Chapter 3 – Reluctant Respect
761 Words
By Wednesday, Mia had stopped pretending the weekend argument hadn't gotten under her skin.
She'd spent two nights hunched over her tablet, redrawing the east pavilion foundation from scratch — not because Daniel had ordered her to, but because his voice kept surfacing in her head at inconvenient hours, needling at every assumption she'd built the design on. *I'm not trying to win this in front of the team. I'm trying to keep the building standing.* She hated how much sense it made once she stopped being angry long enough to actually think about it.
What she landed on, close to midnight on Tuesday, was a colonnade system — lift the pavilion off the flood line entirely, let the water move beneath the structure instead of resisting it. It solved the budget problem and the flooding problem at once, and it was, she had to admit, better than anything either of them had proposed alone.
She walked into the Wednesday meeting ready to defend it.
She didn't get the chance. Daniel was already at the whiteboard when she arrived, sketching a rough massing study — and it took her exactly four seconds to realize it was almost identical to hers.
"You're joking," she said.
He turned, saw her tablet, saw the same colonnade sketched on her screen, and let out a short laugh that had no smugness in it at all — just genuine surprise. "Apparently not."
They stood there a second too long, both a little thrown by it, the argument from four days ago suddenly feeling very far away.
"Six hours apart," Mia said, checking the timestamp on her file. "Two different apartments."
"Guess we're not as far off as we thought."
"Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late." But the smirk that usually came with a line like that didn't show up this time. Instead, something quieter — like he was recalibrating something about her in real time.
When the rest of the team filed in — Wale, Ferran, Priya trailing behind with her legal pad and her radar for tension already twitching — Mia braced herself for round two of Monday's fight.
It didn't come.
Daniel presented the colonnade solution and, unprompted, credited her by name. When Ferran raised the budget again, he didn't dismiss it the way he had before — he listened, actually listened, walking through the cost tradeoffs with her line by line until they found a version that worked for both the site and the spreadsheet. When Wale flagged a load concern on the eastern supports, Daniel deferred to him immediately, no ego, no need to be the smartest person in the room.
It was, Mia realized somewhere around the ninety-minute mark, nothing like the man who'd stood up in her first pitch two years ago and gutted her in front of the entire firm.
Or maybe, she thought, watching him sketch a revised support detail with quiet focus, it was exactly that man — she'd just never stuck around long enough to see what came after the critique.
"You're staring," Daniel murmured, not looking up from the whiteboard.
"I'm reassessing."
"Reassessing what?"
"You." She hadn't meant to say it that plainly, but there it was, sitting in the middle of the table for everyone not to notice, since everyone else had conveniently found their laptops fascinating.
Daniel finally looked at her, something unreadable behind the usual confidence. "And the verdict?"
"Still deliberating."
"Take your time," he said, capping the marker. "I'm not going anywhere."
The meeting wrapped soon after, Robert stopping by just long enough to glance at the whiteboard, grunt something approving, and leave before anyone could ask him to elaborate. The team filtered out in twos and threes, already discussing lunch, already treating Monday's blowup like old news.
Mia lingered, gathering her things slower than she needed to.
"Site visit's this afternoon," Daniel said, appearing at her elbow like he'd been waiting for an excuse. "I want your eyes on the seawall before the contractor gets out there."
"I have a two o'clock."
"Cancel it."
"You say that like it's obvious."
"It is." He held the door for her, an easy, unthinking gesture that felt like it shouldn't matter and somehow did anyway. "You're the only person on this project I actually trust to catch what I miss. That's not nothing, Alvarez."
Mia walked past him into the hallway, and for the first time since the pitch that had upended her Friday, the thing sitting in her chest wasn't resentment.
It was something far more inconvenient than that.
- Writer
