I wasn’t sure which was worse.
Chapter Five
Eliza
Dreaming about Valor was not part of my itinerary – but last night… had been a damn trip.
The elevator hummed up toward the office floor. I could see my reflection in the burnished elevator doors; crisp, cream-colored silk blouse with a bow at my throat, burgundy pencil skirt, black heels that made me look a full two inches taller than my actual five-five. Hair slicked back into the kind of low, architectural bun that said “control freak” in HR language but “try me” in mine.
My phone vibrated. Once, twice, five times rapid-fire. I didn’t even need to check, it was Margot, already on my case.
The only thing more reliable than my heels was Margot’s sixth sense for existential panic.
I ignored her, for now, even as the elevator opened and my excuse of dropped signal vanished. Stepping out, I made my way toward my office and rest of the floor materialized to judge my every move and compare it to the day before.
The glass walls amplified everything; failures, successes, sweat stains, red eyes. The only thing private in this building was your browser history, and even that was debatable.
I slid my keycard through the scanner, which gave a despondent beep. Once. Twice. It finally flashed green. The door to my office opened with a soft pneumatic gasp, like it was sighing at the effort of accommodating me again.
With measured steps and a deep hope not to bump into Valor this morning, I made my way to my door. Only when I was inside did I exhale.
My desk was a minimalist’s wet dream; no family photos, no clutter, just a laptop, a legal pad with my own feminine shorthand, and a single stress ball I never actually squeezed. The window behind me offered a panoramic view of the river and the brownstone horizon, but today the glass acted as a mirror; I could see the exhaustion in the set of my jaw, the slight tremor when I reached for the mouse.
I booted up.
Notifications began their relentless march across my screen.
MARGOT: Emergency status?
ME: Wouldn’t you like to know.
MARGOT: Don’t get sassy. I’m tracking the situation from my bed, wrapped like a human burrito in the weighted blanket you once mocked. Updates?
ME: Still have a job. For now.
MARGOT: “For now” isn’t going to cut it, babe. You need to SLEEP.
ME: I’ll sleep when I’m dead or promoted, whichever comes first.
The messages felt like a lifeline and a garrote, both at once.
I checked my calendar. Triple-checked, actually. Board review at 8:30, prep call with marketing at 7:15, and that mysterious “check-in” with Gabriel Valor at 9:45. Just the thought of him made my head ache in a special, dangerous way. He had the kind of presence that dominated the airspace, the kind you felt even before you saw him in the room. I’d spent years engineering the exact routines that would keep me from ever being caught off guard by a man like him.
The shared Google Sheet for the quarterly numbers was open in another tab. My cursor hovered over the total’s column, watching for discrepancies, decimal points gone rogue, numbers that no longer added up the way they did at midnight. Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Except; wait. My Monday at 1:30 call with the audit team wasn’t in the calendar anymore. I checked my email: no mention, no cancellation, nothing in the trash. My fingers moved on their own, opening every folder, searching for the meeting. It was gone. Like it never existed.
I pasted a smile onto my face and clicked into the audit channel.
ME: @audit just checking, did we move the 1:30 call today?
NOAH (AUDIT): wasn’t aware we had one
ME: Must be losing my mind. thanx
NOAH (AUDIT): lol join the club
I opened a new browser tab and pulled up the backup calendar I maintained for exactly this reason. The meeting was there, a perfect record, timestamped two weeks ago. Someone had scrubbed it from the official schedule, but not mine.