Chapter 3— First Impressions

**JAPHETH POV**

The conference room went quiet the second I walked in, which was somehow worse than if it hadn’t. Ten faces turned toward me, board members, division heads, a couple of lawyers I didn’t recognize, all of them doing the math on exactly how long I’d been back in the country and exactly how unqualified that made me look, sitting down in the CFO’s chair like I’d earned it instead of been handed it.

“Everyone, my son, Japheth,” Dad said, like that settled anything.

I sat. I nodded at faces I half-remembered from childhood dinners, men who used to ruffle my hair and now looked at me like I was a line item they hadn’t approved.

One of them didn’t bother pretending otherwise.

“Alaric Voss,” he said, not standing, not offering a hand. Senior VP of Finance, I placed the name a half second before I placed the face, older, sharper around the eyes than I remembered. “I’ve been with Montgomery twelve years, Mr. Montgomery. Long enough to have expected this seat myself, if I’m being honest, which I generally am.”

A ripple of discomfort moved around the table. My father’s jaw tightened.

“Alaric”

“I’m only saying what everyone in this room is thinking, Seb.” Voss didn’t look away from me. “Your son’s been in London for four years. No offense meant, Japheth, but the board deserves to understand exactly how someone with no operational history at this company is stepping into finance oversight during an active supply dispute with one of our largest accounts.”

I felt every eye in the room shift to me, waiting.

I thought about Peaches’s hand under mine forty seconds ago. I thought about the ring. I thought about how completely unprepared I was for either of the two fights currently happening in my life at the exact same time.

“You’re right that I don’t have operational history here,” I said, and I watched something flicker across Voss’s face, surprise, maybe, that I hadn’t flinched. “What I have is four years of finance training somewhere that wasn’t handed to me because of my last name, and about eleven minutes since I first heard the word ‘Hughes’ this morning. Give me the file. I’ll have a position for the board by end of day.”

Silence. My father’s mouth twitched,  not quite a smile, but close.

Voss leaned back. “End of day,” he repeated, like he was pinning the words to a corkboard for later. “I’ll hold you to that, Mr. Montgomery.”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

The meeting moved on. I sat through forty more minutes of numbers I only half-tracked, because underneath the numbers I kept circling back to the same two facts, over and over, like a loop I couldn’t shut off: Voss had just handed me a deadline with teeth in it, in front of the entire board, on my first morning back, and somewhere down the hall, behind a door with her name on the nameplate, Peaches was sitting at a desk wearing another man’s ring, and I still hadn’t asked her the one question that actually mattered.

I caught Dad after, in the hallway, everyone else already filing out around us.

“He’s been waiting four years for that chair,” I said. “You knew that.”

“I did.”

“And you gave it to me anyway.”

“I gave it to you because you’re better for this company than he is, whether he believes that yet or not.” Dad checked his watch, already halfway toward the next thing. “Voss isn’t wrong that you have something to prove, son. He’s just wrong about who you have to prove it to.”

“Who, then?”

“Yourself, mostly.” He clapped my shoulder once, the way he’d done since I was seven years old and scared of something I wouldn’t name. “Everyone else in that room will forget by Friday whether you handle Hughes well or not. You won’t.”

He walked off before I could ask what that meant, leaving me standing in a hallway that suddenly felt a great deal larger than it had ten minutes ago.

I thought about going after him. I thought about a lot of things in the sixty seconds I stood there, Voss’s face, unreadable and patient, the kind of patient that meant he’d already planned his next move before I’d finished my first sentence; my father’s version of encouragement, which had always sounded more like a riddle than a compliment; and underneath all of it, quieter, more insistent than either, the weight of a ring against my knuckles that I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t stop thinking about.

I went looking for the Hughes file instead, anything to keep my hands busy, keep my head somewhere other than that ring, and found it already sitting on my desk, tabbed and flagged and annotated in handwriting I would have known anywhere, even after four years, even after everything.

She’d started it before the meeting even ended.

I sat down slowly, flipping through pages she’d clearly spent real time on cross-referenced clauses, a summary of the original contract terms written out in plain language for someone who hadn’t read a Montgomery filing in years, small margin notes flagging exactly where legal’s position was weakest. It was good work. It was better than good  it was the kind of work that told me she’d been doing this job for longer than “temporary” implied, quietly making herself indispensable to a company that had never once asked her to.

There was a sticky note on the front page, three words, nothing else.

*You’ll need this.*

I stood there staring at it for a long time, because it meant she’d been thinking about me solving this crisis before I’d even known there was one to solve, which meant that underneath everything she’d said to my face an hour ago, some part of her hadn’t stopped looking out for me at all.

I ran my thumb along the edge of the note, half-expecting it to feel different somehow  warmer, or heavier, something that would explain why three words in her handwriting could undo an entire morning of her calling me Mr. Montgomery like I was a stranger she’d been assigned to tolerate. It didn’t feel like anything except paper. That was almost worse.

I thought about walking down the hall and thanking her in person. I thought about it for exactly as long as it took me to imagine her face when I did  that same tight, professional smile, the one that gave away nothing, the one I was starting to hate more than I’d ever hated the sound of my own name in her mouth when she used to yell it at me for stealing her sketchbook.

I didn’t go. I told myself it was because I had a deadline. That was even partly true.

And that scared me more than anything Voss had said in that room, because Voss I knew how to fight. This whatever this was, sitting on my desk in her handwriting  I had no idea what to do with at all.

I was still staring at the note when my phone buzzed against the desk, wasn’t Kate. Nor Edmund.

A number I hadn’t seen in four years, saved under a name I’d never deleted.

**PEACHES:** Don’t read too much into the file. I’d have done it for anyone.

I read it twice. Then a third time, because the words on the screen didn’t match the girl who’d just told me, an hour ago, that she didn’t care whether I sank or swam.

My thumb hovered over the keyboard. I typed something. Deleted it, and Typed something else.

Before I could decide which version of myself was going to answer her, a second message came through.

**PEACHES:**  Luke wants to meet you. Tonight. He says it’s important.

I read that one four times, and every time it said the same impossible thing.

She wasn’t just engaged.

She was already planning the introductions.