“And I told him I’d call him back.” He turned to look at her properly, and something in his expression was the most unguarded she’d ever seen it more than the parking lot, more than the lake, more than any of it, because this was unguarded without the softness, just bare. “And then I stood in a parking lot for twenty minutes trying to work out whether I was the kind of person who walks away from something real because someone in a suit told me the optics were bad, or the kind of person who tells someone in a suit that the optics can go to hell.”
Zara looked at him. The garden was very quiet around them, a bird somewhere in the hedges, the distant sound of the campus continuing without them.
“Which kind of person are you?” she asked. Carefully. Genuinely. Not knowing the answer.
“I want
