Page 3 of Wreckage and Rain

I can't find it.

That's what finally does it, lying there dry-eyed in the dark. It isn't the dress or the word or her palm flat on the small of his back. It's that I have built an entire life and a whole career out of being the one who notices everything, who keeps the file, who can tell you the exact line where it all turned, and I can't find the day my husband stopped reaching for me. It happened at a rate set just under the rate I'd notice.

And the man it happened to me through is asleep eight inches away, breathing easy, his hand stopped halfway across the bed, and he couldn't tell you he had done one thing wrong.

Chapter 2: The Deal

Colt

Tidewater closes and everything changes. I've turned that sentence over enough times to hear how it sounds, and it sounds like every other junior in this building with a father two floors up and a deal he's certain is the one that finally cuts him loose from the name. I know how it sounds and I think it anyway. I feel it, this one is mine. Not eighty years of Bennet, not my father's hand on the back of my neck steering me into the room. They picked the pitch I built. They picked me.

I've had two years at this desk and still walk into like the man it belongs to is about to come back and want it. I open the slide deck and start in. By the third slide I'm grinning at my own work. My father would call that a weakness. I call it being right.

My phone goes off. Summer.

Summer

Have a good day. Love you.

Me

Love you too.

Send. Face down. Back to the deck. I have a deal to build, a wife who loves me, a father about to find out there is one thing I can do without his name on it. The title slide comes up and I'm into it and the morning goes.

***

Cheyenne knocks at eight thirty and is in before I get yeah out.

"Page seven." She puts a cold brew with oat milk down on the corner of my desk. "Q3 came in over projection. We pivot off growth instead of risk, push fifteen above target, and they thank us for it."

I flip to seven. She's right. I tell her it's good.

She doesn't say anything to that, just a look that means she already knew, there and gone. "The old projections were embarrassing us."

"Did the bridge slide this morning."

"Course you did." She drops into the chair across from me, all the way back, one leg over the other. "Calloway's numbers on three, your model on seven. We open on trajectory and let the risk slide sit in the back as the answer to the question they're already asking by the time they get to it."

"Somebody's got to think two moves out while you're being charming at people."

"That's the split. I charm, you scheme."

"Architect."

"Scheme's shorter."

"You're lazy. It reads as efficient because of the suit."

We go through the back half of the deck. She comes around to my side to see the last build, leans in close to the screen, walks me through it. I finish it and look over to tell her it's done and she's already looking at me. She doesn't look away. There's a smile on her face like the two of us are in on something. I don't know what. I do good work in this building all day and most of it goes off into the building and nobody says a word about it. When she looks at me like that it's like somebody caught it. I look back at the screen and find my place.

"I've got my father in five."

"Go. Don't let him push you again, you've moved him twice this week." She stands, takes the cold brew she brought me, leaves with it. At the door: "Bridge slide stays. No matter how tired you get."

I'm thinking about my father before she's out of the doorway.

***