Daydreams that led back to him.
How was I going to survive the trip?
Chapter Twelve
Gabriel
Rules, boundaries, schedules, discipline: I craved them, even when I hated them.
First thing in the morning, the apartment was always too cold, the city always too loud, my inbox always already full.
I scanned the day’s logistics on a triple-locked spreadsheet and told myself the problem was overload. Not distraction. Not the way Eliza’s silence, her absence, had wired itself directly into the back of my skull. Not the way I could remember every last syllable of our last conversation, and every micro expression on her face. And the feeling of her lips on mine.
It was a processing issue, that was all. Glitch in the system. One more thing to fix.
Today, I dressed with extra care, though I always did. Cufflinks, tailored shirt, tie with a half-Windsor so precise you could measure it in millimeters. I checked the window for the car, even though it was always on time. My morning routine was a sequence of deliberate motions engineered to fend off chaos. But the chaos got smarter.
Eliza wasn’t in early. That made sense; she’d been off since the kiss, and her face since had seemed locked somewherebetween “fuck you” and “I dare you.” I should have felt relief. Instead, every tick of her absence registered as an error in the system: missing variable, pending calculation.
The first time I saw Calvin, it was accidental. But not, really. He made a show of bumping into me at the espresso machine like he had yesterday, holding his phone like a nervous tic. He was in the off-brand version of a startup uniform: jeans, an unpressed shirt, jacket that might have cost more than my first car. The kind of look that said, “I don’t care about impressions,” but only if you ignored the fact that it was all meticulously planned.
“Valor,” he said, with a tight, too-bright smile. “You look like you haven’t slept.”
“Efficiency,” I said. “Sleep reduces the need for caffeine.”
He loaded a cup into the machine. “You know, you’re allowed to delegate, man. Even the robot overlords have maintenance windows.”
I didn’t bother with banter. “We need to talk about the team structure.”
His eyes narrowed, instantly suspicious. “This isn’t about me coming in at nine, is it? Because I could come in at six, but I’d just do it from bed.”
“It’s not about you. It’s about Eliza.” Even saying her name cost something. “She’s more than capable of handling the client side alone. In fact, I think my presence is only complicating things. It’s creating unnecessary overlap.”
His face went blank. That was never a good sign.
I pressed on. “We need clean boundaries. You want speed? Let her work without me on her heels. She’ll move faster.”
He sipped his coffee, then made a face like I’d handed him a hand grenade with the pin already out. “Wow. Okay. Didn’t expect you to fold this soon.”
“This isn’t folding. It’s efficiency. You want results? Let’s cut redundancy.”
A moment. “You ever consider you’re not actually redundant?” Calvin’s voice lost the usual lightness. “Valor, they’re only backing this deal because you’re involved. Because you’re a known quantity. You step out, and the whole thing gets sketchy, fast.”
“It’s not necessary. Eliza’s-”
He cut me off. “Don’t. Don’t say she’s fine on her own. We both know that. But it’s not about her. It’s about everyone watching. If you step back, they’ll think she’s impossible to work with. They’ll drop us.”
He set his coffee down, looked at me like he was waiting for me to blink. “If she blows this, it’s her ass. If you blow it, it’s mine. You think I want to bet on anyone else?”
That one stung, but I knew he was right. The optics were important, too.
Fuck.
On the surface, the workday was normal. Crisis, decision, optimize, repeat. But every window of downtime, every thread of inattention, ran straight back to the same closed circuit: Eliza.
The system “glitch” that crashed her proposal that day wasn’t random. I’d traced the logs, found the anomaly. A permissions override, midnight timestamp, someone inside the firewall. It was surgical. Meant to humiliate, but more than that, meant to raise questions about her competence.
Eliza was never careless. She lived on perfectionism the way some people lived on nicotine and rage. Whoever wanted to break her, they’d done their homework.