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“One minute, sweetheart. Work call.”

Disappointment filled her face.

I took the call in the hallway, pacing the length of the corridor while Mark spoke. My voice dropped into the register I used for board meetings and negotiations.

“Get Davidson on the phone and tell her if their counsel wants to play games, we’ll pull the entire thing off the table. They need us way more than we need them, and everyone in that room knows it.”

Mark started hedging, and I leaned against the wall and pressed my fingers to my temples.

I heard a soft clink and opened my eyes to see Ember standing in front of me, holding a mug of coffee, a small smile on her face. A cinnamon stick poked out of the mug at an angle.

I stared at it and then looked at her.

She handed me the mug, shrugged her shoulder, and mouthed, ‘you looked like you need it’ before heading back to the kitchen.

“Everett? Are you still there?”

“Yeah,” I took a sip watching as she walked away. She’d gotten my coffee exactly right, just enough sugar. “Tell Davidson we close on our timeline or we don’t close. I’m done negotiating with people who think delaying is a strategy.”

I hung up the phone and stood there for a moment, holding the mug in my hands. Then I made my way back into the kitchen. Neither Sophie nor Ember noticed me; they were shoulder to shoulder, heads bent over Sophie’s tablet.

“This one teaches you loops by using jack-o’-lantern patterns,” Sophie said, swiping through an app interface I didn’t recognize. “You need to code the pattern to make them glow right, and then this one…” she swiped again, “You have to debug the recipe before time runs out.”

“Can you show me the fairy lights one?” Ember asked, leaning in.

“What are you looking at there, Soph?” I questioned.

“Ember signed me up. It’s Coder Kids Halloween Edition. You learn to code basics with spooky themes and challenges.”

I looked at Ember. “You enrolled her in an online app to help with her coding class?”

“Yes, according to her teacher, she has been having trouble, and he mentioned that maybe something like this would help. I found one with a Halloween angle, which had a decent free trial option. If you would prefer me to cancel it, I will.”

“No,” The word came out rougher than I’d intended. I cleared my throat. “No, that’s…that was thoughtful. Thank you.”

She flashed me a small smile, and I turned back to my laptop before I did something stupid like smile back at her.

The afternoon passed quickly. I dealt with emails, conducted a video call with the legal team, and reviewed contracts. It was a normal, productive workday for me, except that every few minutes I heard the bracelets Ember wore jingle, and each time they did my eyes drifted over to where she was.

At one point, Ember was busy wiping frosting off Sophie’s cheek with her thumb. The next she was singing some Halloween song I didn’t recognize under her breath while she washed the mixing bowls they’d used. The last time I looked up, Ember was crouched down by the oven, checking on a second batch of cookies. I immediately noticed those damn leggings again, the fabric pulling tight across her thighs.

I was forty-two years old and ran a company valued at a little over 2.2 billion dollars, I was not supposed to get distracted by leggings.

Once dinner was over and Ember was upstairs putting Sophie to bed, I poured myself a scotch. I was about to head back to my office to review some documents when I noticed Ember’s laptop was open and on the kitchen counter.

I’d seen her making notes on it while she cooked dinner and afterwards as she cleaned up the kitchen. I walked over and hit the spacebar and the screen instantly lit up. There was nothing on the screen but the background, and then I noticed there was a minimized document. I shouldn’t have clicked on it, but curiosity got the better of me. Plus, I wanted to see what else she’d written. The document was further along than the last time I’d seen it.

He stood at the kitchen counter where she always left her coffee mug and realized that the problem wasn’t that he missed her. It was that he’d let himself get used to someone again. Something he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do. The warmth, the noise, the way she left lights on in the rooms she’d left. He had built his life around the absence of another person. He had grown so accustomed to silence it had almost become a solid structure in his life until she walked in and started breaking that structure down.

I read it again and then again, then I scrolled further. The next scene was different, and my hand tightened on the scotch glass as I read it.

“Goodnight, Ethan,” Rosie said, heading upstairs.

“Night, Rosie, thanks for tonight.”

“No problem. Glad I could help you out.”

I heard her bedroom door close before dropping my keys on the counter and loosening my tie. I stood in the dark kitchen for a moment. The gala had been three hours of small talk, and I hated small talk. When I finally crawled into bed and stretched across the sheets and laid there staring at the ceiling.