OVERTIME WIFE

Chapter 2: The Call

"You're going to want to sit down for this one."

Priya didn't knock. She never knocked, just leaned into Reese's doorway with her laptop already open, already angled, the way she did when she'd found something before Reese had finished her coffee.

"I'm already sitting down."

"Sit down harder."

Reese set her mug aside. Whatever this was, it had that particular energy Priya only got for two things: a client crisis, or gossip good enough to count as one. "Give me the headline."

"Cole Bracken's agent called the main line twenty minutes ago. Asked for you by name."

The mug slipped half an inch across the desk before Reese's hand caught it. She hadn't meant to move at all.

"No," she said.

"You haven't heard the question yet."

"I don't need to hear it. The answer's no."

Priya turned the laptop around anyway, because Priya had worked with her for four years and knew exactly which of Reese's “no”s were real and which ones were just the first thing she said before the real conversation started. On the screen: a headline, red and loud, a blurry video still of a man built like every hockey player Reese had spent three years teaching herself not to look at directly.

BRACKEN'S BENZ NIGHT.

"He got benched an hour into the game," Priya said. "Sponsor pulled within the hour. His agent's calling every image firm in the city trying to get ahead of it before the trade rumors start, and somehow I want to be clear I find this hilarious somehow he asked for you specifically."

Reese read the headline twice. Something in her chest was doing the thing it always did with his name not grief exactly, not anymore, three years had sanded that down into something quieter and worse. A flinch that lived somewhere under her ribs and never fully went away.

"Ellis called himself," Priya added, watching her face. "Not an assistant. That's not a cold-call, Reese. That's a Hail Mary."

"I know what it is." Reese closed the laptop, gently, like it might go off if she did it too hard. "I'm not doing it."

"Okay." Priya didn't move from the doorway. "Can I say one thing as your friend and not your coworker?"

"You're going to say it either way."

"We lost the Callahan account Tuesday. That was forty percent of this quarter. Danforth already told Marcus " she caught herself, grimaced " sorry, wrong Marcus, told the board that if we don't land something by the end of month he's pulling the funding conversation forward. You know what that means."

Reese did know what that meant. It meant Priya's job. It meant the two junior account managers who'd been with the firm eight months and had families depending on paychecks Reese signed off on. It meant four years of building something out of nothing, about to fold because the number on a spreadsheet mattered more than the number of people it represented.

"There are other clients," Reese said, and she could even hear how thin it sounded.

"Name one who calls personally, on the day it breaks, asking for the best in the city." Priya's voice softened, just slightly. "I'm not going to pretend I don't know why this is different for you. I just think you should hear him out before you decide the answer's no. That's all."

Reese looked at the closed laptop like it might open itself and prove her wrong.

"I'm not talking to him," she said. "If Ellis wants a meeting, he can bring a proposal to Danforth like every other client. I'm not sitting across from Cole Bracken and pretending I don't know exactly who he is."

Priya held up both hands, backing toward the door. "Your call. I just wanted you to have the whole picture before it lands on your desk anyway." A pause, one foot already in the hallway. "Because for what it's worth it's going to land on your desk anyway. Danforth already knows they called."

Reese didn't leave her office for twenty minutes after that.

She sat with her hands flat on the desk, breathing the way she used to teach herself in the first year, back when hearing his name on a broadcast could put her on the bathroom floor of whatever building she happened to be in. She was better now. Better didn't mean gone.

She thought about Danny.

She thought about the last time she'd visited three weeks ago, him steady on his feet in a way that still felt new enough to be fragile, talking about physical therapy exercises like they were mundane, like his body hadn't once been the kind of instrument that made scouts drive four hours to watch a nineteen-year-old skate. She thought about the hit. She'd watched it more times than she'd ever admit to anyone, frame by frame, trying to find the moment where it could have gone differently, and never finding it, because there wasn't one. That was the part nobody wanted to hear. It wasn't dirty. It wasn't even particularly late. It was just hockey, brutal ordinary hockey, and her brother's spine had been in the wrong place at the wrong split second, and Cole Bracken had walked away from it with a two-game suspension and a career that only got bigger.

Her phone buzzed. Danforth.

My office. Now, if you have a minute.

She did not have a minute. She went anyway.

Danforth's office was all glass and skyline, the kind of view that was supposed to make you feel like you'd made it, and today it just made Reese feel like she was standing in a fishbowl about to be told exactly how the water level worked.

"You heard," he said, before she'd sat down.

"I heard."

"I want you to take the meeting."

"With respect "

"I don't need the respectful version, Reese, I need the version where you tell me how we make payroll in six weeks if Bracken's people walk into some other firm's lobby tomorrow morning." Danforth wasn't unkind about it. That was almost worse. He said it like a man who genuinely believed he was being reasonable, and from where he sat, maybe he was. "I know what his agent's asking is a lot. I know there's history there that isn't mine to ask about. I'm asking you to take one meeting. Not sign anything. Not agreeing to anything. One meeting."

Reese looked past him, out at the city, at the arena roof visible in the gap between two buildings, close enough that on game nights she could sometimes hear the crowd noise if her window was cracked.

"Nine a.m. tomorrow," she said. "One meeting. That's all I'm agreeing to."

"That's all I'm asking."

She left before he could say anything else, before the calm in her own voice could crack the way she could already feel it wanting to, back down the hallway, past Priya's desk, past the framed magazine features and client thank-you notes that were supposed to remind her the firm was worth saving.

At her desk, she opened the laptop again. The headline was still there. The blurry video still. His face, half-turned toward whoever had been filming, unreadable in the low bar light.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she typed *Cole Bracken hit Danny Kellan* into the search bar for the first time in over a year, and let the old footage load, and made herself watch it again not because she needed the reminder, but because tomorrow morning she was going to sit across from him for the first time in three years, and she refused to do it with anything less than a clear, cold, complete memory of exactly why she hated him.