Chapter 6: After Hours

The email hit my inbox at 9:52 p.m. on a Thursday, and I almost didn't see it at all.

I'd already changed into pajamas and curled up on the couch with Sofia, half watching a rerun neither of us was really paying attention to, when my phone buzzed against the coffee table with that annoying work-notification sound that gets past Do Not Disturb. I'd set it up in my first week, mostly because I was nervous, and partly because something in me said that when Damian Cole wanted something at night, he wanted it dealt with right away, not the next morning.

The server migration for the Q3 investor deck had blown up. I need the backup files pulled and formatted before the 7 a.m. board call. Can you come in tonight?

I sat there for ten full seconds before I even got what he meant. Not asking if someone else could take care of it. Not even to the whole team. He sent it straight to me, at ten at night, and from what I'd seen over the past month, he almost never asked for anything he thought he could hand off to somebody else's morning.

"You okay?" Sofia asked, glancing over.

"Just a work thing." I was already standing, already reaching for my bag. "I've gotta go in."

"Really? It's almost ten."

"Right now.

" I pulled a sweater over my pajama top, decided it would have to do, and grabbed my keys before I could think too hard about how strange this felt — being summoned back into that glass tower after dark, when the ordinary rules of the office fell away and something rawer took their place.

Sofia followed me to the door, arms folded, and I could read that familiar mix of worry and suspicion on her face, the same look my sister’s been giving me more and more lately.

"It's ten at night, Mila. What sort of boss texts his assistant to come in at ten at night?"

"The kind whose whole board presentation got corrupted twelve hours before he had to hand it in." I slipped on my sneakers by the door, still not really looking at her. "It isn't personal. It's just a crisis."

"That man's been in a crisis lately."

Her voice stayed light, but there was this sharpness under it, and I wasn't in the mood to dig into that at ten at night with my keys already in my hand.

"Just be careful, okay?"

"It's a work night, Sofia. I'm not going on a date."

"I never said it was a date."

Her eyes followed me all the way to the door, and there was something knowing in her expression that I decided not to deal with before I stepped out into the hallway.

The building was almost silent when I got there, the lobby lit up but empty except for one security guard who barely looked at me as he waved me through, and the elevator ride to the fortieth floor felt weird at night, slower somehow, or maybe it was just my own nerves stretching the seconds thin.

I found Damian in his office with his jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, tie loosened in a way I hadn't seen before — the careful, buttoned-up version of him I'd grown used to slightly undone at the edges, and something about the sight of it caught me off guard more than I wanted to admit. Three empty coffee cups sat on the corner of his desk, which made it pretty clear he'd been at this for hours alone before he finally admitted he needed help.

"Thank you for coming," he said, not looking up from the laptop screen. "The migration messed up half the deck. I need you to pull the Q2 backups, check them against the board's latest projections, and reformat them before seven. I could do it myself, but I need someone to double-check the numbers while I rebuild the slides, and everyone else is either not answering or an hour farther away than you are."

"I'm here," I said, dropping my bag by the door. "Just tell me what you need."

"I really do appreciate it. I know getting called in after ten at night isn't exactly in the job description."

"Neither was dealing with a broken walk-in freezer during a Saturday rush, and I handled that too."

I dragged a chair over to the second monitor he'd already set up for me, and part of me was glad for the practical distraction of a problem I actually knew how to solve.

"What should I look at first?"

He walked me through it fast, and the crisis seemed to sharpen his focus instead of wearing it down. That felt like him, honestly, since some people get scattered under pressure and he just gets more precise.

We worked in near-silence for the first hour, the office lit only by our two laptop screens and the ambient glow of the city outside the window, a companionable quiet settling over the room that felt entirely unlike the sharp, assessing atmosphere of our daytime interactions. I pulled up the files, checked the numbers, and spotted a mismatch in the Q2 revenue projections that made Damian pause in the middle of his sentence and lean over my shoulder to look at the screen himself.

"You're right," he said, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him at my back, close enough that I had to consciously steady my breathing before I trusted my voice to answer.

"That's off by almost half a million. Nice catch. Again."

"I'm making a habit of it," I said, and was rewarded with something that was almost, unmistakably, a real laugh — short, low, surprised out of him before he could stop it.

"Looks like it." He straightened and backed off a little, but the moment still hung there, soft and stubborn, like a note that wouldn't fade.

"Want coffee?"

"Yeah, please."

