Ethan’s pov
I used to eat breakfast in eight minutes, standing up, reading emails.
Now I sit down.
I don’t know when that changed.
I used to think sitting down for breakfast was a waste of good morning time, time I could use to answer messages or read the news or get ahead of the day before it got ahead of me.
Now none of that feels as important as it used to.
It started, I think, the week after the terminal, though I couldn’t point to a single morning and say that was the one.
It happened the way most things had been happening with Zara, gradually, then all at once, until I looked up one Tuesday and realized I’d been sitting at that table for twenty minutes with a cold cup of coffee and no memory of checking my phone even once.
My phone was right there on the table, screen dark, and I hadn’t even thought to look at it.
That was new for me.
A few months ago that would have been unthinkable.
“You’re actually eating,” I said, watching her work through a plate of eggs with something closer to appetite than she’d shown in weeks.
It was good to see.
For a while I had watched her push food around her plate and pretend she wasn’t doing it, and I had learned not to say anything about it because saying something only made her eat less.
“Don’t sound so shocked. It’s rude.”
“I’m not shocked. I’m relieved.” I took a sip of coffee that had gone lukewarm without my noticing.
“The ginger tea’s helping?”
“The ginger tea’s helping.” She glanced up at me over her fork.
“You didn’t have to tell the chef to start making it.”
“I know I didn’t have to.”
“You keep saying that. About things you didn’t have to do.”
“Maybe I like doing things I don’t have to do.” I heard how that sounded the second it left my mouth and didn’t bother taking it back, watching something flicker across her face that looked almost like pleasure before she covered it with a sip of tea.
She was good at covering things up.
I was starting to notice all the small ways she did it, the quick blink, the sip of tea, the way she looked down at her plate for a second too long.
Marta came through with the morning paper and a fresh pot of coffee, setting both down without comment, though I caught the small, knowing look she gave the room before she retreated back to the kitchen.
I’d noticed her doing that more lately.
I hadn’t decided yet whether it bothered me.
Marta had worked for my family a long time, long enough to know when something in this house had shifted, and I got the feeling she had her own quiet opinion about what that something was.
“What’s on your schedule today?” I asked.
“Lunch with Amara Okafor. The container insurance thing.” Zara said it casually, like it wasn’t the strangest sentence I’d ever heard cross her lips, a woman who six weeks ago had been serving drinks in a Manhattan lounge now discussing freight premiums with one of the sharpest minds on our board.
“She wants to keep talking numbers. I think she’s serious about it.”
“She usually is. Amara doesn’t waste time on people she’s not serious about.” I meant that.
Amara had sat through a hundred pitches in her time and walked out of most of them halfway through.
If she was giving Zara a second lunch, that meant something.
“That’s what I figured.” A small, pleased smile crossed her face, quick and unguarded, the kind she didn’t seem to know she was giving away.
“It’s strange. I spent years being told my opinion on business didn’t matter because I served drinks for a living. Now I’ve got a board member asking for my take on shipping insurance.” This chapter is updated first at NovelPing.
“Your opinion always mattered. People just weren’t paying attention.”
“That’s a generous way to put it.”
“It’s an accurate way to put it.” I meant it, more than the casual tone probably conveyed, and something about the way she looked at me afterward made me want to say more, though I didn’t have the first idea how to follow it without sounding like I meant something bigger than breakfast conversation.
I let the moment sit there instead, unfinished, the way I’d been letting a lot of moments sit there lately.
“What about you?” she asked.
“What’s your day look like?”
“Board meeting at ten. Marcus wants to walk me through what he’s found on the access logs before that, if he’s found anything new.” I rubbed the back of my neck.
“Then probably another three hours of Gerald trying to convince me the Kestrel fallout isn’t as bad as it looks.”
“Is it as bad as it looks?”
“Worse, honestly. But I’ve stopped saying that out loud in the boardroom. Bad for morale.” I said it lightly, but it wasn’t a light thing.
Every day this week had started the same way, with a new problem sitting on my desk before I’d even had my first cup of coffee.
“You could say it to me.”
I looked up at that, something in her tone catching my attention properly for the first time that morning.
