Page 179 of His Good Girl

Avery

Five months after the city decided not to collapse under the weight of our scandal, Callum Rowe sent me a text that nearly made me walk into a glass wall.

I was at work, carrying a stack of revised Hartwell community access summaries from Dana’s office to mine, feeling dangerously competent in a royal blue dress and low heels, when my phone buzzed in my hand.

Callum Rowe:Dinner tonight.

That by itself was not alarming. Callum took me to dinner often enough now that the city had mostly finished pretending to faint over us. The first month after theVanity Fairarticle had been strange. People watched us differently for a while. Some with curiosity. Some with judgment. Some with the hungry disappointment of spectators who had been promised a scandaland received, instead, a well-lit profile about grief, consent, corporate safeguards, and civic development.

Rowe Structural kept the Hartwell contract. Lang bled lawyers. Grant Vale disappeared. Jules went to therapy, then brunch, then therapy again, which she called emotional cross-training. Dana kept giving me more work and fewer compliments, which meant I was improving. Benjamin stopped calling me a sentimental variable and started calling me ‘Ms. Hale’ in the tone of a man who had emotionally adopted a raccoon and had regrets.

So, dinner was not alarming, but the second message was.

Callum Rowe:I’m going to ask you something.

I stopped walking. Unfortunately, physical barriers did not stop existing. I narrowly avoided colliding shoulder-first with the glass wall outside Conference Room C and made a noise that caused Marcus to look up from inside the room with visible concern. I smiled through the glass as if I had meant to test its integrity and my phone buzzed again.

Callum Rowe:Wear a pencil skirt.

I stared at the message as the papers in my arms slid one inch. Then two. Then the entire stack hit the floor in a soft, humiliating avalanche of public access language. Benjamin appeared beside me so quickly he must have emerged from the carpet.

“Structural failure?” he asked.

I crouched too fast and nearly knocked my forehead against his knee. “I dropped a few things.”

“Yes, I witnessed the debacle.” He bent with me, picking up several pages. His gaze flicked to my phone, which I had stupidly left face up on the floor. For once, I was faster. I snatched it up quickly and Benjamin’s eyebrows lifted.

“That’s private,” I huffed.

“A word people use when they have failed to hide things.”

“Do you want to help me pick up the papers or narrate my downfall?”

“Must I choose?”

I glared at him.

He handed me the pages he had collected, expression bland, eyes far too amused for his own good. “You are flushed.”

“I almost walked into a wall.”

“Many women do when summoned by billionaires with subtlety issues.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you’ve become fond of me in a way that embarrasses us both.”

I stood, clutching the unruly documents to my chest. “I have to go to my desk.”

“I assumed. Desks are where we go to pretend phones haven’t ruined us.”

I made it three steps before he called after me.

“Ms. Hale?”

I turned. Benjamin stood with one hand in his pocket, his tablet tucked under his arm, his expression doing that strange thing it had begun doing lately, where the viciousness softened around the edges but refused to admit it had.

“If he is asking what I suspect he is asking,” he suggested, “breathe before you answer.”