CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Aria’s POV

I stayed longer than working hours.

The Harrington reconciliation had pulled me past five-thirty, then past six, the kind of work that expanded the longer you looked at it.

Each corrected entry revealing two more that needed attention, each resolved discrepancy opening a question about a related account that Marcus had flagged as secondary priority but which clearly needed to become primary.

By the time I saved the file and shut down my laptop, the accounts floor had emptied completely, the overhead lights switched to their after-hours setting, low and ambient, leaving only the desk lamps of the handful of people scattered across the building still finishing their evenings.

I gathered my bag, sent Marcus a brief summary of where the reconciliation stood and headed for the elevator.

The building at this hour had a different quality, it’s quieter and less performative, the daytime energy replaced by a more settled evening.

My footsteps were audible in the corridor in a way they weren’t during the day, when I arrived at the elevator, it opened onto me with the soft mechanical hum of a building winding down.

I pressed the ground floor button.

The doors were closing when a hand came through them and they reopened.

Xavier stepped in, his jacket off, his shirt sleeves rolled to the forearm, the end-of-day version of him that somehow looked calmer than the fully assembled morning version.

He glanced at me with the brief, genuine surprise of someone who hadn’t engineered this particular moment.

“Ms. Ashford,” he said. “Still here.”

“It was the Harrington,” I said by way of explanation.

He pressed lobby and stood beside me as the doors closed. “How bad is it?”

“Three quarters of accumulated chaos,” I said. “Your words.”

“Accurate ones.” He looked at the floor numbers descending above the doors. “You’ve made more progress on it in three days than the previous person made in three months.”

“The previous person was presumably managing other accounts simultaneously,” I said. “I had the advantage of it being my primary focus.”

“Still,” he said.

The elevator reached the lobby. We stepped out into the marble expanse of the ground floor, quiet now except for the night security desk near the entrance where a guard looked up briefly and returned to his monitor.

Outside, through the glass front of the building, the city had moved into its evening register, the sharp shift of traffic patterns, streetlights coming up, the particular density of a city that never actually stopped but changed its rhythm after dark.

I pushed through the front door.

“Which direction?” Xavier said, beside me.

I looked at him. “Sorry?”

“Your car,” he said. “Which direction is it parked?”

“I took the tube today,” I said. “My car needed a service.”

He glanced at the street, then back at me, with the brief, decided quality of a man who had already resolved a problem before asking the next question. “I’ll drive you.”

“That’s not necessary,” I said.

“It’s nine degrees and the next tube is in fourteen minutes,” he said, with the unhurried certainty of someone who had checked. “Where do you live?”

I looked at him for a moment, at the steady, unperformative way he waited, not pushing, simply present and leaving the decision entirely with me. The way I noticed he always did, He never pushed, he simply made himself available and let you come to your own conclusions at your own pace.

“Clement Road,” I said. “It’s about twenty minutes.”

“I know it,” he said, and gestured toward the underground parking entrance without further discussion.

***

His car was exactly what I had expected and still somehow more than I had prepared for. It’s a Mercedes Maybach GLS, the kind of vehicle that communicated its cost through restraint rather than ostentation, the interior so quiet when he started the engine that the city outside became a different world entirely.

I sat in the passenger seat with my bag on my lap.

We pulled out of the parking structure and into the evening traffic, and for the first few minutes neither of us said anything. It wasn’t uncomfortable, that was the particular thing about silences with Xavier, they never demanded to be filled. They simply existed, without pressure, until something worth saying arrived to fill them naturally.

“How is Bryan?” he asked, as we moved through the first intersection.

I turned to look at him slightly. “You know his name.”

He smiled softly, his eyes on the road. “Arthur mentions him often.”

“Arthur.” I repeated, trying to match the name with the other and suddenly my brain clicks. “Wait! Arthur?” My eyes widened.

“Arthur Beaumont.” Xavier confirmed.

“You know Arthur?”

He casted a glance at me, like solve the mystery.

It suddenly dawned on me. I had thought the Beaumont name attached to Xavier and Arthur name was just a coincidence. Like how hundreds of people share the same last name without being from the same family.

So, I had been working in Arthur’s company. Wonderful! Was he the one that influenced my appointment?

Thinking about it, academically, I don’t qualify for the account position I got from the Beaumont Group. Even though I had gathered lots of work experience from my former job.

I looked at Xavier. “I never knew you were related to Arthur. As for Bryan, he is well.” I said. “He asked me this morning whether his new bedroom at Arthur’s estate could have a telescope.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’d think about it,” I said. “Which Bryan correctly interpreted as yes.”

Xavier’s mouth curved. “He’s perceptive.”

“Dangerously so,” I said. “He’s five and he already knows which of my maybes are real maybes and which ones are just yeses I haven’t said yet.”

“Smart kid,” Xavier said. Something in his voice when he said it was quiet and specific. Like the observation came from somewhere more particular than casual admiration.

I looked at him, but his eyes were on the road and his expression had returned to its composed, illegible note.

We talked as the city moved past the windows, easily, the conversation finding its own shape without requiring effort.

He asked about the accounting firm I’d left, about how I had gotten into the work, and I answered honestly, giving him the abbreviated version that didn’t include the full weight of what actually led me there.

He told me how he had started in the company at twenty-three doing work not entirely different from what I was doing now. Learning the numbers before the decisions, understanding the structure before he was trusted with changing it.

He said all that without self-congratulation, simply as a fact, the way people talked about things that had shaped them rather than impressed others.

I found myself listening to him the way I rarely listened to people, completely. Without the part of my attention that usually stayed reserved, watching for the angle or the exit.

He pulled onto Clement Road after about eighteen minutes ride. I directed him to my building and he pulled in against the kerb.

Outside, the street was quiet, the particular residential quietness of a weekday evening. Bins out on the pavement, a light on in the flat above mine where my neighbor’s television was always audible through the ceiling.

I should have gotten out immediately. Instead, I sat there for a few seconds longer.

“Thank you for the lift,” I said.

“Anytime,” he said simply. Like the word meant more than its meaning.

I turned to look at him and found him already looking at me, not with the professional composure of office hours, but with the unguarded version of a man who had stopped managing his expression.

The current from the corridor moved through my chest with a clarity that the past several weeks of professional corridors and careful conversation had been quietly building toward.

I held his gaze for a beat longer than I should have. Then I picked up my bag and reached for the door handle.

“Goodnight, Mr. Beaumont,” I said.

There was a small, loaded pause.

“Goodnight, Aria,” he said.

Wait! Did he just called my first name? No prefix. That doesn’t seem like the typical Xavier.

I got out and walked to my building door without looking back.

I walked to my apartment door in measured steps. When I found my keys, my hands were far from being steady.