Katherine rose from her desk and walked the short distance down the corridor to Martin’s office, her heels measured and unhurried against the polished floor, though her mind was moving considerably faster than her pace suggested. His assistant glanced up as she approached, opened her mouth to announce her, and then seemed to think better of it as Katherine simply continued past the desk and let herself in.

Martin was standing at the window with his back to the door, phone pressed to his ear, his voice low and clipped in the particular tone he used when a conversation wasn’t going the way he wanted it to. He glanced over his shoulder at the sound of the door, registered who it was, and ended the call within a few seconds with a curt promise to follow up later.

"Katherine." He set the phone down on his desk, his expression arranging itself into something neutral, practiced, the same composure he had worn since the launch. "I assume this isn’t a social visit."

"You’d assume correctly." She closed the door behind her, the click of the latch unusually loud in the quiet office. "The entire building is talking about Fiona, Martin. Not the leak, although that’s certainly part of it again now. The engagement. Caleb Reed. People aren’t whispering about it anymore. They’re stating it like established fact in the break room, in the elevators, in client calls if my assistant is to be believed. Morale is suffering. And I have heard absolutely nothing from you about how we intend to handle any of it."

Martin’s jaw flexed, almost imperceptibly, before his expression smoothed back into something unreadable. "There’s nothing official for us to handle. Fiona doesn’t work here anymore. Her personal life isn’t a Voss matter."

"Her personal life became a Voss matter the moment three floors of staff decided her engagement explains a leak we never actually proved happened in the first place." Katherine’s voice stayed level, but there was an edge beneath it now, the patience of someone who had spent the better part of a week absorbing other people’s anxiety and had very little left over for absorbing more. "I asked you about this weeks ago, when she first left, with no warning and no explanation any of us were ever given. You brushed it off. I let you, because I didn’t have anything solid to push back with. But now there’s an engagement appearing out of nowhere, two days after a launch nobody outside his inner circle even knew was coming, to a man whose company has been outpacing us at every turn this past year. I would like, just once, a straight answer from you. Did you know any of this was happening before the rest of us found out from the news like everyone else?"

For a moment Martin said nothing at all. His eyes moved past her, toward the window, toward the skyline beyond it, somewhere far outside the conversation they were actually having.

"No," he said finally, his voice quieter than before, and something in the way he said it made Katherine study his face a moment longer than she might have otherwise. "I didn’t know."

It wasn’t quite a lie. But it wasn’t quite the whole truth either, and Katherine, who had spent years learning to read the small gaps where Martin’s composure didn’t fully reach, filed that distinction away without saying so out loud.

"Well," she said instead, turning toward the door, her tone clipped back into something more businesslike. "I suggest we figure out what we are going to tell people, because right now the story telling itself on every floor of this building is doing far more damage than anything we could say to correct it."

She left without waiting for a response, the door clicking shut behind her, and Martin remained standing at the window for a long while after she was gone,Martin stayed at the window long after Katherine’s footsteps faded down the corridor, the door clicking shut behind her with a finality that seemed to settle into the room and stay there. The city spread out below him in its usual indifferent grid, cars moving in their patient lines, the late afternoon light flattening everything into the same dull gold it did every day at this hour. He had stood at this exact window a thousand times. He couldn’t remember the last time it had felt this much like a wall.

No, he had told her. I didn’t know.

It wasn’t a lie. He hadn’t known about the engagement, hadn’t known about Caleb Reed’s ownership of Moonshine, hadn’t known any of the specific, headline shaped facts that had detonated across every screen in the city two days ago. On those points he was entirely innocent, and he could repeat the denial to Katherine, to the board, to anyone else who asked, without a single flicker of guilt crossing his face.

What he hadn’t told her, what he had no intention of telling her, was that the words had cost him more than they should have to say out loud. That somewhere underneath the simple factual truth of them sat something else entirely, something he had spent two days trying not to look at directly, the way a person avoids touching a bruise they already know will hurt.

He sat down slowly at his desk, the leather chair exhaling under him, and let his eyes drift to the framed photo near the edge of the desk that he never quite managed to look at and never quite managed to remove either. Katherine, smiling, an arm looped through his at some gala neither of them had particularly enjoyed. The picture of an arrangement working exactly as intended. Their parents had built something efficient out of the two of them, two companies eyeing a merger long before either Martin or Katherine had any real say in the matter, and Martin had told himself for years that efficient was enough. That it didn’t need to be anything more than that, because very little in his life had ever been allowed to be more than efficient.

