Chapter Five
890 Words
KADE
He ran six miles every Wednesday morning because his body required it and his therapist, back when he'd had one, had said physical discipline was a healthy substitute for control issues. He'd stopped seeing the therapist. He'd kept the running.
By mile four he had stopped thinking about Nadia.
By mile five he had, unfortunately, started thinking about something else.
He pushed through mile six faster than usual and arrived back at his apartment with his lungs burning and the specific clarity that came from having worked something out without meaning to.
The shower helped. The coffee helped more.
He stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of his forty-second floor apartment with a mug and watched Manhattan arrange itself into a workday below him and thought about what Marcus had said.
Thirty seconds. You spent thirty seconds of our conversation thinking about your secretary instead of her.
The irritating thing was not that Marcus had said it. The irritating thing was that Marcus had been conservative. It had been considerably more than thirty seconds. It had been most of the afternoon, distributed across several hours in increments small enough that he'd been able to pretend it wasn't happening until he was standing at the edge of her desk at six o'clock asking if she was okay like a man with no self-awareness whatsoever.
He drank his coffee.
The facts, as he understood them, were these.
Viv had been his executive secretary for eleven months. She was the most competent person on his floor, possibly in his building, and he was including himself in that assessment on days when he was being honest. She anticipated problems before they materialized. She managed his schedule with the calm precision of someone defusing something. She had exactly zero tolerance for nonsense and communicated this without ever raising her voice, which he found genuinely impressive.
She also had red hair and a mouth built for saying things that landed, and she wore those pencil skirts that he had never, not once, professionally noticed.
He was aware this was not a sustainable position.
The other fact, the one that had been sitting at the back of his mind since sometime in autumn, was that something had shifted. She was still excellent. She was still professional. But the particular quality of attention she used to give him, that slight warmth underneath the efficiency, had been replaced with something clean and neutral and completely impenetrable.
He hadn't noticed it happening. He'd only noticed it was gone.
Which meant he'd taken it for granted while it existed, which was a failure of observation he did not enjoy acknowledging.
His phone buzzed.
MARCUS [7:34 AM]: Henderson moved their morning call. Now 10.
KADE [7:35 AM]: Viv knows?
MARCUS [7:35 AM]: I sent her the update at 7:15.
MARCUS [7:35 AM]: She'd already anticipated it and cleared the slot.
MARCUS [7:36 AM]: Just so you know.
Kade looked at that last message for a moment. Marcus was not a man who sent information without intent. Just so you know from Marcus meant pay attention to this and they both understood that.
He set his mug down and went to get dressed.
She was at her desk when he stepped off the elevator at 8:40, which meant she had been there since at least eight because she always needed twenty minutes before he arrived to have everything arranged to her satisfaction. He knew this. He had never told her he knew this.
"Henderson moved," she said, without looking up.
"I heard."
"I've used the slot to push your prep call with Legal. They had questions about the liability clause that will take longer than the fifteen minutes they originally requested." She turned a page. "I gave them thirty and told them if they needed more than that they should send a document instead of scheduling a call."
"How did they take that."
"Sandra from Legal said, and I'm quoting, fair enough." She looked up. "Your coffee is on the desk. The Henderson counter-brief summary is the top document on the left stack. Marcus wants five minutes before the ten o'clock."
She said all of this with the pleasant efficiency of a woman reading a weather report. Informative. Completely self-contained. Not unfriendly, exactly, but with that clean neutrality that had been driving him quietly insane for months.
"Calloway," he said.
"Yes."
"Did you eat breakfast?"
She blinked. It was small and fast and she recovered immediately but he caught it, the tiny crack in the professional surface, the flicker of someone who had not expected that particular question.
"That's not in your briefing," she said.
"I'm aware. Did you?"
A pause. "Coffee counts."
"It does not count."
"It has calories."
"So does hand sanitizer." He held her gaze. "There's a place on forty-one that does eggs. I'll have someone bring a plate up."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't have to." He picked up his coffee and moved toward his office. "That's why I'm doing it."
He didn't look back.
Behind him, after a beat of silence, he heard the very quiet sound of Vivienne Calloway having absolutely no idea what to do with that.
Good.
Neither did he. But it was the first honest thing either of them had said in months, and that felt like a start.
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