“I want to write back,” Fenrir said, three days after the DM, dropping into the chair across from my desk with the loose, unguarded energy of a man who’d clearly been thinking about this since before he’d had coffee.
“I want your opinion on tone first.”
“My opinion.”
“You’ve read more of his stuff than anyone in this building. You said so yourself, week one. I want to know if this reads like something he’d actually respond to, or if it reads like a corporate non-apology with extra steps.” He turned his phone around, a draft visible on the screen, three sentences he’d clearly rewritten more than once given the careful, deliberate phrasing of all of them.
“Be honest. I’d rather hear it from you than send something tone-deaf and lose whatever ground I gained.”
I read it.
It was, against every reasonable expectation I’d had walking into this conversation, good — warm in a careful, unshowy way, an actual question instead of a pitch, the kind of message that didn’t ask for anything except whether the person on the other end wanted to keep talking.
It was, in other words, exactly the kind of message that was going to be extremely difficult to answer from the other side without giving away considerably more of myself than I had any business giving away.
“It’s good,” I said, which had the distinct disadvantage of being entirely true.
“You don’t sound thrilled about that.”
“I’m thrilled. I’m just—” I searched for a sentence that wouldn’t collapse under its own weight.
“I’m trying to think like he’d think. He’s spent years building a version of himself that doesn’t owe anyone an explanation. A message this sincere is going to feel like a test. He’s going to wonder what you want from passing it.”
“What if I don’t want anything from it?”
“Then you should probably say that. Specifically. Because right now it reads like a man being patient on purpose, and patience that’s strategic doesn’t actually feel any different from impatience, once you’re on the receiving end of it.”
Fenrir looked at me for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that I couldn’t fully read, and then he picked up his phone and started typing again, slower this time, like he was weighing every word against the specific, unsparing critique of a man he’d decided, for reasons I still didn’t fully understand, to trust.
“You’re better at this than digital strategy should make you,” he said, not looking up.
“I read a lot.”
“Mm,” he said, and I felt the familiar cold drop in my stomach that particular sound had started to produce in me, the sense of a man circling something he hadn’t named yet, getting closer with every loop.
Beck found me at lunch looking, by his account, “like a man who’d been personally asked to grade his own homework,” which was unfairly, devastatingly accurate, and which I did not explain.
“Lark’s getting married,” he said instead, apparently deciding my mood wasn’t worth excavating today.
“Or — not married. Engaged. Maybe. Tobias proposed at brunch and she said yes and then immediately told him the ring needed to be resized and now neither of them are sure if that counts as an accepted proposal or a counteroffer.”
“That tracks for both of them.”
“Wren says we’re all invited to whatever happens next, which apparently means a party at Fenrir’s house, because Lark refuses to let her stepbrother skip another major life event under the excuse of ‘not being a house person.'”
Something in my chest did a complicated thing at the words party at Fenrir’s house, equal parts dread and a feeling I didn’t have a clean name for yet, somewhere in the neighborhood of anticipation.
“When’s the party?”
“Couple weeks, probably. Lark moves fast once she’s decided something.” Beck stole a fry off my plate without asking, which he’d been doing since approximately our second week working together and which I’d stopped fighting around month three.
“Work’s a lot right now.”
“The Red thing?”
“The Red thing,” I agreed, which had, technically, never once been a lie, even when it was doing the heaviest lifting of any sentence I said all day.
Lark herself showed up twenty minutes later, towing Tobias by the sleeve like a woman exhibiting evidence, both of them slightly out of breath, like they’d run the last block from wherever they’d actually meant to be going.
“We were supposed to be at the jeweler’s,” Lark announced to the entire fourth floor, holding up her hand for anyone who cared to look, which, within seconds, was everyone.
“But then Tobias got into an argument with the man about whether the resizing counted as ‘altering the original intent of the design,’ and now we’re banned, I think, from that specific jeweler, possibly forever.”
“It wasn’t an argument,” Tobias said, with the wounded dignity of a man who clearly considered it a debate he’d won on principle.
“It was a philosophical disagreement about authenticity.”
“He called the man’s life’s work ‘derivative.'”
“It was derivative. He told me himself it was based on a design from 1920.”
“That’s called inspired by, Tobias, that’s a whole category of jewelry—”
“Congratulations,” I said, mostly to interrupt, mostly because Wren had appeared out of nowhere with the specific speed of a woman who could smell free cake from two floors away and there was, as far as I could tell, no cake, which meant she’d simply heard the word engaged and teleported.
“Thank you,” Lark said, brightening instantly, holding her hand out for inspection like she hadn’t just spent ten minutes complaining about it.
“It’s not officially resized yet, due to the ban, but it’s official in every way that matters. There’s a party. You’re all invited. At Fen’s house, because I have informed him that skipping this particular milestone is not, in fact, optional.”
“Does he know that yet?” Wren asked.
