Chapter 2: The Executive Floor

Calloway & Vance occupied fourteen floors of a glass tower on Congress Street, and Mia spent the elevator ride up trying to memorize the building directory like it was a vocabulary test she could still fail. "You'll be fine," said Derek Pham, her new manager, a compact man with kind eyes and a lanyard so overloaded with badges it looked structural. "Everyone's nice. Well — mostly everyone. You'll learn who to avoid by lunch." "Comforting." "I try." He led her off the elevator onto the eighth floor, a sea of open desks and exposed brick that smelled like fresh paint and somebody's cold brew. A woman with a undercut and ink-stained fingers peeled off from a cluster near the window and beelined toward them. "Jordan Reyes, design," she said, shaking Mia's hand with real enthusiasm. "You're the new marketing coordinator. I already like you because your resume had actual metrics in it instead of just adjectives." "I peaked early," Mia said. "Downhill from here." Jordan grinned. "I like her," she told Derek, as if Mia weren't standing right there, and something in Mia's chest loosened for the first time since she'd landed in this city. Maybe this would be fine. Maybe last night really had been a clean, contained thing, a door she'd shut behind her. "Come on," Derek said, checking his watch. "Leadership wants to say hi before we get you set up. Standard new-hire thing — don't panic." They took a different elevator up, to a floor where the carpet got thicker and the art got more expensive and the air itself seemed to know it cost more to breathe here. Derek walked her past a glass-walled conference room, past an assistant's desk, toward a corner office with the door standing open. "He's usually pretty quick about these," Derek said. "Doesn't love small talk, but he means it when he says welcome." Mia was only half listening, running her thumb along the edge of her badge lanyard, composing the version of herself she needed to be for the next thirty seconds — polished, sharp, someone worth the relocation package — when the office door swung fully open and a man stepped out adjusting his cuff, already talking to someone behind him about a Thursday deadline. Charcoal suit. Different tie today, and it was knotted, not loosened, and his sleeves were down instead of rolled to the forearm, and none of that mattered even slightly because she knew that jaw and that voice and the particular way his eyes moved before the rest of his face caught up. He stopped mid-sentence. Mia's badge lanyard slid out of her fingers and she barely registered it hitting her sternum. Every drop of blood in her body seemed to relocate somewhere unhelpful, her stomach, her ears, and she had the distinct, horrifying sensation of the floor tilting three degrees to the left while remaining, physically, perfectly level. Nate — Nathaniel, she understood in that half-second, with the force of a structure collapsing — did not move. His hand was still on his own doorframe. His expression did something complicated and fast, disbelief chased by something that looked almost like fear, before it locked down into the flat, controlled blankness of a man who had spent years learning to do exactly that in front of a room. "Mia," Derek was saying, oblivious, gesturing between them with the easy pride of a man introducing his favorite new hire to the boss, "this is Nathaniel Calloway. Our CEO." The words landed in the space between them like something dropped from a great height, and neither of them said anything at all.

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