Page 175 of His Good Girl

I appreciated that she said it, but I hated that I already knew my answer.

“What would it look like?” I asked.

Dana folded her arms. “Callum Rowe, the renowned private builder behind Hartwell, facing down a dirty smear campaign. His relationship with Avery Hale, daughter of his late best friend, framed as a surprising but happy development to you both; complicated but consensual, adult, and fully disclosed. You do not report to him. I oversee your role and evaluations.The board has been notified. HR has safeguards. The article celebrates the relationship instead of defending it like a misdemeanor.”

“That is upsettingly clever.”

“I know.”

I looked at Callum. He had not spoken. He was letting me think.

“Do you want this?” I asked him.

His answer came immediately. “I want you protected.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t want strangers reading about us. I don’t want your name in the same paragraph as mine because Lang sent a drone to my window. I don’t want any of this, but if the question is whether I would rather stand beside you in public than let someone suggest you are a dirty secret I hide, then yes.”

My throat tightened.

“Very good,” Benjamin said softly. “Emotionally articulate and under thirty seconds.”

Callum did not look at him.

I swallowed. “What would I have to say?”

Dana’s expression softened again, barely. “The truth. The edited truth.”

“God help us,” Benjamin said. “The truth with tailoring.”

I breathed in. “They made a lascivious story out of me, of us,” I said.

Callum’s gaze held mine.

I lifted my chin. “I want to be part of telling the real one.”

Dana nodded once. “Good.”

Benjamin glanced at his tablet. “I’ll get Margo on a secure line.”

Tom looked pained. “Can we please involve PR and HR beforeVanity Fairhears the word godfather?”

“PR will faint,” Dana said.

“Then seat them first,” Benjamin replied.

By early afternoon, I was in Callum’s office with Dana, Benjamin, Margo Bell on video, and two PR people whose names I immediately forgot because they looked like they had been assembled from blowouts and caffeine. Callum stood by the window with the blinds half drawn like he still had not forgiven glass for existing. Margo was in her fifties with silver hair, wearing red glasses and the expression of a woman who could make a dinner party cry if she asked the right follow-up questions. She did not gasp over the age gap. She did not flinch at godfather. She also did not ask whether I had slept my way into my job. She asked better questions than that.

“When did you stop seeing him as your father’s friend?” she asked me.

I froze.

Callum’s attention shifted, but he did not answer for me.

“I don’t know that I have stopped,” I finally answered. “I think I realized he could be that as well as something else. I don’t think history disappears just because desire and love show up. It makes it more complicated.”

Margo asked Callum when he decided the relationship was worth the risk and he looked at me before answering.