Page 5 of True Colors

I swallow hard and manage not to stumble on the one word I give him. “Yes.”

“Good.” He goes back to his screen, already thinking about something else. His subtext is crystal clear.

You’re not important, Anouk Starling.

I slip out the door, my chest tight, my breathing shallow.

This is why I like my numbers—they don’t humiliate you, spreadsheets don’t talk over you.

A truth I know—one I learned the hard way—is that analytical models don’t make you feel small, people do.

CHAPTER 2

Luther

“Get rid of her, Dot.” I lean back in my chair, fingers steepled behind my head as Dot Harper stands in front of my desk looking like she’d love to throw the laptop she’s holding at my face.

“No.”

I sigh. “Dot, you can’t leverage your relationship with my parents⁠—”

“Like I’d do that.” Her eyes flash. “But what I will do…is refuse to fire the best damn data analyst I’ve ever had.”

I exhale slowly. “She froze. In front of thirty employees.”

“She panicked,” Dot counters. “You caused that.”

My jaw tenses. I’m an executive, and my job is to ask questions. Her job is to answer them. How is her choking my fault?

“I asked her a basic⁠—”

“You kept pushing her while she was already overwhelmed. You did that on purpose.” Dot gives me a withering look. “Not everyone thrives under pressure.”

I say nothing, just wait for her to finish whatever she intends to say.

“She has a stutter, Luther,” Dot adds, her voice steady. “It isn’t incompetence. It’s a speech disfluency. She works incredibly hard to manage it, and most days she does. Today just wasn’t one of them.”

A stutter. Not incompetence. She has an actual physiological issue, and I walked all over her?

But still….

“HelixSphere can’t afford analysts who fall apart in front of clients.”

Dot lets out a laugh so dry it sounds brittle. “Clients don’t care how the sausage is made. They care about accuracy. Anouk delivers that. Every. Single. Time.”

I walk to the floor-to-ceiling windows, the bay sparkling beyond the glass, and force myself to stay on course, despite Dot’s irritating habit of making me second-guess myself with calm, well-reasoned arguments.

I don’t like being corrected, and I especially don’t like being wrong. But I get the uneasy feeling that I am not correct in my assessment of Anouk Starling.

She stood apart from everyone in that conference room, like she was on the outside of a circle that everyone else knew how to stand in.

Her long, straight, soft brown hair caught the light. She let it fall over her shoulders like she was using her mane to shield herself from the world.

Her features are gentle. Soft.

I think she looks younger than she is. I’ll have to look up her HR file to confirm DOB.

Her eyes…now they are spectacular. Green. Startlingly so.