Before she can Breathe

"You're doing the thing," Imara said, dropping into the chair across from Nia's desk and setting down a coffee that was not from the office kitchen.

Nia looked up from her screen. "What thing?"

"The thing where you arrange objects." Imara pointed. "You've moved your stapler three times since I sat down."

Nia looked at the stapler. Then she put it back where it started. "I'm not doing anything."

"You absolutely are." Imara settled into the chair with the authority of someone who had been in this office often enough to know where everything belonged. She was wearing a dark green coat over a charcoal suit, and she looked exactly like what she was a woman who had walked into seven boardrooms this week and won in six of them. The seventh was still pending. "Talk to me."

"I have nothing to say that I haven't already said."

"You haven't said anything, Nia. That's the problem. I've been sitting here for four minutes and you've told me about the all-hands agenda and moved a stapler and that's the sum total of what you've given me." She leaned forward. "This is me. What's actually happening in your head right now?"

Nia looked at her for a moment. Imara had been her closest friend for six years they had met when Nia was still new to Chicago and still sharp in all the ways that fresh hurt makes a person sharp, and Imara was the one person who had never once treated her like someone who needed to be handled carefully. It was the thing Nia valued most about her. It was occasionally also the thing that made it impossible to be anything less than entirely honest.

"I'm calculating," Nia said.

"Calculating what?"

"Whether this is survivable without disclosure."

Imara's expression did not change. She had known about Seren's father for three years. She was one of two people outside Nia's immediate family who knew, and she had held that information with the particular care of someone who understood exactly what it cost.

"Operationally," she said carefully, "or emotionally?"

"Both. Start with operationally."

Imara picked up her coffee. "Okay. Operationally: the acquisition is done, which means Ashford Group controls the firm. You are a senior strategist with two direct reports and a portfolio that accounts for roughly eighteen percent of this office's managed assets. You are, in other words, not expendable. They're not going to clean the house in the first sixty days, that's bad optics and worse business. So your position is stable."

"For now."

"For now. Yes." She paused. "The question is whether anyone on the Ashford team is going to connect your name to his. You were married for eighteen months five years ago. It wasn't public there was no press, no announcement, no splash. The divorce was quieter than the marriage. Most people who weren't directly in that world wouldn't know."

"Most."

"The people who work closely with him would know." She held Nia's gaze. "Cressida Vane would know."

Nia nodded once. She had thought about Cressida at approximately nine-fifty-two this morning. Cressida Vane had been Darian's chief of staff for four years, which meant she had been in that role during the marriage, during the divorce, and in the years since. She was the kind of person who catalogued everything and disclosed nothing unless it served a purpose. Whether Nia's presence at this firm served any purpose Cressida was working toward was not something Nia could assess without more information.

"And emotionally," she said, bringing herself back.

Imara was quiet for a moment. "Emotionally," she said, "I think you're significantly more in danger than you're allowing yourself to believe right now." She said it without softness, because that was not what Nia needed and they both knew it. "You haven't seen him in five years. You have a four-year-old daughter who looks exactly like him. And in approximately three hours, you are going to be in the same room as the man and you're going to have to stand there and look like this is a professional inconvenience and not the thing that could dismantle everything you've spent four years building."

"I can do that."

"I know you can. I've watched you do harder things." She put her coffee down. "I'm not asking if you can do it. I'm asking if you've thought about what it's going to cost you to do it."

Nia considered that. Outside the window, the West Loop moved on with the particular industrious indifference of a city that had no interest in anyone's personal crisis. A delivery truck was double-parked on the corner. Someone was having an enthusiastic conversation on the sidewalk below, both hands gesturing.

"I think about the cost of the alternative more," she said finally.

Imara nodded. "Okay." She stood, straightened her coat. "Then here's what I think you need to do before two o'clock. You need to eat something that isn't coffee. You need to check in with Rowan, because he's going to hear about this acquisition and if he hears it before you call him it'll be worse. And you need to decide, before you walk into that room, what your position is."

"My position."

"What happens if he recognizes you? If he wants to talk. If he asks questions." She looked at Nia steadily. "Not the Seren question, you don't have to have that answer today. But what do you say to him when he's standing two feet away in a conference room and there's thirty other people in the room and your hands need to be perfectly still?"

Nia thought about the elevator she had imagined a hundred times in the past four years the abstract scenario in which she and Darian Ashford occupied the same space and she had to decide what her face did. The scenario she had constructed and reconstructed until it was almost manageable.

"I say hello," she said. "And I make it cost him nothing to see me. And I walk away first."

Imara studied her for a moment, then said: "Good. Eat something." She picked up her bag and headed for the door, then paused with her hand on the frame. "Call Rowan."

"I will."

"Before two."

"Imara."

"I know. I'm going." She left.

Nia sat in her office for exactly three minutes after that, not moving, not rearranging anything. Just sitting. Then she picked up her phone and called her brother.

Rowan answered on the second ring. He was in the middle of something, she could hear the particular quality of background sound that meant he was at a job site, the low drone of equipment and voices in a space that was still becoming whatever it was going to be.

"Hey," he said. "Everything okay? Seren?"

"Seren's fine. She's at school." A pause. "I need to tell you something before you hear it somewhere else."

A brief silence on his end. Then, quieter: "What happened."