He thought of Fiona on that stage two nights ago, the ring catching the light, her face turned up toward Caleb Reed with an expression Martin had never once seen directed at himself in all the months she’d worked under his roof. He told himself it shouldn’t matter. He told himself that several times, in fact, with the same flat insistence he used when closing out a difficult quarter, as though repetition alone could make a thing true.

It hadn’t worked yet.

He remembered, despite every effort not to, the first time he’d seen her again after that night. She had walked into the interview room with her shoulders set in that particular careful way people held themselves when they were determined not to let anyone see how nervous they actually were, and for one disorienting moment Martin had genuinely wondered if he was imagining things, if exhaustion and a long week of meetings had simply conjured her out of memory and placed her across the table from him. Then she’d said her name, and something in her voice had confirmed it before her face fully had, and he had sat there for the length of one entire breath doing absolutely nothing, saying absolutely nothing, while his mind tried to reconcile the woman from that blurred, unplanned night with the composed, clearly talented candidate now waiting for him to ask his first question.

He had asked it anyway. Professionally. Cleanly. As though his pulse hadn’t just done something complicated and unwelcome in his chest.

He had told himself, then and in the weeks that followed, that hiring her was simply good business. Her portfolio had been genuinely strong. Her ideas during that interview had been sharper than half the senior staff he already had on payroll. There had been no reason not to hire her beyond the one reason he refused to examine too closely, which was that some part of him had wanted an excuse to have her nearby a while longer, to understand what exactly had happened that night and why it had stayed with him the way it had, long after he’d assumed a single unplanned evening would simply fade into the long list of things he didn’t think about anymore.

It hadn’t faded. He could admit that now, alone, in a way he had never once allowed himself to admit it out loud. There had been something in that night he hadn’t expected. Not just the obvious thing, not just the physical immediacy of two people who had both shown up at that bar carrying their own private wreckage and found, briefly, an anesthetic in each other. There had been a moment afterward, quiet, unplanned, when she’d said something about her mother, about how she used to make her tea a particular way whenever Fiona was upset as a child, and Martin had found himself talking back, telling her something about his own childhood he hadn’t spoken about to anyone in years, certainly not to Katherine, not in three years of a relationship built carefully around never asking each other anything too unguarded. It had surprised him, how easy it had been. How little he’d had to perform.

He had told himself it meant nothing. People said things they didn’t mean in moments like that. The defenses came down for an hour, and then the sun came up, and everyone went back to being exactly who they’d always been.

Except he hadn’t quite gone back. Not completely. He had carried some small, stubborn piece of that night with him through months of watching her work two floors below his office, through every meeting where he’d had to consciously redirect his attention away from the particular way she laughed at something a colleague said, through every late evening when he’d told himself there was no reason to linger near the creative floor on his way out, and lingered there anyway.

Now there was a ring on her hand and a stranger’s name attached to her future, and Martin sat in his office with the photograph of Katherine smiling up at him from its frame, and felt, for the first time in longer than he could comfortably trace, something that resembled grief for a thing he had never actually let himself claim in the first place.

It made no sense. He told himself that too, several times, turning the thought over as if logic alone could dismantle it. He had no right to this feeling.

He thought about calling Fiona. The thought arrived uninvited, fully formed, and he sat with it the way he’d been sitting with everything else tonight, examining it from a careful distance rather than acting on it. He had no real reason to call her. Nothing he could say would sound like anything other than what it actually was, an old wound reopening itself at exactly the wrong moment in both their lives. She was engaged. She was, by every account the entire industry had spent two days repeating, happy. Whatever brief, strange thing had passed between them in a hotel room many months ago belonged entirely to the past now, sealed shut by a ring and a public proposal and a launch night that had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

Outside, the city had begun shifting into evening, windows lighting up floor by floor across the skyline in no particular order, the way they always did. Martin sat with the quiet a while longer, turning the same useless question over and over without ever quite letting himself land on an answer. Not the question of whether he still felt something. He already knew that one, had known it for longer than he wanted to admit.

The question he couldn’t yet answer was what, if anything, a man was supposed to do with a feeling that had never been given any legitimate claim to exist in the first place.

He didn’t have an answer by the time the office finally went fully dark around him, the automated lights dimming on their evening schedule, leaving him alone in the blue wash of the city beyond the glass. He told himself, the way he had told himself so many things over these two strange days, that it didn’t matter. That it would fade, the way it should have faded the first time, the way feelings that had no business existing were supposed to eventually fade if a person simply gave them enough silence and enough time.

He almost believed it.