Chapter 2

TARIIK

The corner office on the fortieth floor looks out over Manhattan like it belongs to me—because it does now. Floor-to-ceiling windows, a mahogany desk that used to be my father’s, the Bennett & Stone logo etched into the glass door behind me in gold lettering. My father built this firm from nothing. I’ve spent the last six years making sure it doesn’t die with him.

I lean back in my chair, tie loosened, sleeves rolled to the forearm, and turn the small silver frame over in my hand. Elena. Twenty-six in the photo, laughing at something off-camera, sunlight catching the gold in her brown hair. I keep it in my desk drawer, not on the desk itself—Sophia doesn’t need another reason to look at me like that. I only take it out when the office empties and the building goes quiet like this, when there’s nothing left to perform for anyone.

Elena and I were supposed to build something together. Different plans, different clients, the same late nights at the drafting table, arguing over sightlines and materials until two in the morning. She understood the hunger in this job in a way no one else ever has. Then the firm started bleeding money the year my father’s health went, and the board wanted stability, wanted a name they trusted. Sophia’s father held forty percent of Bennett & Stone. A marriage solved a problem a merger couldn’t.

I run my thumb along the edge of the frame. I don’t hear the door.

“Tarik.”

I look up. Sophia stands in the doorway in a gray cardigan over a simple blouse, her hair pulled back loosely, the kind of tiredness that doesn’t come from one bad night but from two years of them stacked on top of each other. Her eyes drop to my hand before I can close the drawer, and something passes over her face—not a surprise. She’s seen this before.

“I didn’t hear you come in.” I slide the frame into the drawer and shut it, too late for it to mean anything.

“Marissa let me up. I told her it was about Malik.” She doesn’t sit. She stands in front of my desk with her arms crossed, like she’s bracing for something. “He asked for you again this morning. I didn’t know what to tell him this time.”

“Tell him I’m working.” I gesture vaguely at the papers spread across my desk, the model of the Hendricks Tower sitting under glass by the window. “This is what’s going to give him a life, Sophia. Private schools. The best doctors in the country if he needs them.”

“He doesn’t need the best doctors in the country. He needs his father to sit with him during a breathing treatment without checking his phone the entire time.” Her voice stays level, but there’s an edge underneath it now, something worn thin. “Do you know how many nebulizer treatments I’ve done alone since his diagnosis? Do you know what it sounds like when he can’t get air in, Tarik?”

I don’t answer right away. I know the sound. I was in the room once, months ago, and it’s not something I let myself think about often.

“I’ll increase the household budget,” I say instead. “Get you a night nurse if you need one. Whatever help you need, I’ll pay for it.”

Something in her face goes still, the way water goes still right before it’s about to freeze. “I’m not asking you for money.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“I want you to be his father.” Her voice cracks on the word father, just slightly, and she hates that it does—I can see her hate it. “Not a line item. Not a name on a college fund. I want him to stop flinching every time the front door doesn’t open.”

“I don’t know what else you want me to say.” I stand, buttoning my jacket, putting the desk between us like it’s armor. “I told you what I could give this marriage before we started it.”

She pulls a folded flyer out of her bag and sets it on the edge of my desk, smoothing it flat like she’s already bracing for me not to look at it. “There’s one more thing. Malik’s school is doing a Special Person morning. Parents come sit in on breakfast and story time. Nine to ten, next Thursday. He’s already telling his whole class you’re coming.”

I glance at it. Barely. “I’ll try to make it work.”

“I need more than try, Tarik. One hour.” She folds the flyer back up before I can hand it back to her like it’s nothing. “That’s all I’m asking.”

“I heard you.” I say it the way I say most things to her now—acknowledgment without commitment, a box checked so the conversation can end.

“I know what you told me.” Something old and tired moves behind her eyes. “I told myself it would be enough. That two people raising a child together, going through what we’ve gone through, would turn into something. I was wrong.”

“Sophia—”

“That’s all you can be to us.” She says it quietly, not a question, just her repeating the shape of what he’s already told her, in every way that matters, for two years. “Fine. I heard you.”

She turns and walks out before I can decide whether I want to stop her. The door clicks shut, and the office goes quiet again, quiet enough that I can hear my own pulse in my ears. I sit back down, open the drawer, and look at the photo one more time before closing it for good this time—or telling myself I will.

I sit with the drawer open a while after she leaves, turning the frame over once more before I finally close it. Marissa buzzes through twice more before I actually move—first with a contractor call I let go to voicemail, then with the reminder that I’m due downtown in twenty minutes. By the time I grab my jacket and head for the elevator, enough time has passed that Sophia’s car is long gone from the garage.

I don’t see Elena until I’m almost past her.

“Tarik?”

I stop. The lobby noise goes strange and distant for a second, the way a room does when something in it doesn’t match what you expected to find there.

Elena stands near the reception desk in a camel coat, a leather portfolio under one arm, and beside her—small, dark-haired, three years old by the look of her—a little girl in a red coat, tugging at her sleeve, clearly done waiting for whatever grown-up conversation is about to happen.

“Elena.” Her name comes out rougher than I mean it to. “What are you doing here?”

“Client meeting. Farrow and Associates leases the fourteenth floor.” She smiles, unhurried, the kind that used to make the rest of a room disappear. “Didn’t know this was your building. Small world.”

“And this is—” I glance down before I can stop myself.

“Ivy.” She rests a hand on the girl’s shoulder, something in her voice softening the way it only does around something she loves without complication. “Say hi, baby.”

“Hi,” Ivy says, unimpressed, already looking toward the doors.

“She’s beautiful,” I say, and it costs me something to mean it.

“She’s a lot of work, but yeah.” Elena laughs, brushing hair off Ivy’s forehead. “It’s just me on daycare-emergency duty these days.”

There’s no ring on her hand. I don’t ask. I don’t need to.

“What’s actually bringing you here?” I ask instead. “Farrow doesn’t do residential.”

“They’re bidding on part of the Whitmore project. I’m heading up design—a new pediatric wing. Respiratory and pulmonary care, mostly. Kids with asthma, reactive airway disease.”

Something in my chest goes still. “You’ll want negative-pressure isolation on that floor if you’re taking acute cases,” I hear myself say, “and the HVAC filtration has to run separate from the rest of the building or you’re defeating the point.”

Elena stares at me, genuinely startled. “That’s exactly right. Since when do you know anything about pediatric pulmonology, Tarik Bennett?”

“I do my homework,” I say, which isn’t quite a lie. I don’t tell her the truth is a hospital room two years ago, a doctor’s voice, a hand I let go of somewhere in the middle of it.

“You should come look at the plans. I could use a second set of eyes that actually understands the clinical side.”

“I could do that.”

“I’ll email you.” She smiles, and for a second it’s twenty-six again, sunlight in her hair. “Good seeing you, Tarik.”

I watch her walk toward the elevator, Ivy’s hand in hers, and I stand there a long moment after they’re gone. I know everything I just told her because of my own son. Standing in that lobby, that’s the part I let myself think about last.