Page 98 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

I didn’t appreciate getting ambushed by Maddox in the chai. I also know it was entirely my own fault. I’m old enough to recognize when I’ve fucked up my part of something, and I fucked up plenty. I should’ve brought Asher and Maddox into the plan from the start instead of running it alone and quiet, the way I run everything, but old habits don’t die just because you’ve finally found a reason to want them dead.

He called it sanctimonious. Told me to get off the cross. I’ve turned that phrase over more times today than I’d like to admit, mostly because he wasn’t wrong, and Maddox being right about something emotional is rare enough that it tends to stick with me longer than it would coming from anyone else. He’s spent two weeks doing the unglamorous work in New York, building a file nobody asked him to build alone, and I let him watch me carry on like I was the only one making sacrifices for her. That wasn’t fair to him either.

I’ve built an entire life out of deciding what other people need to know and when they need to know it. It served me well enough in business. It’s served me considerably worse in the last eleven days, and I’ve had ample time sitting through board calls and dinners I didn’t want to attend to understand exactly how badly. Harper isn’t a shareholder I’m managing through a difficult quarter. She’s the woman I love, currently carrying more uncertainty about where she stands with me than I have any right to have put on her.

I told Maddox I’d talk to Harper that night.

I didn’t.

Instead, I sat through a late, nauseating dinner with my ex-wife and Harper’s parasitic excuse for parents, the three of them dead set on extracting as much loyalty and capital as they could manage from one overpriced bottle of Burgundy. Jason Miller spent forty minutes walking me through a portfolio strategy that wouldn’t survive a first-year analyst’s review, Rebecca nodding along beside him like she understood a word of it, Evelyn presiding over the whole thing with the satisfaction of a woman who’d engineered exactly the seating chart she wanted. You can’t call something an equal-opportunity investment when the entire dossier’s shaped like a triangle. I’ve genuinely never seen a pitch deck that cynical, and I’ve sat through hundreds of them. How any previous investor handed these two a single dollar is beyond me. Actually, no. Let me not say that. It’s an insult to actual con artists, who at least understand the value of a good story.

By the time dessert arrived I’d stopped pretending to listen and started running the board math in my head instead, who’s still undecided, who owes me a favor old enough to call in, who’ll vote with Evelyn out of habit rather than conviction. Renard’s been with the estate since before Sophia was born and he’ll vote however I ask him to, no questions, but Beaumont’s harder, old enough to remember when Evelyn still ran half the social calendar for this place and sentimental enough that it might matter to him. Delacroix is the real variable. I haven’t worked out yet whether he’s loyal to the business or loyal to the version of Evelyn who hosted his daughter’s engagement party in our south garden. It’s slow work. Quiet work. The kind that doesn’t show progress for days at a stretch, which is exactly the problem, because somewhere in the middle of doing it properly I let eleven days pass without giving Harper a single honest sentence about why.

I close my laptop, leave the contract for tomorrow, and head for my suite.

I make it as far as the corridor outside the lift before Evelyn finds me.

She’s coming from the direction of the business wing, which means she’s been waiting somewhere along this stretch with the patience of a woman who’s done this before, which she has, more times in thirty years than I care to count. Her hair’s down tonight, soft around her shoulders instead of the controlled twist she wears to board meetings, and it takes me a full three seconds to place what’s actually bothering me about the rest of it.

Bare feet in flat sandals instead of the heels she lives in during business hours. No jewelry beyond a thin gold chain I don’t recognize. Every choice tonight reads as deliberately undone, deliberately casual, in a way that doesn’t belong to the woman who’s run board meetings in this same hallway for two decades.

The dress.

Soft, pale, the kind of loose linen thing that belongs on someone twenty-five years younger and considerably more inclined to wear it barefoot in a vineyard at golden hour. It’s the sort of dress Harper owns three versions of. On Evelyn it reads like a costume, expensive and deliberately wrong, and I can’t decide if she chose it on purpose or if she’s lost enough of her own sense of self that she’s started reaching for someone else’s closet without realizing it.

Either way it’s almost funny. Almost.

“Killian.” She catches my arm, light, familiar, the same gardenia and jasmine she’s worn since before Sophia was born, and for the first time in thirty years it doesn’t read as elegant. It reads like something gone slightly off in the back of a cabinet. “I was hoping I’d catch you. Dinner? There’s a bottle of the ‘09 I’ve been saving.”

“Can’t tonight, Evelyn.” I keep walking, which means she has to either let go or keep pace, and she chooses to keep pace, her hand sliding from my arm to rest flat against my chest instead.

“You’ve had a hard week. Let me make it easier.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not. I know you, Killian.”

Thirty years ago that sentence might have meant something. Tonight it lands the way most things she says to me land lately, technically true and entirely beside the point, because knowing me has never once stopped her from acting against my best interests when it suited hers.

I stop walking and take her hand off my chest, not gently, and put it back at her side.

“Don’t touch me.”

She smiles like I’ve said something charming instead of something final, and steps in closer instead of back.

“You didn’t seem to mind my hand on your thigh in the board meeting this morning.”

Something in me that’s been stretched thin for eleven days finally lets go.

I move into her space without touching her, close enough that she has to tip her head back, close enough that I watch her breath catch on something she mistakes for the start of a different kind of conversation. There’s a version of tonight where I just walk past her, where I let the silence do what it usually does and save both of us the trouble. I’m tired of that version. I’ve been living in it for thirty years and it’s never once gotten either of us anywhere worth being.

“You and I are never going to be a thing, Evelyn. Hell, even when we were together, we weren’t together. It’s been over thirty years of trying to make it work, making excuses for you, tolerating you, and feeling relieved every time you walked out the door. I’d call you a sadist, but you’ve failed so often at provoking me that you might just be a masochist without a cause.”

Her mouth falls open. No sound comes out of it.

“I loved you, for a time,” I continue, and I mean it, which is the part she’s never going to be able to use against me. “And I’m grateful, forever grateful, for the daughter we share. But whatever was between us, whatever explained two people deciding to marry each other, it breathed its last breath decades ago. So please, for both our sakes, stop shuffling the cards and fold. You haven’t won a hand in a very long time. It’s time to stop playing. I’ll continue to respect your space in this business and in our daughter’s life. Anything beyond that, after I step away from this conversation, is entirely your own doing.”

She finds her voice somewhere around the third sentence and pulls herself back into the shape she likes best, chin up, eyes narrowed, the board-room version of herself sliding back into place like armor.