CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Xavier’s POV

I had been in the middle of a sentence when I saw her. It was her eyes that made me almost stop mid-sentence.

Her eyes were dark, expressive, the kind that carried whatever their owner was feeling whether she intended them to or not. But they had caught mine in that corridor with a directness that didn’t flinch, and something in the two seconds before she looked away had moved through my chest like a current finding a wire it hadn’t known was there.

I moved through it quickly and kept walking but the current stayed.

I sat through two hours of afternoon meetings and felt it the entire time, not in a way that showed, just present, the way a sound stays in a room slightly longer than the source of it. Her face kept surfacing with a persistence that had nothing polite about it. The way she held the clipboard against her chest like a shield she didn’t realize she was carrying. The exact moment her eyes had came back to mine before she looked away.

I knew that feeling of almost recognizing someone. I had been living with a version of it since the afternoon I walked into the library and found Bryan on the floor. But this was different and somehow older, reaching further back than a few weeks.

I couldn’t place it and that was the thing that wouldn’t let me push it away and move on. Not the attraction, which was straightforward enough, but the specific, unresolved sensation of something incomplete. Like a sentence my brain had started but couldn’t finish.

By the following morning I called my head of facilities, Daniel, into the facilities before nine in the morning.

“The fumigation team from yesterday. Which company was that?” I asked.

“Greenfield Pest Solutions,” he said. “It was a quarterly contract. Is something wrong?”

“Who was on site? I need the sign-in log.”

It arrived forty minutes later. It was three names. Two male and one female. My eyes landed on the female name.

Ashford, A.

Something snagged faintly at the back of my mind at the name, unspecific, the way a scent triggers a memory before the memory fully surfaces but I couldn’t place it.

The initials told me nothing useful but I needed the full name, and the sign-in log didn’t carry it.

I could call Greenfield directly and request the full roster of staff assigned to the Beaumont Group contract under the same access protocol rationale I had used with Daniel, and it would be entirely reasonable but I just don’t want to with no reason.

I picked my phone and called my grandfather instead.

He answered on the third ring, his voice carrying the unhurried quality of a man who had been doing something entirely pleasant and was mildly amused at the interruption.

“Xavier, twice in one week. I’m beginning to feel popular.” He said as soon as he answered the phone.

“That woman,” I said. “Bryan’s mother. What’s her name?”

There’s was a brief, specific silence.

“Aria,” Arthur said. “Aria Ashford. Why?”

The name landed with the quiet precision of a key turning in a lock.

“Xavier,” Grandfather called, his voice carrying a new quality now, very alert, like the shift of a man who had just heard what he hadn’t expected. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll call you later.”

I ended the call and looked at the sign-in log still open on my screen.

Ashford, A. — sign-in 08:14, sign-out 13:47.

Is the woman from the corridor the mother of the little boy my grandfather had been quietly rebuilding a life for over the past several weeks with? Or this was another coincidence. The same boy who had brought laughter once again into the Beaumont estate. If that is true, this life is truly small like people says.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling for a long moment. Then I picked up the phone and called Daniel back.

“The Greenfield contract,” I said when he answered. “I’ll like to expand the scope to monthly visits rather than quarterly, starting next month. Can you arrange for the same team to be assigned going forward?”

“Of course sir,” Daniel said. “Should I specify any particular staff?”

“The same team as yesterday,” I said. “Consistency is important for security familiarity.”

“Understood sir. I’ll reach out to them immediately.”

I ended the call and set the phone down. For a moment I simply sat there, the quietness of my office holding everything still around me. The quarterly reports were still open on my screen, half-reviewed, the numbers waiting with the patient indifference of things that didn’t care whether they were attended to now or an hour from now. I turned back to them and managed approximately four minutes of genuine focus before her face surfaced again.

I pushed back from the desk and walked to the window.

Forty-two floors below, the city moved in its usual organized chaos, cars, pedestrians, the distant geometry of intersections and crossings that from up here looked almost choreographed.

Thinking about a woman I barely know and had seen for roughly just two seconds bothered me more than it should have.

I was not a man who chased things. I built conditions, created access, arranged circumstances, and let the results come on their own terms. It was a discipline that had served me well across every area of my life, professionally and personally, and I had no reasonable justification for abandoning it now over a corridor encounter with a woman I had never formally met.

My phone buzzed on the desk and pulled me out of my thought. I picked it up without checking the screen, expecting Daniel with a follow-up question about the contract change.

“Hello baby,” the voice from the other end of the line pulled me back to my senses.

I checked the phone screen with alertness to confirm the caller. It was Ivanna.