“I know I could.”
“I mean it. You don’t have to perform certainty for me the way you do for the board.” She set down her fork, studying me with an attentiveness I wasn’t used to receiving from anyone who wasn’t billing me by the hour.
“I’ve watched you carry this alone for weeks now. You don’t have to keep doing that at breakfast.”
Something in my chest went soft and unguarded in a way I didn’t have a plan for.
“It’s worse than I’ve let on,” I admitted, quiet.
“Kestrel. The trust clause. Whoever’s behind both of them. I keep running lists of names in my head and every list circles back to people I’ve trusted my whole life.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“It is.” I hadn’t planned to say that either.
It kept happening lately, admissions slipping out over coffee that I wouldn’t have made to Gerald or Daniel or anyone else in my carefully managed life, and I still hadn’t worked out what that meant about the woman sitting across from me, or about myself.
“You don’t have to solve it alone, you know. Even if you can’t tell me everything.” She reached across the table, her hand settling briefly over mine, warm and steady.
“I’m not going anywhere. Not for five more weeks, at least.”
The reminder landed harder than she probably meant it to.
Five weeks.
I’d started doing math I hadn’t given myself permission to do, counting days the way I used to count deal deadlines, except this deadline didn’t come with a bonus at the end of it, just an ending I’d agreed to before I understood what I’d be losing.
“Five weeks,” I repeated, testing the sound of it.
“Something wrong?”
“No.” I shook my head, reaching for my coffee mostly to have something to do with my hands.
“Just thinking.”
“Something like that.” It wasn’t true, and I suspected she knew it wasn’t true, the same way I’d started suspecting things about her that she wasn’t quite saying either, both of us circling something neither of us had named out loud yet.
There was a whole conversation sitting under the surface of this one, and neither of us seemed ready to have it yet.
Noah’s name flashed across her phone screen, buzzing against the table, and she glanced at it with an expression that flickered, just briefly, into something tighter than the easy morning we’d been having.
She silenced it without answering.
“Everything okay there?” I asked.
“Fine. He’s just being Noah.” She said it too quickly, the way she’d been saying a lot of things too quickly lately, and I let it go the same way I’d been letting things go, telling myself it wasn’t my place to push on her family the same way I didn’t want her pushing on mine.
I noticed it anyway.
I noticed most things about her now, even the small ones she probably thought I missed.
“You know you can talk to me about him too. If something’s actually wrong.”
“I know.” She smiled, small and a little sad around the edges.
“Same offer goes both ways, apparently.”
“Apparently.”
We sat there a moment in a silence that didn’t feel like the empty, careful silence that used to fill this dining room before she moved in.
It used to be a quiet room.
Now the quiet felt like something shared instead of something empty.
“You’re doing it again,” she said, amused.
“Doing what?”
“Sitting here past when you’d normally leave.
I’ve timed you, you know.
First two weeks, you were out the door by seven-fifteen every morning, coffee in hand, barely a word.
Now it’s…” she checked her watch, “…seven forty, and you haven’t touched your phone once.”
I hadn’t noticed.
I checked my own watch to confirm it, and she was right, twenty-five minutes past my usual departure, a meeting with Marcus I should have already been prepping for sitting untouched in my head while I’d been perfectly content watching her eat eggs and complain lightly about Cordelia’s latest round of gossip.
Twenty-five minutes.
It didn’t feel like twenty-five minutes.
It felt like five.
“Huh,” I said, mostly to myself.
“Huh what?”
“Nothing. Just noticing.”
“Noticing what, exactly?” She tilted her head, curious now, setting down her mug to give me her full attention, and I found myself without a good answer, because the truth felt too large to say out loud over cold coffee on a random Tuesday.
“That I used to eat breakfast in eight minutes,” I said instead, which was true, just not the whole truth.
“Standing up half the time. Reading emails. I don’t remember the last morning I actually sat down like this.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“No.” I looked at her properly then, “It’s the opposite of a complaint, actually.”
“You’re staring,” Zara said, and I realized I’d been doing it for a full minute, thinking not about the company at all, but about how much I didn’t want six weeks to end.