Page 94 of Suite 7

“So what’s the real reason you’re here?” I ask.

“I told you. I wanted to see you.”

“That’s not like you.”

“I know.” He sets his coffee on my cluttered table. “I tried to work. Couldn’t focus. Tried the gym. That didn’t work either.”

He looks at me. “And then I realized — I just wanted to see you.”

The simplicity of it is harder to sit with than any version of control he’s ever exerted over me.

“What are you working on?” he asks, nodding at my laptop.

“The Alderton Group gala. Their first public event since the restructure.”

“Tell me about it.”

I pause, searching his face for polite performance. It isn’t there.

So I tell him. “The Alderton Group’s senior departure was messy — the kind of messy that ends up in the business press with unnamed sources and pointed language about leadership culture.”

“I saw something about that,” he says. “Six months ago.”

“Eight,” I say. “It’s been festering.” I pull my laptop closer, turn it so he can see the guest list. “The gala is their counter-narrative. Two hundred guests, carefully curated — clients they need to reassure, press they need onside, industry figures who are currently watching to see which way this goes.”

“What’s the message?”

“Stable. Forward-moving.” I look at him. “And it has to land without anyone in the room feeling like they’re being managed. The moment they feel managed, it reads as damage control. Which it is, but they can’t know that.”

“So the room has to do it.”

“Exactly.”

He nods and starts asking questions. Good ones. Not about the flowers or the catering, but about sight lines, about how the room directs attention and about creating intimacy at scale without making two hundred people feel like they’re being herded.

He uses words like load-bearing and circulation path, architectural instincts applied to what I’m trying to make the space say, and I find myself gesturing with my hands, getting excited, solving problems out loud while he listens.

At some point he disagrees with me about the flow between the lounge and the private floors. He thinks I’m underestimating the bottleneck at the entrance — that on a high-volume night I’ll create exactly the kind of visible friction that undercuts the whole message. I tell him he’s wrong. He tells me he’s not. We go back and forth, not heated but certain, the same rhythm we’ve always had — neither of us has ever conceded a point, and we’re not about to start now.

It takes me a moment to realize I’m smiling.

Not the version I put on when I need the room to feel a certain way. Just — smiling, because I’m interested and he’s interested and we’ve been arguing about entrance flow for the last ten minutes like it’s the most important thing either of us has dealt with all week.

Maybe it is.

When I finally wind down I’ve been talking for twenty minutes.

“Sorry,” I say. “I get carried away.”

“Don’t. I like watching you talk about something you love.”

He checks his watch. Then he turns to face me more fully.

“Vera.”

The shift in his tone makes me look up.

“Saturday night. Instead of coming to my place...” He pauses, and there’s color in his cheeks. Actual color. “Let me take you to dinner first.”