What Imara knows

"He took the stairs," Imara said, setting down her fork with the deliberate placement of someone making a point through cutlery. "Yesterday and today. You take the elevator. He takes the stairs. Nia, that man is avoiding the elevator because of you."

Nia looked up from her salad. "How do you know he took the stairs?"

"Because Delia, his assistant, is a lovely girl, very chatty once you give her a compliment about her shoes, mentioned it in passing when I ran into her at the coffee station this morning." Imara picked her fork back up. "He took the stairs both days. A man who runs a fourteen billion dollar company and has an office on the fourteenth floor is walking down fourteen flights of stairs twice a day. That is not fitness. That is avoidance."

"Or he likes stairs."

"Nia."

"Imara."

They were at the Italian place three blocks from the office that Imara had been coming to since before Nia moved to Chicago and which had therefore become, by the logic of long friendship, theirs. It was a Tuesday evening and the restaurant was moderately full and the bread basket between them was already half empty because Imara ate bread without apology and Nia had stopped pretending she didn't.

"I'm not saying it means anything," Imara said, in the tone of someone absolutely saying it means something. "I'm saying it's a data point."

"It's a staircase."

"Everything is data, Nia. You know this. You work with numbers for a living." She reached for the bread. "He sent you those restructuring parameters at seven-fourteen p.m. the day he said end of day. The end of the day at this firm is six o'clock. He sent them forty-six minutes ahead of a deadline that was already the same day he set it. That's two data points."

Nia looked at her. "You're keeping a spreadsheet."

"I'm keeping a mental spreadsheet. Which is different and also more accurate." Imara broke the bread with the satisfaction of someone who had been thinking about this conversation since approximately six-forty-three that morning when Nia had called her from the office and mentioned, in passing, the restructuring parameters. "What I'm telling you is that whatever he is doing on the outside, the inside is not as controlled as he wants you to think it is."

"That doesn't change anything."

"I didn't say it changed anything. I said it was a data point." She looked at Nia steadily. "The question I'm actually asking and I'm asking it now because we haven't had a real conversation about this since Monday and it's Tuesday and things are moving faster than either of us planned for is how are you actually doing. Not operationally. Not professionally. You, Nia. How are you doing."

Nia was quiet for a moment. Outside the restaurant window Chicago moved through its Tuesday evening with the particular density of a city that never fully exhaled cabs and cyclists and a group of people in what appeared to be matching jackets moving with the purposeful energy of people who had somewhere to be and were mildly late getting there.

"I'm managing," she said.

"That's not what I asked."

"It's what I have."

Imara looked at her for a long moment. Then she refilled both their wine glasses and sat back and said, "Okay. Tell me what managing looks like."

Nia turned her wine glass once on the table. "It looks like getting up at six and going to the office and doing my job and picking up Seren and making dinner and putting her to bed and doing it again the next day." A pause. "Which is what it has always looked like."

"And the part where you see him every day in a professional setting while carrying a secret that could detonate your entire life?"

"That part I fit in between the portfolio reviews."

Imara almost smiled. "There she is." She leaned forward. "Okay. Seriously. The all-hands, the integration meeting, the elevator. Three interactions in three days. What's your honest read?"

Nia was quiet for long enough that Imara didn't push, which was one of the things about Imara that made her worth talking to she knew the difference between a silence that needed filling and one that needed space.

"He's different," Nia said finally.

"Different how?"

"Quieter. More deliberate. Like someone who has thought about what he's going to say before he says it rather than after." She paused. "He wasn't like that before. He was decisive, he was smart, but there was always this quality of momentum. Like he was moving too fast to fully land anywhere." She looked at her wine glass. "He lands now."

Imara was watching her carefully. "And that's harder."

"Significantly."

"Because the version of him that was moving too fast to land was easier to be angry at."

Nia looked up. "When did you get a psychology degree?"

"I've always had one. I just don't usually bill for it." Imara held her gaze. "Nia, I need to ask you something and I need you to actually answer it."

"You always need that."

"I mean it this time." She set down her wine glass. "Seren. Have you thought about what happens if this goes sideways? Not the professional piece I know you've thought about that. The Seren piece. If he finds out through someone other than you. If the timeline on this accelerates in a direction you haven't controlled."

The question settled over the table with the specific weight of something that had been present in the room since they sat down and had finally been named.

"Every day," Nia said. "I think about it every day."

"And?"

"And I don't have a clean answer. I have a series of contingencies that each depend on variables I can't fully predict." She looked at Imara. "What I know is that I am not telling him anything in the middle of an acquisition integration while we are in a professional relationship that I cannot exit cleanly. The timing has to be mine."

"And if the timing stops being yours?"

Nia picked up her wine glass. "Then I adapt."

"That's not a plan."

"No," she agreed. "It's a disposition. Sometimes that's all you have."

Imara looked at her for a moment. Then she picked up her own glass and said, "I hate it when you're right about things I wish you were wrong about."

"I know."

"I'm still keeping the mental spreadsheet."

"I know that too."

They split the check the way they always did. Imara paid for the wine because she always ordered the better bottle and considered it a personal responsibility, Nia paid for the food because the arrangement had been established in year one of their friendship and neither of them had ever suggested revising it.

Outside on the sidewalk the evening had turned properly cold in the way Chicago evenings did in October not gradually but decisively, as though the city had made a unilateral announcement about the season and expected compliance. Nia pulled her coat closed and they walked the first block together before Imara's car was waiting.

"One more thing," Imara said, stopping at the corner.

Nia looked at her.

"Stellan Ashford." She said the name with the specific precision of someone who had been waiting for the right moment to introduce it. "He's coming to Chicago next week for the board integration review. I know someone at the Ashford Group's New York office , we overlapped at a conference two years ago, we stay in touch occasionally." She paused. "She mentioned, not in a gossipy way, more in a careful way, that Stellan has been asking questions about the Chicago acquisition. Specific questions. More specific than you'd expect from someone whose involvement is purely board-level oversight."

Nia was very still. "What kind of questions?"

"The kind about personnel." Imara held her gaze. "About you specifically."

The evening foot traffic moved around them with the indifferent efficiency of a city that had places to be. Nia looked at the middle distance for a moment and then back at Imara.

"How specific," she said.

"Specific enough that my contact felt it was worth mentioning." A pause. "She doesn't know about Seren. Nobody in that world does. But Stellan is asking about your history with the firm, your tenure, your " She chose the next word carefully. " personal background."

Nia said nothing.

"I'm not telling you this to alarm you," Imara said. "I'm telling you because you said the timing has to be yours and I want you to understand that there may be someone working to take the timing out of your hands before you've decided what to do with it."

Imara squeezed her arm once brief, firm, the physical equivalent of everything she hadn't said. Then she turned toward her car.

"Imara," Nia said.

She stopped.

"If Stellan already knows " Nia's voice was steady, measured, betraying nothing. "What does that mean for Darian?"

Imara turned around slowly. The look on her face was not the one she used for reassurance.

"It means," she said quietly, "that the timing may have already stopped being yours."

She got in the car. The door closed.

Nia stood on the corner alone as the car pulled away, the cold wrapping around her like something with intention.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

Unknown number. Chicago area code. 

She almost let it ring out. She answered it instead because she had learned in the past five years that the calls she most wanted to avoid were usually the ones that mattered most. 

"Ms. Calloway." The voice was

male, smooth, and completely unfamiliar. "My name is Conrad Hale. I'm an attorney representing the Ashford family."

Nia stopped breathing.