"He doesn’t know," Priya said, reading my face. "That’s the arrangement. Mona and I agreed on it before I was hired. I’m here because of my portfolio, not because of who I’m sleeping with, and the last thing Mona wants is for Jace to feel like she planted someone to watch him. He’s got enough paranoia about people in his space without adding that."
"So you just… work here. And nobody knows."
"Nobody knows. And I’d like to keep it that way." She held my gaze. "I’m telling you because you look like you’re carrying something heavy and you don’t have enough people to carry it with. And because Mona told me you’re good for him."
Did Jace talk about me with his family?
I opened my mouth to ask how. How was I good for a man I’d yelled at on a balcony and shut down in his own office. But Priya was already picking up her coffee and the question stayed where it was.
I stood in the break room processing the fact that Jace Hunter’s world was smaller and more interconnected than I’d realized and that the people who loved him were quietly, carefully, watching over him from angles he couldn’t see.
The whole week ended without Jace appearing at the office.
Miley watched me mope throughout the weekend. I loaded the dishwasher. Opened my phone, stared at his contact, typed nothing, closed it. Opened it again ten minutes later and did the same thing. Stared at the ceiling. Pushed food around my plate at dinner. Picked up my camera for the first time in months, held it for ten seconds, and put it back down.
By Sunday evening, she set her wine glass down hard.
"Go find him."
I looked up from the couch. "What?"
"Whatever this is. Whatever happened. Sitting in this apartment overthinking it is making you miserable and honestly it’s making me miserable too because you’ve been sighing and making sure I feel how depressed you are." She pointed at me. "Go talk to him. Sort it out. Or don’t sort it out. But do something."
"I can’t just show up at his house, Miley."
"Why not?"
"Because it’s inappropriate. He’s my boss."
"More inappropriate than kissing him?" She raised an eyebrow. "Because that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and sunk. You’re past appropriate, Anna. Way past."
She was right. Miley was always right about the things I most wanted her to be wrong about.
I stared at my phone and thought about the line. The one between boss and assistant. The one I’d drawn on the balcony in the wind, the words I’d said in his office after seeing his confession to his brother about me.Nothing more,I’d told him.You’re my boss. Nothing more.
If I went to find him, that line was gone. Not blurred. Gone. And if I crossed it, there was no coming back to the safe side. Lines, once crossed, don’t redraw themselves. They just become the ground you stand on, for better or worse.
But the alternative was another night on the bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the silence when his voice replayed in my head. And I was tired of that. I was tired of empty offices and the question of whether the things I’d said on that balcony were the truth or just fear overshadowing it.
I called Miles and asked for Jace’s address.
He hesitated. A long pause that I could hear him thinking through. "You can’t go to the city penthouse. He’s not there."
"Where is he?"
"His cabin. In the mountains. Remote. A couple hours north." Another pause. "I told you to figure out what it means if you care about him. I didn’t mean drive into the mountains on a Sunday night."
"You said if I don’t care, leave him alone."
"Yeah."
"I’m not leaving him alone, Miles."
"You’ve decided what to do then?"
I didn’t have an answer for that. Not one I could say out loud, anyway. What I was going to do was drive to a cabin in the mountains because a man I’d told was just my boss hadn’t come to work and the emptiness where he used to be was louder than anything I’d felt since leaving Charlotte.
Jace wasn’t Tobias. I knew that in my bones, in the part of me that had held his face in the dark and felt his pulse slow under my fingers.
