufficient.

I said nothing.

She said nothing.

Sophie was still standing in the doorway and the silence had gone on long enough that I could feel her noticing it, feel her trying to decide whether to speak or disappear, and I made the decision for her.

"Thank you Sophie," I said. "Close the door."

She closed the door.

We were alone.

Linna had not moved. She was standing in the middle of my office with a notebook in her hand and her chin lifted and her face arranged into something that I recognised because I had learned it from watching her do it as a teenager every time something tried to knock her down. That specific composure. That refusal. The expression of a woman who had decided that whatever this was it was not going to be the thing that broke her.

I had always admired that about her.

I had spent ten years trying to forget that I admired it.

"Linna," I said.

Her jaw tightened slightly. "It is Lin now."

"Is it."

"On all official documentation yes."

I looked at her for a long moment. She looked back. Neither of us looked away because we had never been people who looked away from things and apparently ten years and whatever had happened between us had not changed that.

"Sit down," I said.

"I think I would rather stand."

"I did not ask what you would rather."

Something moved in her eyes. Not quite the thing I wanted to put there and not quite the thing I was afraid of putting there. Something in between.

She sat down.

I sat back in my chair and looked at the woman across my desk who had walked into my building this morning with a different name and a different life and apparently no idea that this was my company and I tried to locate the appropriate response to that and found several competing for position.

Anger was there. It had always been there, banked low and reliable, a pilot light that had never quite gone out. Ten years and it was still there which told me something about how deep the original wound had gone.

But underneath the anger something else was moving.

Something I had no intention of examining in this office on this evening with her sitting three feet away from me looking like she was prepared for war.

"How long have you known," I said.

"Since thirty seconds ago," she said. "When I looked up."

I studied her face for evidence of a lie and found none. Which meant she had walked into my building this morning with genuinely no idea. Which meant this was not a plan or a strategy or another performance designed to take something from him.

Which meant I did not know what it was.

"You changed your name," I said.

"I go by Lin professionally. I have for years."

"Conveniently."

"Practically," she said. "The same way everything I have done for ten years has been practical."

The word landed with a weight she may or may not have intended.

I looked at her.

She looked back.

Outside my window New York continued doing what New York always did, moving without apology and without sentiment, and inside this office two people who had grown up together and broken apart and built themselves into strangers sat across from each other in the wreckage of a coincidence neither of them had planned for.

"You are still hired," I said finally.

Something crossed her face too quickly for me to read.

"I need the job," she said simply.

"I know."

I looked back down at my desk. Picked up my pen. The universal signal in this office that a conversation was over.

She stood. Smoothed her blouse. Walked to the door with that walk I recognised, straight spine, lifted chin, the walk of a woman who had decided that whatever room she was in she was going to leave it on her own terms.

She stopped with her hand on the door.

She did not turn around.

"Adams," she said quietly.

I did not respond.

She opened the door and left.

I set my pen down.

I sat in the silence of my office for a long time after that, looking at the city through the glass, and tried to remember the last time something had happened that I had not seen coming.

I could not.