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“You’re in active negotiations. Seattle is offering real money. Ownership is scrambling to put together a counter. Every headline between now and the decision has implications.”

Then his eyes moved to me.

“And your work is the best this organization has had. The engagement numbers, the campaign direction, the sponsor response, all of it. I don’t want to lose that.”

He folded his hands on the desk. A corporate succulent sat between us, offering no counsel.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’m not here to define whatever this is. That’s not my place. But I need it managed before the press runs with a story neither of you controls.”

Evan spoke for the first time. “What does managed look like?”

“Discretion,” Silas said. “Not denial. Awareness. No public venues during the negotiation window. No content that could be misread. And if the story does run, we get ahead of it together rather than scrambling after.”

No content that could be misread.

Frame 187 flashed through my mind. Evan on the bench, tired and open, a truth I had no right to spend.

My hands stayed still in my lap.

I looked at Evan. He was doing the thing he did when processing something important: eyes focused on a point beyond the person speaking, running the math on variables the rest of us could not see.

Then he met my eyes.

The look lasted one second. It contained a question, an apology, and enough frustration to make the room feel too small.

I held his gaze. Gave him the smallest nod. Not agreement with Silas’s terms. Just acknowledgment.

I’m here. We’ll deal with this.

“We hear you,” I said to Silas, turning back. “The work stays clean. The rest is ours to figure out.”

Silas studied us for a moment, the same cataloging look he always wore, then nodded.

“Fair enough.” He opened the door, the universal signal for a meeting’s end. “For what it’s worth, I’m rooting for you both to get through this without letting everyone else decide what it means. I just need you to make my job possible while I do it.”

We walked out. The corridor was bright after the office’s strategic dimness, and I blinked against it like someone stepping out of a cave.

Evan walked beside me. Not touching. Not speaking. But present in a way that had geometry to it: measured pace, careful distance, the physics of two bodies aware of each other at the molecular level.

“McKinney’s future uncertain,” I said quietly, quoting the headline I had seen on the sports ticker that morning.

He exhaled. Not a sigh. An acknowledgment.

“It’s being discussed,” he said.

“Seattle?”

“Seattle.”

Evan stopped at the hallway junction and turned toward me. His face was doing the thing where it tried very hard to communicate nothing and instead communicated everything: the weight and the want.

“I don’t know what happens next,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

“But I’m not going anywhere. Not today.”

Then he walked toward the locker room, and I stood in the corridor with Silas’s warning, a reporter’s phone call, Frame 187, and the contract window pressing against the walls of a relationship we had not even built yet.