His Sons Girl

Nine To Zero

Vivian called back within the hour, and by the time she did, Julian had already filled three legal pads with the kind of methodical, controlled fury I imagined had built Sterling Industries in the first place — dates, timelines, a list of names underlined twice.

“It’s Callahan,” Vivian said, her voice tight through the speakerphone. “Desmond Callahan requested the emergency session at four-eleven this afternoon. The photos hit the tabloid’s inbox at four-forty. Twenty-nine minutes, Julian. That’s not a coincidence, that’s a coordinated play.”

“Can we prove it?”

“I already have someone pulling his assistant’s outgoing calls for today. If he used a personal phone to contact the photographer directly, we’ll find it. Desmond’s many things, but careful under pressure was never one of them.” A pause, papers shuffling on her end. “I want to be clear about something before tomorrow morning. Proving Desmond orchestrated the leak doesn’t undo the fact that the underlying story is true. You’re still going to have to answer for it in that room.”

“I know that.” Julian’s voice had none of the raw uncertainty from earlier in the night — something colder and more focused had taken its place, the version of him I imagined had negotiated a hundred hostile takeovers and won most of them. “I’m not walking in there tomorrow to deny anything, Vivian. I’m walking in to own it completely, and then to make it very clear that a board member using a drone and a tabloid leak to manufacture a governance crisis is a considerably larger problem for this company than my personal life.”

Vivian was quiet for a moment. “That’s a fight, Julian. A real one, the kind that could split the board for months.”

“Then it splits the board for months. I’m not spending the next decade of my life letting Desmond Callahan use my son’s pain as a weapon against me.” Something in his voice gentled, just slightly. “Thank you for finding this tonight. I mean that.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Thank me after nine o’clock tomorrow, once we know it actually worked.” She hung up, and Julian set his phone down on the desk with a hand that wasn’t quite steady, the adrenaline of the last hour finally catching up to him all at once.

I didn’t sleep at my own apartment that night. I stayed in his office until nearly two in the morning, helping him organize the same three legal pads into something a communications team could actually use, and when he finally admitted he couldn’t do anything more useful before sunrise, I followed him back to the penthouse instead of going home, both of us too exhausted and too wound up to spend the night apart.

The boardroom the next morning was exactly as cold and formal as I’d imagined it — long glass table, floor-to-ceiling windows, nine faces arranged around it with expressions ranging from carefully neutral to openly hostile. I wasn’t in the room for it, waiting instead in Vivian’s office two floors up with a coffee I couldn’t make myself drink, but Vivian called the moment it ended, breathless in a way I’d never once heard from her.

“He did it,” she said. “He laid out the timeline himself before anyone else could frame it — the dinner, the gala, all of it, no hiding, no spin. And then he laid out Desmond’s calls to the photographer, verified, timestamped, undeniable. Six votes to keep him. Two abstentions. Desmond resigned before they could formally move to remove him — walked out mid-session rather than sit through the vote.”

Relief hit me so hard my knees actually buckled, and I had to sit down in Vivian’s guest chair before I could fully process what she’d just told me. “He’s okay? The company’s okay?”

“The company’s fine. Better than fine, honestly — nothing rallies a board like watching someone try to weaponize a scandal and lose spectacularly.” A pause, and when Vivian spoke again, some of the exhaustion had softened into something gentler, almost warm. “He asked about you three times during the recess, Harper. I want you to know that. Whatever I said to you in that library, whatever I still think about how complicated this is going to stay — I’ve watched my brother fight for exactly one thing in the last fifteen years like he fought for his seat this morning, and it wasn’t the company.”

I found Julian in his office twenty minutes later, jacket discarded over a chair, tie loosened, the particular loose-limbed exhaustion of a man who’d just spent three hours winning a fight he hadn’t fully expected to survive. He crossed the room the moment he saw me and pulled me into him without a word, and I felt, for the first time since that library door had opened two nights ago, something in my chest finally unclench.

“It’s not over,” he said quietly, into my hair. “The press cycle’s just starting. Ethan still isn’t speaking to either of us. Marissa’s warning is still true, whatever this morning proved about the board.” He pulled back enough to look at me, something steady and certain in his expression despite everything still unresolved. “But I would do every single hour of the last forty-eight again, exactly the same, to end up standing here with you.”

My phone buzzed against my hip, and some instinct made me check it even in the middle of the moment, my stomach dropping the second I saw the name on the screen.

Ethan, for the first time since the library, more than three words.

I saw the coverage of the board vote. I’m glad it worked out for him. I’m not ready to talk to either of you, but I wanted you to know something before I stop reaching out completely: I’m not the enemy in this story, Harper. I never was. I just loved someone who never fully chose me back, and I think some part of me always knew that, longer than either of us wanted to admit.

I read it twice, Julian’s arms still around me, and felt the fragile relief of the morning settle into something more complicated — grief and guilt threading back through the victory, a reminder that whatever we’d just survived in that boardroom, the cost of it was still sitting, unresolved and aching, in the one place neither of us could fix with a vote or a statement or a well-timed piece of evidence.

Somewhere out there, a twenty-seven-year-old man who had loved me honestly for eight months was learning to live with a version of the truth I’d handed him without ever meaning to, and no amount of boardroom victories was going to make that debt disappear.