The Wrong Kind of Right

Mia Alvarez had rehearsed this pitch for six days straight, and she was not about to let Daniel Cole's cologne ruin it. He'd walked in three minutes late, dropped into the chair across from her like the boardroom belonged to him — which, in fairness, it kind of did — and hadn't said a word since. Just watched her with that maddening half-smile while she ran through renderings of the Delgado Waterfront Cultural Center, the biggest commission Reyes & Cole had landed in a decade. "Questions?" she asked, when she finally reached the last slide. Daniel leaned back. "One. Why does the east pavilion ignore the flood line?" Mia's jaw tightened. "It doesn't ignore it. It accounts for a hundred-year projection, which the client specifically—" "The client specifically asked for something that won't need retrofitting in twenty years." He said it lightly, like he was pointing out a typo instead of gutting the centerpiece of her design. "You're building for the client's brief. Not for the water." Around the table, three senior partners exchanged glances. Mia felt her face heat, the same way it had two years ago, in this exact room, when Daniel had stood up in the middle of her first big pitch and said, almost gently, I don't think this is ready. She'd walked out that day and cried in the stairwell for ten minutes before fixing her mascara and going back to her desk like nothing happened. She was not going to cry in a stairwell today. 1"I'll revise the pavilion," she said evenly. "Anything else?" "No." Daniel's eyes lingered on her a beat too long. "It's good work, Mia. It just needs to be great." She hated that some small, traitorous part of her filed that away like a compliment. The partners thanked her and asked her to step out while they discussed staffing. She gathered her tablet, her nerves, and what was left of her dignity, and made it exactly to the hallway before Priya from HR caught her arm. "Don't go home yet," Priya whispered. "They're announcing the lead team in twenty minutes." "I know. I'll be back." "No, Mia — I mean, don't go home after, either." Priya's face did something complicated. "You should probably sit down for this part." Mia didn't sit down. She stood in the hallway, arms crossed, watching the boardroom door like it might tell her something through the frosted glass. When it finally opened, Robert Reyes — founding partner, silver-haired, allergic to sentiment — stepped out with a printed memo in hand. "Good news," he said, in the tone of a man about to ruin someone's week. "The Delgado project needs two leads. Someone with vision, and someone who can keep that vision from bankrupting us." He handed the memo to Mia without quite meeting her eyes. "Congratulations. You and Daniel are co-leading." For a second, Mia thought she'd misheard him. Then Daniel stepped out behind Robert, hands in his pockets, that same half-smile back in place — the one that had cost her a promotion once, and was apparently about to cost her a lot more than that. "Partners," he said, offering her his hand like they hadn't just spent forty minutes disagreeing in front of the entire senior staff. "Try to keep up, Alvarez." Mia looked at his hand. Looked at him. She shook it anyway — firm, brief, professional — and told herself the warmth crawling up her arm was just adrenaline. "Try not to slow me down, Cole." Robert Reyes made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Kickoff meeting's Monday, eight a.m. Sharp. Don't make me regret this." He walked off, leaving them alone in the hallway, six feet and two years of history apart. "Monday," Daniel said. "Monday," Mia agreed. Neither of them moved.