She didn’t yearn.
She didn’t sit alone in a hoodie from university, typing and deleting “you good?” like a character in a bad breakup montage.
Harper cracked her neck, opened her laptop, and began typing with the kind of focused rage that powered most of her best work.
The article was shaping up nicely. It was elegant, scathing, a quietly damning indictment of the Hawthorne Foundation’s so-called charitable endeavors. She’d traced some of the donation patterns, shell corporations, and board appointments that all pointed to one thing. The Hawthorne Foundation was political leverage disguised as philanthropy.
What she hadn’t added yet were the parts that only Sebastian could decipher, Charles Hawthorne’s full influence network, Swiss accounts and other nearly untraceable companies.
Because, if she was being honest, she didn’t want to be the one to force him to talk about all the ways in which he’d been used, betrayed. Not after she’d seen him, just once, late at night, standing outside her building, vulnerable, like he wasn’t sure whether to knock or disappear.
She hadn’t invited him in. But part of her had wanted to.
And the other part of her still hated that she had.
She stared at her draft. Read the last line. Deleted it. Rewrote it. Deleted it again.
She needed more. More evidence. More context. More courage,maybe.
And she needed him to come back in one piece.
Harper rubbed her eyes. The glow of her laptop was the only light in her flat, casting long shadows across her desk. It was past midnight, and she was still thinking about Sebastian Hawthorne.
Had she learned nothing in five years?
Five years.
It felt impossible that it had been that long since she first saw him across a glittering room, surrounded by power players and pretending not to enjoy the attention. Holding court like he was born to it.
Which, of course, he was.
She leaned back in her chair and let the memory surface. It was uninvited and unwelcome, but stubbornly vivid nonetheless.
* * *
Five Years Earlier
Harper Sinclair smoothed down her blazer for the fourth time in as many minutes, trying to ignore the traitorous hammering of her heart. The price tag had induced actual nausea when she’d purchased it, but standing in the gleaming atrium of the Lumière Gallery, surrounded by people whose watches cost more than her education, she was grateful for the armor.
The Caledonian Tech Initiative launch was her first serious assignment since joiningThe Chroniclethree months ago. Until now, she’d been relegated to community interest pieces and the occasional lifestyle supplement. This was different. Cabinet ministers mingled with tech executives beneath installation art that looked like exploded chandeliers. Waiters glided between conversations carrying trays of champagne flutes and canapés arranged to resemble abstract sculptures.
Harper clutched her press credentials in one hand, voice recorder in the other, knuckles white with determination.I belong here. I belong here. Iabsolutely, definitely belong here.
“First time?”
The voice came from behind her, amused but not unkind. Harper turned to find a woman in her mid-thirties regarding her with wry understanding. She wore a perfectly tailored dress in deep burgundy, her dark hair cut in a sharp bob that accentuated clever eyes.
“Is it that obvious?” Harper asked, wincing.
“Only to another woman who started exactly where you are.” The woman plucked two champagne flutes from a passing waiter and handed one to Harper. “Margot Hayes. Political correspondent,The Times.”
Harper recognized the name immediately. Everyone in journalism knew Margot Hayes, the reporter who’d broken the Defense Minister scandal last year and whose political analysis was required reading throughout Caledonia.
“Harper Sinclair,” she managed. “The Chronicle.”
“I know,” Margot said, surprising her. “Read your piece on the housing development protest in Southwark. Good work; you got the community voices right without the usual poverty tourism.”
Margot Hayes knew who she was?