Chapter 3

Three weeks. That’s how long it took Evan to show up at my office like nothing had happened.

I came back from lunch and he was just there, leaning against the wall by reception, holding flowers like a man in a commercial.

“Maya.” He pushed off the wall. “Hey. You look, “

“You can’t be here.”

“Five minutes.” He held the flowers out. Lilies. I’d told him once that I hated lilies. “Just five minutes. Please.”

Nina, at the front desk, watched the whole thing over her monitor with her coffee halfway to her mouth.

“Outside,” I said.

He followed me onto the sidewalk like a dog who knew it was in trouble.

“You changed your locks,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“That’s, “ He laughed, short and nervous. “That’s kind of dramatic, don’t you think?”

“You had a woman in our bed, Evan. Don’t talk to me about drama.”

His face did the thing. The wounded thing. The one that used to work.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “It meant nothing. You know me, you know I’d never, “

“I know exactly who you are. That’s the problem.”

“Maya.” He stepped closer and I stepped back, and he caught himself, hands up. “I’ve been a wreck. Ask anyone. I haven’t slept, I can’t eat, I keep reaching for my phone to text you and then I remember, “

“That you cheated.”

“That you left.” His jaw tightened. “You didn’t even let me explain.”

“There’s no explaining a woman’s heels by the couch.”

He dragged a hand down his face. I used to find that gesture charming. Now it just looked like a man buying time.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I deserve that. But things are different now. I’m different. The company’s blowing up, Maya, like really blowing up. We just closed a round you wouldn’t believe.”

“I don’t care about your company.”

“You should. You’d be proud.” He smiled, that bright easy smile that got him out of everything. “I’ve got serious backing now. Seriously. The kind of money that changes your whole life.”

“Good for you.”

“My best friend came through for me.” He said best friend like it was a title. “This guy, Maya, this guy is the real deal. Billionaire. The actual kind, not the Instagram kind. He believed in me when nobody else did.”

I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about how to get back inside without making a scene.

“He doesn’t even need me,” Evan went on, warming up now, because the one thing Evan loved more than himself was someone important loving him. “He could put his money anywhere. But he looked me in the eye and said, I’m in. "You know how rare that is?”

“Mm.”

“Here.” He pulled out his phone, thumbing through it, grinning. “We had this dinner last week. Closed the whole thing. Look.”

He turned the screen to me.

And the sidewalk tilted.

It was Evan, arm slung around another man, both of them holding glasses up to the camera. Evan flushed and laughed. And the other man, half a head taller, dark hair, that suit, that stillness even in a photo, looking at the lens like he was doing it a favor.

Him.

The stranger.

The man whose bottle I’d drunk and whose bed I’d left before dawn with my shoes in my hand.

“That’s, “ My voice came out wrong. I fixed it. “Who is that?”

“Lucas.” Evan beamed. “Lucas Hartwell. Hartwell Capital. I told you, the real deal.”

The name landed somewhere behind my ribs and just sat there, heavy and cold.

Lucas. He had a name. Of course he had a name. I was the one who’d made the rule, and now the rule was a joke, because the no-name stranger was standing in a photo with his arm around the man who’d cheated on me.

“You okay?” Evan tilted his head. “You went white.”

“I’m fine.”

“You sure? You want to sit, “

“I said I’m fine.” It came out sharper than I meant. I made myself breathe. “I just didn’t have lunch.”

He bought it. Evan always bought the easy answer.

“Anyway,” he said, sliding the phone back in his pocket, taking my whole world with it, “the point is I’m not the guy you walked out on anymore. I’ve got people who believe in me. I’ve got a future. And I want you in it.”

I stared at him.

He had no idea. That was the thing that nearly made me laugh, right there on the sidewalk. He stood there pitching me his shiny new life, his billionaire best friend, the man who’d changed everything, and he had no idea that I’d spent a night with that man three weeks ago.

And Lucas. Lucas had no idea who I was. To him I was a woman with no name who walked out before sunrise. He didn’t know his best friend’s ex was the stranger in his bed.

Two men, and I was the only one holding the whole picture.

It should have made me feel powerful.

It just made me feel sick.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Maya, come on, we were, “

“I have a meeting.”

“Just tell me you’ll think about it.” He caught my wrist, gentle, pleading. “Us. Just think about it.”

I looked down at his hand on my wrist. The same hand that had been on a stranger’s hip three weeks ago.

“Let go,” I said.

He let go.

I walked back inside before he could see my face do whatever it was about to do.

Nina was still at the desk. “You good? You look like you saw a ghost.”

“Close enough.”

I made it to the bathroom before my hands started shaking. Gripped the edge of the sink. I looked at myself in the mirror, the same mirror-face from the bar, the one that looked fine when nothing was.

It’s over, I told myself. One night. A stranger. You’ll never see him again. The city’s huge. People disappear in it every day.

I almost believed it. I was getting good at almost believing things.

I splashed water on my face, fixed my eyeliner, and walked back out to my desk like a functioning adult.

There was a meeting invite waiting in my inbox. Flagged urgent. From my boss.

I opened it.

New client. Big one. The kind that came with a champagne announcement and a company-wide email. We’d be handling the account directly, my team, starting Monday, prep meeting Thursday, all hands.

I read the client name three times before it stopped being letters and started being a sentence.

Hartwell Capital.

My stomach dropped straight through the floor.

I read it again, every word, like rereading would change the letters into something else. It didn’t.

I grabbed my phone, hands not even pretending to be steady now, and I scrolled, and there it was, the firm-wide email already out, already celebrating, the photo attached, a man in a dark suit shaking my boss’s hand.

The same dark suit. The same stillness.

Lucas Hartwell was my client now. Mine. My account. My name on the team list.

And there was no city big enough to disappear into.