Don't hang up

Caleb's pov

Caleb Wren had picked up his phone and put it back down eleven times.

He was not a man who counted things like that. He was not a man who hovered. He made decisions and he moved and he did not sit on the edge of a hotel bed at two in the morning second-guessing himself over a phone call. That was not who he was. That had never been who he was.

And yet.

He stood up and walked to the window. The city was still moving below, bubbly and filled with people just to take his mind away from the thoughts in his head for a while but it didn't work. He looked at it without seeing it. His reflection stared back at him from the glass and he looked away from that too.

He had known, walking into that meeting room, that something was off. He had felt it before he saw her, some shift in the air that he would not have been able to name. And then he had looked up and there she was, and his entire body had done something that he was still not ready to examine. Five years. She had sat across that table from him like she had been carved from something harder than the person he remembered, like every soft edge had been replaced with something that did not bend, and he had looked at her work and it was extraordinary, and he had sat there in that room and felt something that he had spent five years being very disciplined about not feeling, especially knowing he was damn fucking guilty.

He picked up the phone.

Then put it down.

He thought about the way she had looked at him when she stood to leave. One look. Brief and completely unreadable, the kind of look you give a stranger whose name you happen to know. That was what had done it.

Not the surprise of seeing her. Not even the work, which was genuinely remarkable. It was that look. The absence in it. Five years ago Nora could not hide a single thing she felt, it had been one of the things that had driven him half mad about her but he hid it so well underneath how badly he treated her, the way everything showed, and now she had looked at him like he was furniture, like he was never a part of her life.

“Goddammit.” He cursed.

He pressed dial before he could think about it again.

It rang four times. He counted those too.

When she picked up he had exactly one thought and it left his mouth before anything else could: "Nora. Don't hang up."

He heard her breathing. Just for a second, a small pause that told him she had considered it.

She didn't.

"How did you get this number?"

It wasn't a question. The way she said it was flat and precise, and it landed like something deliberate.

He exhaled slowly. "I'm the CEO. I approved your grant. I have access to all application files." He kept his voice even, measured, the voice he used in boardrooms when someone was pushing and he was choosing not to push back. Not yet.

"That doesn't mean you go snooping through files to call people at two in the morning."

The words hit him somewhere specific. He felt his jaw tighten. There it was. That directness, that complete absence of any instinct to soften a thing she meant, and the particular way she had of making him feel, in the space of one sentence, like he had done something small. He had not missed that. He had told himself, many times over the years, that he had not missed that.

He breathed through it.

"You're right," he said. "It's late. I apologize for the hour."

Silence.

He waited. It was one of the few things he had learned over the years but probably could never be better at than her.

"Was there something you needed, Mr. Wren." She put his name in there like a full stop. Like a wall.

Mr. Wren. He almost said something about that. He stopped himself.

"I wanted to make sure you'd received the correspondence from the foundation." He kept his tone clean and professional, stripped of everything else. If that was the tone she wanted, he could do that. He had been doing that all his adult life. "The full grant documentation."

"I received it."

"Good."

"There seems to be a misunderstanding though." A pause. "The figure is significantly above what I applied for. I already spoke to Mr. Hale and he mentioned you authorized additional provisions personally, but I'd like that looked at because it doesn't match what I submitted."

He sat down on the edge of the bed. "There's no misunderstanding."

"The numbers don't match my application."

"Because they were revised upward. The foundation and its partners have discretion to increase grant benefits when a proposal meets certain benchmarks. Your impact projections met those benchmarks. It's not a clerical error."

A pause. Longer this time.

"I see," she said.

She did not say thank you. She did not say anything else about it. He could hear in her voice that she was not convinced, that she was filing it somewhere in her mind under things to watch, and she was not going to challenge it directly right now but she was also not going to simply accept it. That had not changed. The way she processed things, quietly and completely, holding conclusions until she was certain.

He found he did not know what to do with the fact that he had noticed.

"Well," she said. "Thank you for calling to clarify. I'll review the full documentation tonight."

That was it. He could hear it. She was closing the call, efficiently, politely, the way you close a call with someone you have no particular feeling about.

"Nora—"

"Good night, Mr. Wren."

The line went dead.

He sat there with the phone in his hand and the room was quiet and he became aware, slowly, that he was holding the phone slightly too hard. He loosened his grip. He looked at her name on the screen. The call timer was frozen at three minutes and forty-two seconds and he stared at it for a moment before the screen went dark.

