He looked at me for a beat. Not with surprise. With the particular stillness of someone who has already done the math. “Right,” he said, and let it go. “Coffee still going?”
“Just made it,” Finn said.
“Good. I’ve got the Morrison estimates to finish before six, so I’ll be in the back.” He poured himself a mug, nodded at me, and disappeared through a door I hadn’t noticed before. The whole interaction took maybe ninety seconds. He’d treated me like someone whose opinion mattered without needing to be told why it mattered. He’d known about the Thompson fix and he’d known it was mine, and he hadn’t required a single piece of evidence to believe it.
Something in my chest loosened. I didn’t have a name for it.
“Your office doesn’t feel like a battlefield,” I said.
“Should it?”
“Crestline feels like one. Every conversation is a negotiation. Every meeting is about who gets credit. I spend half my time managing relationships that should be stable and the other half watching Laura position herself between me and anything that matters.”
Finn set his mug down. “That’s not a workplace problem. That’s a Callum problem.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I met his eyes. They were green, steady, giving me space to decide how much to say. “I confronted him four nights ago. Two-fifteen in the morning. I had the receipt for a silver bracelet hebought Laura, and the note she’d left on his desk at the office. I laid it all out on the kitchen island.”
Finn didn’t move. “What did he say?”
“He told me I was being dramatic. That Laura was just ambitious.” I took a breath, the air in the studio suddenly thin. “That the bracelet was a professional gift. That my jealousy was making me irrational.” I looked down at my hands. “He said I’d always been too sensitive. He used the word ‘supportive’ six times, like I wrote a check and then got out of the way.”
“That’s gaslighting,” Finn said. “Not even subtle gaslighting. That’s the kind where he’s counting on you to doubt your own memory.”
“I know what it is.”
“Do you believe him?”
“No.” The word came out faster than I expected. “I don’t believe him. I don’t trust him. I don’t think I’ve trusted him for a long time. But I’ve been in this for seven years, and leaving isn’t simple. The company is my work. The clients are my relationships. The design language is mine. If I walk, I walk away from everything I built.”
Finn was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You don’t have to walk today. You don’t have to decide anything right now. But you should know that if you ever need options outside Crestline, I have a network. People who would hire you in a minute based on the work you’ve already done. No explanations required.”
“I’m not looking for an escape plan.”
“I’m not offering one. I’m offering a door. You decide if and when you open it.”
The coffee had gone lukewarm. I drank it anyway. Outside the windows, the light was shifting from gray to something darker, the early-evening blue that came off the lake this time of year. The studio felt quiet in a way that had nothing to do with volume. It felt quiet because no one was trying to shrink me.
“Laura wants my life,” I said. “Not just Callum. She wants my role, my title, my place at the gala, my name on the company history. She wants to be me, except with credit.”
“She can’t be you,” Finn said. “She doesn’t have the work. She can wear your seat at a dinner, but she can’t design what you designed. She can’t think the way you think. She can’t pull a cantilever solution out of her head in the middle of a site crisis and make it look inevitable. That’s not ambition. That’s theft.”
“Callum doesn’t see it that way.”
“Callum sees what serves Callum. He always has.”
I looked at him. “You’ve known him a long time.”
“Long enough to see a pattern. He’s been taking credit for other people’s work since college. With you, he just found someone who didn’t care about the spotlight.”
“I cared about the work.”
“I know,” Finn said. “That’s why this is infuriating to watch.”
Theo came back through the door with a stack of printed estimates and a pen behind his ear. He glanced between us, read the room in about half a second, and said, “I’m heading out. Morrison numbers are on your desk. Holland, good to meet you properly.”
