POV: Priya
He had left before I could answer.
That was the part I could not stop returning to. Not the argument — I had won the argument, cleanly, the way I won every argument I prepared for. Not the file, which was closed, which would stay closed.
Not even the last thing he had said, though the last thing he had said was sitting inside my chest like a stone I had swallowed and could not cough up.
Because I would like to talk to you. And I have not wanted to talk to anyone in a very long time.
He had left before I could answer, and the leaving was the thing, because it meant I had not had to decide what I would have said.
I sat in the conference room for eleven minutes after the door closed. I knew it was eleven minutes because I watched the clock on the wall the way I watched clocks during depositions — as evidence.
Proof that time was passing at the rate it was supposed to pass, even when the inside of my body suggested otherwise.
My hands were steady. They had been steady through the entire argument. They had been steady when I told him to leave Jasmine alone, when I laid out the paper trail, when I used his first name and felt the shift in the room like a change in barometric pressure.
They were not steady now.
I pressed them flat on the table. I noticed my pulse in my wrists. I noticed the heat in my face — not a blush, I did not blush, I had not blushed since I was twenty-two and a senior partner had told me I argued like a man and meant it as a compliment.
This was not a blush. This was the specific, infuriating physiological response of a woman whose nervous system had decided to betray her in an empty conference room.
I stood up. I gathered the file. I walked to my office and closed the door and sat behind my desk and did not open the file.
I was angry.
Not at him. At myself.
Because I had spent three months managing this man. Three months of careful, boundaried conversations — Aurora updates delivered within the scope Jasmine had approved, legal positions stated with precision, every syllable measured against the question of what could be used and what could not.
And somewhere inside those three months — I could not identify the exact moment, and the inability to identify it was the thing that enraged me most, because I was a woman who identified exact moments for a living — he had stopped being opposing counsel and become something else.
I ran through the timeline the way I ran through case files. Looking for the inflection point. The sentence where the story changed.
There was the call three weeks ago. He had asked about my work — not Aurora, not Cadence. My work. How I had come to it.
I had told him about my mother's divorce, the lawyer who had reduced twenty-three years of marriage to an asset distribution spreadsheet.
I became a lawyer because of that spreadsheet. Because someone should have looked at my mother and seen a person, not a column.
Jackson had listened. Not the way powerful men listened — with half their attention on what they were going to say next. The way people listened when they had nowhere else to be.
That was when my shoes got wet. And I had not noticed because I had been too busy watching his.
I opened my laptop. I pulled up the case notes. I read them without reading them — my eyes moving across the words while my mind replayed the conference room.
The way he had sat back when I dismantled the fiancée argument.
The way his voice had changed when he said Aurora's name — quieter, stripped of performance, as though the name itself required a different register.
The way he had looked at me when I told him to leave them alone. Not with anger. Not with the cold, strategic recalibration I had expected.
With something I did not want to name, because naming it would make it real, and I was not ready for it to be real.
I closed the laptop.
I knew what he was. I was ruthlessly, professionally clear on what he was and what he had done. A man who had tried to use his granddaughter as leverage. A man who had chosen power over his own sons. A man who had controlled his wife's medical decisions in her final weeks.
By every metric I would advise a client to use, he was a terrible risk.
And I was the woman who had told Jasmine to let me carry it. I was the wall between Jackson Blackwood and a four-year-old who drew horses with too many legs. I was the reason he could not file, could not send gifts, could not pick up a phone and call the apartment where Aurora slept.
That was my job. That was the architecture I had built.
And the man on the other side of it had just looked at me across a table and said he wanted to talk to me, and my hands had not been steady since.
I picked up my phone. Not to call Jackson. To call Jasmine.
She answered on the third ring. "Priya."
"Can we meet this week?" I said, and heard the careful, measured version of my own voice — the one I used when I was about to do something that required more courage than any courtroom had ever asked of me. "Not about the case. About something I need to tell you in person."
A pause. Jasmine heard things in pauses the way I heard things in testimony.
"Thursday," she said. "Morning. My apartment."
"I will be there," I told her, and ended the call.
I sat with the weight of what I was about to do.
Not confess — nothing had happened. No line had been crossed that could be measured in actions.
But I was going to sit across from Jasmine and tell her that the man who had threatened her daughter's future had walked out of a conference room today and left a sentence hanging in the air that I had not been able to put down.
That I had spent three months talking to him and the talking had changed something in me that I could not change back.
That I was angry about it, and confused by it, and frightened by the part of me that was neither angry nor confused but simply — awake. Awake in a way I had not been awake in years, and awake because of the worst possible man, and unable to make the wakefulness stop.
I was going to tell her because she deserved to know. Because the wall I had built between Jackson and Aurora was only as strong as my honesty, and if I kept this inside the wall, it would rot the foundation.
I looked at my phone. His name was still on the recent calls list.
Eleven minutes and fourteen seconds. The length of the call I had not made. The length of time I had sat in an empty conference room with unsteady hands and a pulse I could feel in my wrists.
I did not call him back.
But I did not delete the number.