He didn't call back.

He wanted to. His thumb moved to her name twice and stopped, and he made himself be still and not do it because he was not that man. He did not chase. He did not repeat himself. He had made the call and she had ended it and that was the end of it and he was not going to sit here and scroll back to her name like some kind of fool with his chest cracked open and nothing to show for it.

He stood up, setting the phone down on the nightstand with more force than he intended and it slid slightly off the edge. He caught it and put it back and walked to the other side of the room. He paced. Twice. Then stopped because what the hell was going on with him.

This is the same lady he had divorced, sent away without looking back, so what changed? Was it how she now looked different?

She had called him Mr. Wren.

He pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum and exhaled once, hard.

She had sat across that table from him like he was no one. Like he was a stranger in a suit who happened to be holding a stamp. He had sat there and read through her work and it was brilliant, it was genuinely brilliant, and she had not looked at him once with anything that resembled the thing he had seen in her eyes the last time they had been in a room together. That look he had tried, for five years, to stop thinking about. There was none of that now. There was nothing. Just that clean professional courtesy that she wore like armor and wielded like a scalpel.

He did not know which was worse. The look she had given him when she left, or the sound of her voice on the phone. Both of them said the same thing and said it clearly and without cruelty, which somehow made it worse than cruelty would have.

He had expected anger. Honestly, he had steeled himself for it. Anger he could work with. Anger meant something was still there, some live wire, some feeling that hadn't finished burning. What he had not prepared for was the absolute coldness that emanated of her. The complete absence of emotions.

He picked the phone up again. Put it down. Picked it up.

He did not call.

Instead he stood there in the middle of the room with his phone in his hand like an idiot, and he thought about the papers on the table earlier. The way she had reached across and taken them from him with both hands, her grip firm, no hesitation. Like she was taking back something that had always been hers.

He almost threw the phone.

He stopped himself. He set it down. He rolled his neck once and breathed and was in the process of talking himself into some version of composure when he heard the door.

It opened quietly and a figure moved through it and he turned.

Lena.

She was in a robe, her hair loose, and she read his face the way she always did, quickly and accurately, with that particular attention that had always made her good at knowing when something was wrong.

"You look terrible," she scoffed.

He arranged his face into something easier. "I'm fine."

"But I saw you staring blankly and you were pacing."

"I'm fine, Lena."

"You were pacing when I came in. I watched you through the gap." She came further into the room and sat in the chair near the window, pulling her feet up, watching him. "What happened?"

"Nothing happened. Just had a long day."

She looked at him for a moment with the expression that meant she did not believe him and was deciding whether to press it. Lena had always known when to press and when to let a thing sit, and she studied him now with those clear eyes and he held her gaze and kept his face still.

"The grant meeting," she said. " how did it go? Hope there wasn't a problem?"

The question came as a shock because how was he going to say indeed there was a problem. How on earth was he going to say his divorced wife of five years was sitting across from him today with a look that didnt even show she ever knew him.

"No problem. Everything went fine."

"Then why are you standing in your hotel room at two in the morning looking like someone just walked over your grave?"

He almost said something. He could feel it at the back of his throat, the shape of the words, and he swallowed them back down and looked at the window instead.

"Caleb."

"I said I'm fine, Lena."

She went quiet. He heard her shift slightly in the chair. A minute passed, maybe two, and the silence between them became uncomfortable.

He turned from the window.

He looked at her. She was watching him,

He hesitated. The question was there, had been there since the moment he had looked up and seen that face across the table from him, and he had been holding it back all evening, through the rest of the meetings, through dinner, through the hours after. He had not let himself ask it because asking it meant something.

But it was two in the morning and she had called him Mr. Wren and hung up, and he was standing here in a hotel room that suddenly felt very small.

"Lena." He kept his voice even. Careful not to show any of the emotions ravaging his heart and tearing his mind apart. "When did you last hear from your sister?"

The room changed.

He watched it happen on her face. The stillness that moved across it, immediate and total, the way a body goes still when it hears something it was not expecting.

Her feet came down from the chair slowly. Her eyes fixed on his and they were wide now and searching, trying to read what was behind the question, trying to understand why, after five years of absolute silence on the subject, after five years of her own careful navigation around a name that they had both learned not to say in each other's presence, after five years of him never once asking, never once bringing it up, never giving her any reason to think it was anything other than finished and buried and done—

Why, now, at two in the morning, Caleb Wren was asking about Nora.