PRETTY LITTLE MISTAKE

CHAPTER THREE — Professional Circumstances

I would like to state, for the record, that I did appropriate due diligence before accepting this job.

I looked at the website. I researched the work culture, which was described as fast-paced and detail-oriented, which are the two phrases every company uses when they mean we will require a lot from you and would prefer you not discuss your feelings about it. I was entirely prepared for fast-paced and detail-oriented.

I was not prepared for the man from the hotel bar to be standing in the lobby of my new employer at eight fifty-nine on a Monday morning looking like the architectural plans for a person had been submitted and approved at the highest possible level.

His name, I discover at approximately nine-fourteen when my new colleague Priya slides a company org chart across my desk with the energy of someone delivering critical intelligence, is Killian Black.

"The Killian Black," Priya says, in the tone of someone for whom this phrase requires no further elaboration.

"I'm new," I say. "Elaborate."

"Old logging dynasty, new tech empire, runs half of Washington state. The Black pack controls most of the Cascade territory from the mountains to the coast. His great-grandfather built the original compound. His grandfather started the tech transition. Killian runs all three companies now because apparently one empire wasn't enough." Priya tilts her head. "He's also, objectively, built like —"

"I've seen him," I say.

"Right. So you understand."

I do understand. I understand several things simultaneously, all of them inconvenient. I understand that I have moved into Killian Black's territory — his city, his pack infrastructure, his company — with one suitcase and a graphic design portfolio and approximately three hundred dollars in my current account. I understand that when he said the hotel doesn't exist he was offering me the most professional and efficient possible solution to what is, objectively, an extremely funny situation.

It is not funny. It is the least funny thing that has happened to me in a week that set a high bar for unfunny things.

But I need this job.

I needed it before I took it. I need it more now that I understand whose territory I'm standing in, because leaving means going back, and going back means Cascade Falls means Serena means the pack and Damien and the look on Elder Rourke's face when he read her name. I have one suitcase and a bookshop apartment and a college friend's forwarded email, and I am not being run out of this life the way I was run out of the last one.

So. Graphic design. Third floor. The hotel doesn't exist.

I am perfectly capable of this.

The first two weeks are fine. I am good at my job — this is not arrogance, it is inventory — and the third floor design team is the kind of place where competence is currency and nobody particularly cares about your personal circumstances, which suits me exactly. I work. I turn in clean briefs. I earn the nod from the senior designer Marcus, who communicates approval through the medium of not correcting you.

Killian Black appears to have no professional reason to visit the third floor. This is consistent with the org chart and with the understanding we reached in the lobby, and I am grateful for it in the way you are grateful for things you are trying very hard not to think about.

I see him twice.

The first time: Thursday, the glass lift that runs through the centre of the building. I'm going up, he's going down. We pass each other through two floors of glass and neither of us acknowledges the other. He's on his phone. I'm looking straight ahead. My heart does something I find completely unacceptable.

The second time: the building's coffee bar, a Wednesday morning. He's there before me, and the barista has the look of someone in the presence of a person for whom ordinary social transactions are slightly recalibrated. He takes his coffee. He turns. He sees me. One second of the lobby expression — careful neutrality — and then he nods, once, and leaves, and I order my coffee and stand there with it and think: good. This is fine. This is the professional situation we have both agreed to.

The coffee tastes like nothing for about ten minutes.

Three weeks after I start, I am in my bookshop apartment above the biography section, eating toast over the sink because I haven't bought a table yet and probably won't.

I do the maths I have been not doing.

It takes me less than a minute. I am precise with numbers. It is a design skill, the ability to count backwards, to know where things start.

I count backwards.

I sit down on the floor — a thing I apparently do now — and I look at the wall and I think: well.

Serena stole my mate bond. Damien is bonded to my twin sister. I have fled across the state with a suitcase and landed, through the specific cruelty of the universe, in the territory of the man I slept with in a hotel bar the night my life ended. I have a job I need and a bookshop apartment and approximately no support structure and I am now sitting on the kitchen floor having just done arithmetic.

The arithmetic says: pregnant.

I eat the rest of my toast.

This is not shock. Shock implies the information is surprising, and somewhere underneath the seven layers of performing-fine I have been maintaining since October, some foundational part of me has been waiting for this. Because that is my life now. That is the specific texture of the situation I am in: the kind where the universe has decided the interesting question is not how much can go wrong but in what order.

I make a list. I have always made lists.

One: confirm. Two: determine what a person does next. Three: do not, under any circumstances, make this worse by doing something emotional before doing something practical.

I look at the wall for a while longer.

Then I look at my phone. I have Killian Black's direct line because emergency contacts are a form requirement, not a personal development. I look at his name in my contacts long enough that the screen dims.

I don't call him tonight.

I'm not ready to be practical yet.

I give myself until morning.

In the morning I confirm the arithmetic.

The arithmetic is unchanged.

I call him.