He made it himself, which I hadn't expected. I hadn't pictured him as someone who knew his way around an office kitchenette, but he moved through the small space with the same quiet ease he brought to everything else, and a few minutes later he came back with two mugs and set one down beside me without saying much.

"Careful," he said. "I make it pretty strong."

"I like mine strong."

"Yeah, I figured you would." He said it like an observation he'd been quietly collecting evidence for over the past month — small, in itself,but it landed somewhere in my chest with more weight than a comment about coffee had any right to carry.

We fell back into the work after that, and the silence between us felt easier now, less wrapped up in the stiff daylight formality. I kept sneaking glances at him when he wasn't looking, at the way he frowned at a slide that wouldn't line up right and ran a hand through his hair when a formula wouldn't cooperate. Those small, human moments were the kind of thing I almost never saw under the polished shell he wore like armor during business hours. Somewhere around midnight, it hit me that I was starting to know this man in a way that had nothing to do with his title, his company, or the debt hanging over my family. It had everything to do with the unguarded version of him at one in the morning, sleeves rolled up, battling a formatting error like it had personally insulted him.

I honestly didn't know what to do with that realization. I filed it away, like I did with everything lately, and kept working.

By one in the morning, the deck was rebuilt, the numbers checked twice, and we were both slouched in facing chairs, the adrenaline from the crisis draining into that loose, tired kind of exhaustion you get after solving a problem together at an hour when most defenses have already worn thin.

"Mind if I ask you something?" I said, before I'd fully decided to.Damian looked up and set his mug down slowly.

"Go on."

"Why're you doing all this yourself?" You could hire someone whose entire job is crisis management. You could've had a team on call for exactly this kind of night. Instead, you're stuck rebuilding a board deck at midnight with your assistant."

Something shifted behind his eyes, not guarded exactly, but careful, the way a man might handle a question he doesn't usually let himself sit with.

"Because the last time I trusted someone else to handle something this important without checking it myself," he said slowly, "it cost me almost everything."

"So what happened?"

He stayed quiet long enough that I thought he might not answer, his gaze flicking to the window and the scattered lights of the city below before he looked back at me. "

I had a business partner, early on. Someone I trusted completely, more than I trusted myself, honestly. We built the first version of this company together. And when it really mattered, he made a decision behind my back that almost sank both of us, because he thought he knew better than I did what I needed to hear." His jaw tightened, just a little. "I won't make that mistake again. Now I check everything myself. Every number, every deal, every person who says what I want to hear."

"That sounds exhausting," I said quietly, echoing, without meaning to, the same words Sofia had used on me weeks ago. It struck me only after I'd said it how strange it was, hearing my sister's exact phrase leave my own mouth in an entirely different context, as though some part of me had been quietly cataloguing the parallels between the two men in my life who trusted almost no one.

"Yeah, it is."

He met my eyes, and there was something open in his face that I hadn't seen before, not the calculating CEO, not the man testing me at every turn, just someone who looked tired, honestly, almost human. "But it's the only way I know to make sure I don't get blindsided like that again."

I thought, with this sharp stab of guilt that almost took my breath away, of the folder still sitting somewhere in that filing cabinet, of the lie I'd told him three weeks ago that he hadn't really believed, of every quiet thing I was still hiding from him even now, sitting close enough to see the exhaustion in his eyes at one in the morning.

"You don't have to check everything," I heard myself say, too soft, too close to something I had no business offering him. "Sometimes people are just who they say they are."

Damian studied me for a long moment, and something unreadable shifted behind his eyes.

"Are you, though?" he asked. "That person you keep saying you are?"

The question hit the quiet of the office like a stone dropped into still water, rippling outward, and I felt every muscle in my body tense up, felt the careful calm I'd kept up for weeks start to crack right down the middle.

"What kind of question is that, anyway?" I managed, aiming for lightness and falling somewhere short of it.

"Just an honest one."

He hadn't moved, hadn't broken eye contact, and something in his voice had dropped lower, quieter, more dangerous than his usual measured tone.

"I've been wondering about you since the day you walked into my office and turned pale over that folder with your last name on it."

My heart was pounding so hard I thought he could hear it in the room's silence. I opened my mouth to answer, to deflect, to deny, to toss out some careful half truth like I had before, and for the first time since all this started, I realized I didn't know which lie I was supposed to tell.

The city hummed faintly beyond the glass behind him, huge and indifferent, and under the fear pounding in my chest, I felt something else I liked a lot less because it was real: this reckless urge to just tell him everything and see what happened next. I kept it in. Just barely