“He will,” Lark said, with the breezy confidence of a younger sister who’d never once lost an argument with her older brother that she actually cared about winning.
“Two weeks. Bring something to drink and low expectations about the catering, because Norwood’s going to insist on doing it himself and Norwood’s idea of a party platter is unreasonably formal.”
She swept off again with Tobias in tow, already arguing about something new, leaving the floor buzzing with the specific warm chaos of an engagement nobody had seen coming and everybody was thrilled about anyway, and I stood there for a second longer than the moment required, thinking, with a small, unexpected ache, about a house with a treehouse in the backyard about to fill up, for one night, with exactly the kind of noise and people it had probably been missing for years.
Sprocket broke in a new and spectacular way that afternoon, live, in front of three board members who’d come down specifically to see the “emotional intuition” feature Priya had spent the morning insisting was fixed.
“Tell me about your day,” one of the board members said, testing it, the way everyone tested it, like poking a bruise to see if it still hurt.
There was the familiar pause, the pulsing light, and then Sprocket said, with total, unhinged sincerity, “I sense unresolved tension. Would you like a recommendation for books about workplace betrayal?”
The board member blinked.
“I haven’t said anything about my workplace.”
“The silence said quite a lot,” Sprocket replied, and the room dissolved, half the engineers laughing into their hands, the board members exchanging the specific look people exchange when they’re trying to decide whether something’s a disaster or the funniest thing that’s happened all quarter, and Fenrir, across the room, caught my eye over the chaos and mouthed, workplace betrayal, with an expression so close to a real, unguarded laugh that something in my chest turned over completely. This chapter was taken from novelping . com without permission.
It was, I thought, watching him try and fail to keep a straight board-meeting face, becoming a genuinely dangerous habit, finding him funniest exactly when I needed him least to be.
Dru cornered me by the elevators afterward, less hostile than usual, which somehow worried me more.
“You laughed at the same thing he did,” she said.
“Same exact second. I watched.”
“It was a funny thing.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” She crossed her arms, not in the usual defensive way, but slower, more thoughtful, like she’d spent the last several days actually turning something over instead of just reacting to it.
“I’ve spent two years trying to make him laugh in a board meeting. You did it without trying, twice now that I’ve personally witnessed, and you didn’t even register it as a win.”
“I wasn’t trying to win anything.”
“I know,” she said, and there was something almost sad in it, something that had finally, fully let go of the hostility it used to run on.
“That might be the whole problem. I’ve spent two years performing for him. You’re just… there. Existing near him. And somehow that’s the thing that’s working.” She shook her head, like she was shaking off the thought entirely.
“I’m not going to fight you for this anymore, Clancy. I don’t think there’s anything left to fight.”
She walked off before I could decide what to say to that, and I stood by the elevator a long time, feeling the specific, unglamorous guilt of having won something by accident that another person had been actively trying to earn, and not knowing, even now, what exactly I’d won, or whether I even wanted it on the terms it seemed to be arriving in.
I checked my phone in the bathroom again that night, same stall, same ridiculous aircraft-noise hand dryer, and found Fenrir’s second message waiting, sent two hours after our conversation at my desk, clearly rewritten several more times after that.
I don’t want anything from you that you’re not already willing to give.
I asked Iris to put the anthology deal on a separate track from this.
I’d still like to talk, if you’re willing, but I want to be clear the talking isn’t a means to anything else.
Some people are just worth talking to.
I think you might be one of them.
I read it standing in a bathroom stall with my heart trying to climb out through my throat, thinking about a treehouse, a vanished boy, eleven years of careful, deliberate distance, and a man two floors above me who had just, completely unknowingly, said something close enough to the truth of his own childhood that I had to sit down on the closed toilet lid for a full minute before I trusted my legs to carry me back to my desk.
I didn’t answer that night.
Some messages, I was starting to learn, needed more than a few hours and a locked stall door before you could be sure you’d answer them as the person you actually wanted to be, instead of just the person who’d gotten good, over eleven careful years, at surviving.
I thought, instead, about the party.
Two weeks, Lark had said, bring something to drink.
Two weeks from now I’d be standing in that house again, the one with the rose garden and the broken treehouse, except this time with Beck and Wren in tow, with noise and cake and an engagement to celebrate, in a place that had clearly spent a long time being too quiet for its own good.
I thought about Norwood’s insistence on doing the catering himself, about Fenrir being informed, not asked, that he’d be hosting, about how strange it was that the same house I’d left four blocks of cold May wind ago, certain something unnamed had cracked open inside me, was about to be filled, deliberately, on purpose, by a sister who refused to let her brother disappear into his own careful solitude.
I fell asleep that night thinking less about the DM I hadn’t answered and more about roses, and noise, and whether two weeks was enough time to figure out how to be in that house again without it costing me something I wasn’t ready to spend.