Arianne said it the way she said most things that mattered, in the middle of a sentence about something else entirely, so that Gio almost missed it.
"—and Meridian wants the second-quarter numbers by Friday. Also, Sam told me she’s been thinking about walking away from you. Not the industry. You." She closed the folder in front of her and looked up. "I thought you should hear it from someone who isn’t going to make it a performance."
Gio’s pen stopped against the notepad, mid-letter, and stayed there. Something crossed his face in the half-second before he looked up, gone again before Arianne could name it, tucked behind the same expression he wore for board meetings and blackmail threats alike.
"Understood," he said, because it was the only word available that didn’t require more of him than he had ready.
He’d built a career on not answering right away only when the pause served a purpose. This one had served nothing except giving something away he hadn’t meant to, and he knew it the second the word left his mouth too fast to be anything but a cover.
Arianne didn’t push. She never had, not since the night in her office two years ago when she’d named the avoidance out loud and he’d left the room without answering that either. She let him go now the same way, back to his own office, door closed, the second-quarter numbers open on the screen and completely unread.
He’d told himself for eight years that the reason was her name.
Samantha Pemberton. Gilbert’s sister. A face on skincare campaigns in six countries, a name the tabloids had already decided belonged next to someone equally photographed, someone whose family didn’t come with an asterisk. He’d said the words to her once, in a hotel room he remembered in more detail than he’d ever admitted to anyone, her mouth warm against his and his own hands already pulling back. Because you’re Samantha Pemberton. He’d meant it as an explanation. She’d taken it as a verdict.
It had never been true, not the way she heard it. Hƒe knew that now, had known it for longer than he’d let himself examine. The name wasn’t the problem. He was a man with no legal claim to the family that raised him, a boy three older brothers had used as a punching bag until a woman thirteen years old decided he belonged to her instead, and somewhere in the accounting of what he was allowed to want, Sam had always landed in the column marked not for people like you. He’d built the excuse about her name because the real one was worse. The real one meant admitting he thought himself smaller than he was, and Gio did not admit things. He handled them, filed them, moved past them.
Except he hadn’t moved past this one. Eight years, and every version of moving past it had failed the same way — a case would close, a crisis would end, an empty hour would open up in his schedule, and his mind would go straight to her without asking permission. Sam laughing at something Julian said. Sam’s face across a table at Gilbert’s wedding, the one night he’d let himself watch her longer than safety allowed. Sam holding Lexx at the birthday party, that unbearable half-second where their eyes had met over the baby’s head and neither of them had looked away first.
He had told her she was Samantha Pemberton like the name itself disqualified him. What he’d never said, what he was only admitting to the closed door of his own office now, was that her name had never been the obstacle. It was the reason. She was Samantha Pemberton, precise and unimpressed and entirely unwilling to let him disappear into a room the way everyone else allowed him to — the only person who had ever looked at his silence and called it what it was instead of mistaking it for competence. She’d gotten past every wall he’d built for exactly that purpose, and he’d spent eight years punishing her for succeeding at the one thing he’d never let anyone else attempt.
She was walking away because he’d given her nothing to stay for. That was the whole of it, stripped down to something he could finally hold without flinching.
Gio pulled his phone toward him and set it back down twice before he stopped pretending he needed to think about it.
Arianne had given him permission once, years ago, on a night he’d never used it. You can be selfish for this one thing. You don’t owe me your future. He had put that away too, in the part of himself that handled everything he wasn’t ready to open. He was ready now, or close enough that the difference stopped mattering.
He wasn’t going to call her. A phone call was a task, and this had stopped being a task the moment Arianne said Sam’s name in the middle of a sentence about quarterly numbers. This required a room, her face, no folder between them to hide behind. It required him showing up the way he’d never once let himself show up for anything that wasn’t Arianne’s schedule or someone else’s crisis.
He stood, straightened his jacket out of habit rather than need, and looked at the closed door the way he’d looked at problems for fifteen years — as something with a solution, if he was willing to do the work of finding it.
For the first time since the hotel room, this wasn’t a task he could hand off, complete, and file. It was the one thing in his life he’d never let himself want out loud.
He wanted it now. That was new. That was, he suspected, the only part of any of this that had ever actually mattered.
Gio pulled his phone out and called Daryll instead of walking anywhere, because Daryll ran Sam’s schedule the same way he ran Franz’s, and the Meridian Artists offices were on the other side of the city from Rochefort Group. For once Gio intended to use that access for himself instead of for someone else’s protection.
Daryll picked up on the second ring, already mid-sentence to someone else in the background before he covered the phone and gave Gio his full attention. "Give me one second." A door clicked shut on his end, the background noise dropping away entirely. "You never call me directly. This must be good."
"Where’s Sam tonight?"
Daryll didn’t ask why. He’d managed enough of these people long enough to know which questions came with a story attached and which ones just needed an answer. "Charity thing at the Whitmore. She’s presenting an award. Out by nine if the press doesn’t corner her after."
"Tonight isn’t for later."
A pause on the line, the kind that meant Daryll was recalibrating something. "Eight years, and you pick tonight."
Gio’s grip on the phone tightened a fraction. "She told you."
"She tells me everything. That was the arrangement when she signed with me. I don’t get blindsided by her personal life showing up in a headline I didn’t see coming first." Daryll’s tone carried no judgment either way. "Eight years, a rejection, a hotel room. She gave me the timeline, not the emotional accounting. She doesn’t do that with me. I decided what to do with it, which was nothing, because it wasn’t mine to fix."
"I didn’t know that was part of the deal."
"It’s part of every deal I make. I don’t manage anyone’s career around a surprise I could’ve prepared for." Daryll’s voice held steady, matter-of-fact rather than pointed. "I wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up to you. That was never my place."
"Arianne told me something I should have heard a long time ago." Gio checked his watch out of habit rather than need. "I’m not waiting for a better version of the timing. There isn’t one."
"No," Daryll agreed. "There never is with these things. You just walk in anyway." Keys clicked on his end, already texting the venue’s security contact before Gio asked for the favor. "I’ll get you past the press line. What happens after that is yours."
"That’s all I need."
"Gio." Daryll’s voice steadied, the teasing dropping out of it. "It’s about time."
Gio didn’t answer that either, but for the first time in eight years, the silence wasn’t a wall. It was a man leaving a room to go get something he wanted.