The invoice

"Sit down, Claire."

Adrian didn't look up from the folder on his desk when I walked in Monday morning. I'd barely slept the whole weekend, running the conversation in my head a hundred different ways, and none of them had started with him this calm.

I sat.

"I spent the weekend deciding what to do about Friday." He closed the folder and finally looked at me. "I still don't like the timing of it. But I checked with the club. Called the manager myself, asked him straight out whether you'd requested that booking or been assigned it."

My stomach dropped. "You called Vince?"

"I called Vince." He said the name like it tasted bad in his mouth. "He confirmed what you told me. You tried to get out of Friday. He wouldn't let you."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

"That doesn't fix the fact that you're dancing in a club four nights a week while working for me during the day," he said. "That's not a small thing, Claire. That's a lot of hours for one person."

"I know how many hours it is. I'm the one living them."

"Then tell me why."

I looked at him. The guard I'd been holding since the hallway on Friday finally came down. "My son has a heart condition. Not the kind that goes away with one round of medicine. The kind that needs ongoing care, specialists, tests that aren't cheap and don't stop being expensive just because I found a new job. A coordinator's paycheck covers rent and groceries. It doesn't cover Ethan. The club does."

Adrian didn't say anything for a long moment. He picked up his pen, turned it over once, set it back down.

"You could have told me that."

"I could have told a lot of people a lot of things over the years. It's never gone well when I did." I sat up straighter. "You want me gone, fire me. I won't fight it. But don't sit there and act like I owe you an apology for keeping my son alive."

The muscle in his jaw eased, just barely. "I'm not asking for an apology."

"Then what are you asking for?"

"I don't know yet." He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and for a second he looked less like the man who ran fourteen floors and more like someone who hadn't slept much either. "I don't like being lied to. I don't like finding things out the way I found this out. But I also don't like the idea of a kid going without care because his mother's boss decided to be difficult about it."

"So what happens now?"

"You keep the day job." He said it plainly, like it wasn't a question. "The night job, that's yours to decide. I'm not going to pretend I like it, but it's not my business what you do after five o'clock. What is my business is whether you can do this job well, and so far you have."

I hadn't expected that. I sat there a second too long before I managed, "Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet." A corner of his mouth moved, almost a smile, the first one I'd seen from him since Friday. "You still owe me an explanation for why you didn't just tell me the truth from the start."

"Would you have believed me?"

"I don't know." He held my eyes. "Probably not. But I'd have liked the chance to find out on my own terms instead of across a hallway full of my clients."

Neither of us said anything for a moment. The office felt smaller than it had five minutes ago. His desk had never seemed so close to my chair before, and from here I could see the tired lines around his eyes he usually kept hidden behind competence. He didn't lean back. Neither did I. For half a second his eyes dropped to my mouth, so brief I might have imagined it if my pulse hadn't picked up the same instant, and then he caught himself and looked down at the folder like it had said something to him.

The door opened without a knock.

"Adrian, I need five minutes about the Bennett contract, and then I was hoping to steal Claire for lunch, if that's—" Rachel stopped in the doorway, her smile faltering as she looked between us. "Is everything okay in here?"

"Fine," Adrian said, too quickly.

Rachel's eyes moved from his face to mine, and her smile stayed put a half second too long, the kind of pause that comes from noticing a room doesn't match what you expected to walk into.

"You two look like you've been arguing," she said, half a laugh in it, testing the ground.

"Work things," I said.

"Right." She didn't sound convinced. She held up her phone instead, the screen still lit. "Actually, this is funny timing. I was just going over the receipts from Friday's dinner for the expense report, and I noticed something odd on the venue invoice. A dancer's name, flagged for a repeat booking discount." She glanced down at the screen, then back up, her smile thinner now than it had been a second ago. "Claire Whitfield. That's you, right? Small world."

The room went very quiet.

"Rachel," Adrian started.

"I'm not upset," she said, though her voice had lost the warmth it always carried. "I just want to understand what I'm looking at."

I opened my mouth to answer, and found I didn't have a single word ready.