Chapter 16: The Call

She sat on her bed in her work clothes for a long time.

Her shoes were still on. Her blazer was still on. Her bag had made it to the floor next to the closet, which meant she'd had the presence of mind to drop it somewhere that wasn't the middle of the room, but that was about all she'd managed. She'd come home on autopilot—the train, the walk, the three flights—and then she'd sat down and not moved since.

She was trying to make sense of what had just happened.

The logical version: James Whitmore had told her he had feelings for her. He had simultaneously told her she was getting a promotion regardless, which removed the professional justification for the fake engagement, which removed the professional framework that had made all of it bearable. This was bad because she now had no clean reason to stay. She could walk away from the whole thing right now and lose nothing professionally and nothing would have technically happened between them.

The other version: she didn't want to walk away.

She'd been building her case for weeks. The reasons it was fine to stay—the promotion, the professional context, the recommendation letter that would set up the next five years of her career. And she'd been building the reasons it was wise to keep it manageable. James was her superior. The arrangement was temporary. She was a person who kept things professional.

Except she'd been in his family's lake house for three days. She'd woken up next to him in a hundred-year-old bed with his grandmother's ring on her finger and the sound of the lake outside. She'd told his family a story that was partly invented and partly the most honest thing she'd said in months. She'd worn his sweatshirt for two days and not given it back.

The fake engagement had been the easiest choice she'd ever made because it was easy to frame as temporary. Something with an endpoint, a natural expiration date where she could step back and resume her normal life without having to confront what she was actually feeling.

But now the transaction was gone. The expiration date was gone. He'd removed the entire structure.

She didn't want to go back to normal.

She thought about it directly for the first time—the way you had to look at something unpleasant that you'd been looking around for weeks. She didn't want to stop being his fake fiancée. She didn't want to return to being the event coordinator who coordinated around him, who noticed him from across rooms and told herself it was professional observation. She didn't want to eat her lunch alone and not have someone leave coffee on her desk. She didn't want to stop being the person he looked at the way he looked at her.

She wanted it to be real.

The thought hit her like stepping off a curb she hadn't seen—sudden, briefly destabilizing, and then immediately obvious. Of course she wanted it to be real. She'd been wanting it to be real since approximately the first time he'd sat across from her in a coffee shop and described her office wall in detail and she'd had to remind herself that this was professional context, this was a negotiation, this was two rational people making a rational arrangement.

She stood up. She paced to the kitchen, then back to the bedroom. She paced to the window and back. She stood in the middle of her living room and looked at the teal prints on her wall—three of them, the ocean photograph she'd bought after the breakup, the botanical print with the teal accent, the small cityscape she'd found at a street fair years ago. All of them the same color, the color she'd chosen without realizing she was building something.

He'd known that about her. He'd known it from across the room.

She should call a friend. She should get perspective from someone who wasn't in this with her, who could tell her rationally whether what she was doing made any sense. She should think about this the way she thought about everything—systematically, with clear criteria and a decision framework.

She was so tired of being rational.

She'd spent twenty-six years being rational. She'd built a career on it. She'd made practical choices about her apartment and her education and her career trajectory and her relationships, and she'd ended up here: standing in her living room at seven in the evening in her work clothes, knowing exactly what she wanted and looking for a reason to not want it.

She picked up her phone.

His contact still said "James Whitmore CFO," which felt like a failure somehow. Like she should have changed it to something else weeks ago. Like everyone who saw her phone should be able to understand.

She called before she could overthink it. He picked up on the second ring.

"Hi," he said. She could hear traffic behind him. The ambient noise of the city. The sound of someone moving through their evening with purpose, which was very James.

"I'm scared," she said, and then before she could second-guess the vulnerability of it: "I think I need to stop pretending this is fake."

There was a pause on the other end. The kind that stretched into something bigger than either of them.

"Yeah," James said quietly. "I know."

She stood in the middle of her living room for a moment after they hung up, looking at the teal prints on her wall. The ocean photograph. The calm she'd bought after a breakup because she'd needed a color that meant something.

She thought she understood it better now.

She'd needed to remember that calm was possible. That the thing she was feeling right now—the vertigo, the terrifying clarity of knowing what she wanted—wasn't the opposite of calm. It was the other side of it. The turbulence that came before.

She put the phone down on the couch.

She changed out of her work clothes. She made tea, not because she particularly wanted it, but because her hands needed something to do that wasn't pacing. She sat at her kitchen table and drank it while the city went dark outside her window.

Then she texted him: Tomorrow evening. Your apartment. We should talk properly.

His response came in under a minute: Yes.

One word. Just the thing he meant, nothing more.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she set the phone face-down on the table and finished her tea. She changed out of her work clothes. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, did all the small ordinary things that meant the evening was ending and the next one was coming. She turned out the lights in the kitchen, the living room, the hallway. She got into bed and pulled the duvet up and lay there in the dark feeling, for the first time in longer than she could account for, like she'd made the right decision.

It was a good feeling. Solid. She let herself have it.

Her phone lit up on the nightstand.

Not James. A number she didn't recognize, and a single line of text: I know what the two of you are doing. I think we should talk before tomorrow.