Page 96 of Say My Name

I follow with the binders. Maya falls into step beside me. “You’re enjoying that far too much.”

“She was going to drop them again.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

She turns toward her desk before I can answer.

Elena waits in her office doorway. I set the binders on the credenza rather than her desk, keeping the width of the room between us.

“Thank you,” she says.

The words sound normal. The way she watches my hands doesn’t.

“You’re welcome.”

Her fingers flex once at her side.

We made the rule because the office gives every touch another meaning. I’m her boss. We built safeguards into the agreement so her career never depends on what happens between us. I know that, and so does she, but distance has become harder since we agreed to keep it.

Elena finds the flaw in the acquisition model eleven minutes into our working session.

“Your attrition assumption is too low,” she says.

I turn from the whiteboard. “It matches the target’s last two quarters.”

“Before their sales director resigned and took two regional managers with her.” Elena rotates her laptop toward me. “The base case needs another two points, and the downside case should assume we lose at least one more team during integration.”

I read the note she added to the model. She’s right.

“You already ran it.”

“I started after the binder incident.”

“You mean the binder failure.”

Her mouth tightens. “Are we working?”

“You tell me.” The challenge in my voice is deliberate.“”

I erase the last section of the board and replace the retention estimate. Elena updates the model while I work through the revised financing impact. We’ve operated like this hundreds of times, direct and efficient enough to lose two hours without noticing.

Today I track every shift in her chair and every careful inch she leaves between us. She crosses her legs beneath the desk, comes to the board to correct one of my calculations without letting our sleeves touch, then returns to her chair and abandons it again a minute later.

The revised numbers expose the weakness in the deal and lower the projected return. Neither of us protects a bad assumption simply because we spent the morning building around it.

“Run the revised downside case before we take this to the committee,” I say. “If the return drops below the threshold, we walk.”

Elena nods. “Agreed.”

I cap the marker and face her.

She isn’t looking at the whiteboard.

Her eyes move from my rolled shirtsleeves to the open collar where I loosened my tie an hour ago. When her gaze reaches my face and she realizes I’ve caught her, she holds the look.

The air conditioner runs quietly above us. Outside the glass, Maya crosses to the printer with a stack of documents while Elena and I remain fixed on each other.

I set the marker on the tray.