It wasn't a question. It was the tone of a younger brother who had spent six years watching his sister navigate things that should not have happened to her, and who had developed a specific sensitivity to the kind of news that started with I need to tell you.

She told him quickly and without editorializing: the acquisition, the name on the announcement, the all-hands at two. She kept her voice even. She finished and waited.

The silence on his end lasted seven seconds, which she counted.

"He bought your firm," Rowan said.

"His company acquired it. I don't know how much he's directly involved in the operational"

"Nia." His voice was flat and controlled in the way it got when he was choosing his words before he said them, which was usually a sign that the words he actually wanted to say were not ones she'd appreciate. "He bought your firm."

"I heard you."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to attend the all-hands at two o'clock. I'm going to do my job. I'm going to handle this."

"And Seren."

"Is at school and not relevant to a two o'clock all-hands meeting."

"She's relevant to everything, Nia. She's relevant to every single day of the rest of your life"

"Rowan." She kept her voice even. "I know that. Nobody knows that better than I do. But I cannot solve every problem at once. Today I am solving the problem that exists today."

Another silence. She could picture him standing in whatever half-finished space he was working in, one hand in his hair the way he did when he was trying not to say the obvious thing. He had her bone structure and her stubbornness and considerably less patience for situations that required maintaining a surface while something more complicated happened underneath.

"I want to come to Chicago," he said.

"You're in Milwaukee."

"It's ninety minutes."

"Rowan"

"Nia." His voice dropped. "You're going to need someone in your corner who isn't going to tell you to handle it. You always handle it. You're incredible at handling it. I'm not asking you to fall apart. I'm asking you to let me be there."

She looked at her desk. The stapler was back in its wrong position. She didn't move it.

"Come Friday," she said finally. "I'll need you more by Friday."

A pause. Then: "Okay. Friday." He didn't say anything else for a moment. "Call me after two."

"I will."

"Immediately after."

"Yes."

"Nia."

"Rowan, I have to go."

"I know. I just" He stopped. Started again. "She's okay? Seren. She had a good morning?"

Something shifted in her chest, softer and less armored than everything that had been there for the past few hours. "She gave her yellow crackers to a boy named Micah because he was crying," she said. "She said she knew it was kind when I told her."

Rowan made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and something more tender than that. "Yeah," he said. "She's okay."

"She's very okay."

"Call me after two," he said again, and this time she said she would and meant it, and ended the call.

The all-hands started at two on the dot.

Marcus introduced the Ashford Group acquisition team: three members of the integration office, two representatives from legal, and the head of regional operations a man named Pearce who spoke in the measured cadences of someone who had delivered this particular speech before and understood that the people in the room were primarily concerned with whether they still had jobs.

They did, Pearce confirmed. Transition period. Standard protocols. Open-door policy for concerns.

Nia stood at the back of the room. Thirty-one people between her and the door. She kept her hands relaxed at her sides. She listened to Pearce and thought about the portfolio restructuring proposal she needed to finalize by Thursday and the conversation she was going to need to have with Jamie about the Henriksen meeting follow-up.

She was very good at this. At occupying her own mind completely enough that the other thing the waiting, the not-knowing had no surface to attach to.

*He might not even be here,* she thought. Companies send representatives. This is an acquisition team, not

The door at the front of the room opened.

Not dramatically. Not with any particular announcement. It opened the way doors opened in professional settings with ordinary purpose, by a man who was running approximately four minutes behind whatever schedule he had set for himself and who was not, in Nia's experience, someone who ran late as a rule.

Darian Ashford walked into the room, said something brief and quiet to Pearce, and looked up.

His gaze moved across the room with the practiced efficiency of someone who assessed spaces as a matter of habit. It swept left to right, caught, and stopped.

Nia held absolutely still.

He looked at her.

She looked back.

Neither of them moved for the length of a breath two seconds, maybe three, in a room full of people who were not paying attention to the back wall.

Then Pearce said something that required Darian's attention, and he looked away.

Nia's hands, at her sides, were perfectly still.

Her heart was doing something considerably less disciplined, but that was not visible to anyone in the room, and that was the only thing that mattered right now.

Hello, she had planned to say. Make it cost him nothing. Walk away first.

She had not planned for the possibility that she wouldn't need to say anything at all. That three seconds of eye contact across a conference room could constitute a conversation.

That it could feel, after five years of distance, like being recognized.

She walked out of the all-hands at three-fifteen with her phone in her hand and called Rowan.

He answered before it rang. He had been waiting.

"Tell me," he said.

"He was there," she said.

Silence.

"Rowan."

"I'm here." His voice was careful and quiet. "Are you okay?"

She stepped into the stairwell, away from the hallway, away from the footsteps and conversation moving past the door. The fluorescent light above her buzzed at a frequency she had never noticed before.

"I think," she said slowly, "that I need to be smarter about this than I've ever been about anything."

"You're already the smartest person I know."

"I need to be smarter than that."

He didn't argue. "Friday," he said. "I'll be there Friday."

She nodded even though he couldn't see her. "Friday," she agreed.

She stood in the stairwell for another thirty seconds after she hung up. Then she straightened her j

acket, opened the door, and walked back into the hallway like a woman who had nothing to hide.

She had been practicing that walk for five years.

Today, for the first time, she wasn't entirely sure she believed it.