Genevieve's POV

"You can do this," I said, out loud, to no one, standing in front of the revolving doors of Mitchell Capital like they were a dare instead of an entrance.

A woman walking past in a sharp gray suit slowed just enough to give me a look.

"Talking to yourself now, are we?" I muttered at myself, mimicking the arch of her eyebrow. "Great. Excellent pre-interview strategy, Genevieve. Very professional."

I didn't care. Three years of rehearsing this moment in my head had apparently not been enough. I needed to hear it out loud, in my own voice, before I actually believed it.

"Say it again," I told myself. "You are qualified. You are ready. This building does not get to decide who you are."

I pushed through the doors and the lobby swallowed me whole, soaring glass ceiling, black marble floor stretching out like a runway, the specific hush of money that made you lower your own voice without anyone telling you to.

I remembered this lobby. I had stood in it a handful of times as a teenager, trailing after my father on some errand or other, thinking it was the most beautiful room I'd ever seen.

"It's smaller than I remembered," I whispered, though that was a lie, and I knew it the second I said it. It looked bigger now. It looked like a mouth. Open, waiting, ready to swallow me whole the second I said the wrong thing.

"Ms. Hart?"

The receptionist looked up from his monitor, headset fused to his ear like it had grown there.

"That's me," I said, stepping forward, grateful for the excuse to move.

"They're just finishing up in the main conference room. Mr. Mitchell said he'd come get you himself."

"Mr. Mitchell." I almost laughed out loud. "Right. Of course he did," I muttered, mostly to myself, smoothing down the front of my blazer for what had to be the tenth time since I'd left my apartment.

"Of course he did," I said again, quieter, like repeating it might make it less absurd. It didn't.

The fabric was still faintly creased despite my valiant, doomed attempt to steam it in my bathroom that morning.

"Thank you," I said to the receptionist, more evenly this time. "I'll just..." I gestured vaguely toward the seating area.

"Take your time," he said, already turning back to his screen. "They always run long."

"Wonderful," I said under my breath. "More time to lose my mind in a lobby. Fantastic."

I sat down near an absurd modern sculpture by the windows and gave myself a stern, silent talking-to.

"You are qualified," I told myself. "Six years in finance. A CFA. A recommendation letter that used the word 'exceptional' twice. Twice, Genevieve. This has nothing to do with whether you can do the job."

I believed every word of that. I'd believed it on the flight home from London, repeating it to myself over the Atlantic like a prayer.

"This is not about Bryan Mitchell," I said, firmly, like a verdict. "This is not about Bryan Mitchell."

I lasted about four seconds into that pep talk before I looked up and found the conference room.

It sat at an angle from the lobby, the far wall entirely glass, the kind of architectural choice meant to broadcast transparency and instead mostly broadcasting the fact that everyone in that room made more before lunch than most people made in a month. Six people sat around the table. I only had eyes for one of them.

"Oh no," I whispered, watching him.

He was standing at the head of the table, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, gesturing at something on a screen with the loose, easy authority of a man who had never once doubted a room would listen to him.

"Nope," I said quietly. "Absolutely not. We are not doing this right now."

Memory, I realized in that instant, had done me a mercy I hadn't asked for. Memory had softened his jaw. Memory had made him smaller, somehow, more survivable.

The real Bryan Mitchell was not smaller. The real Bryan Mitchell was, infuriatingly, more.

"You are being ridiculous," I told myself, quietly enough that I hoped the receptionist couldn't hear. "It's been eight years. Look away."

I did not look away.

His hair was shorter than I remembered, cut with more intention, threaded through at the temples with the first hints of gray that made him look less like the boy I'd fallen for at twenty and more like a man who'd had to grow into everything he'd once only promised to become.

"Look away," I repeated, more urgently this time. "Genevieve. Look. Away."

I felt heat climb up my neck, unbidden, my whole body apparently deciding to stage a rebellion against eight years of careful composure in real time.

"Not now," I muttered under my breath. "Not here. Not in the lobby, Genevieve, come on."

And then he looked up.

I don't know what made him do it, some shift in the air, some sixth sense, the universe simply deciding I'd had enough warning.

But his eyes lifted from the screen and found mine across sixty feet of marble and glass, and every ounce of composure I'd just finished lecturing myself into holding evaporated on the spot.

"Okay," I said, so quietly it was almost nothing. "Okay, he saw you. That's fine. People see people. It's a lobby. It's what lobbies are for."

I watched surprise cross his face, quick and unguarded, and then something else arrive right behind it that he schooled away almost instantly but not instantly enough.

I'd spent a childhood learning exactly what Bryan Mitchell's face did in the half-second before he decided to hide something, and I would have known that particular flicker anywhere.

"Okay," I breathed, to myself, my heart doing something entirely unprofessional in my chest. "Okay, that happened. That's fine. Everything's fine."

Nothing about my pulse agreed with that assessment.

He said something to the room I couldn't hear, and the nearest man laughed, and I watched the meeting begin to dissolve, chairs scraping back, papers being gathered. Bryan didn't wait for any of it to fully finish.

He was already moving, rolling one sleeve down as he walked, buttoning the cuff without looking at it because his eyes hadn't left me, crossing through the glass door of that conference room and out into the lobby with a stride that ate the distance far too quickly for my scrambled brain to prepare for.

"Compose yourself," I hissed under my breath, standing, smoothing my blazer one more useless time.

"You are a grown woman. You have negotiated with hostile boards. You can survive one hallway."

I did not feel like I could survive one hallway.

He crossed that entire lobby floor and stopped a precise, professional distance away, close enough to be warm, far enough to be deniable, the exact geometry of a man who understood exactly how many witnesses were in the room and extended his hand.

I stared at it a beat too long before I made my own hand move to meet it.

"You're staring at his hand like it's a legal document," I told myself internally, and then immediately regretted having a thought that specific, because his grip closed around mine warm and firm and unbearably familiar, and every ounce of my internal commentary simply short-circuited.

"Genevieve." My name in his mouth sounded rougher than I remembered, like he'd had to work to keep it even. His eyes moved over my face the way you'd read something you'd been waiting a long time to read again.

"Bryan." I managed to get his name out steady, which felt, in the moment, like a genuine professional achievement. "It's... it's been a long time."

"It has." Something flickered behind the polished executive mask, relief, maybe, or something hungrier that I honestly couldn't tell apart from it. Then the mask smoothed back into place, easy and charming, the exact expression I imagined he gave board members and nervous investors. "You look good, Genevieve. London agreed with you."

"Did it?" I said, my voice coming out lighter than I felt. "I mostly remember rain and spreadsheets."

"Sounds about right for you," he said. "You always did love a good spreadsheet more than you loved most people."

"That's not entirely fair."

"Isn't it?"

"Say something normal," I ordered myself silently. "Anything. A weather comment. A compliment about the lobby. Anything that isn't 'you look exactly like every dream I've spent eight years pretending I didn't have.'"

"The lobby's exactly how I remember it," I said instead, which was, at minimum, true.

"We redid the flooring two years ago," he said. "Nobody notices. I take a strange amount of pride in that."

"That tracks. You always did care more about details nobody else noticed."

"Did I?"

"You did. You used to rearrange my father's pens by color when you thought no one was looking."

"That was one time."

"It was at least four times, Bryan."

Something in his expression warmed at that, like I'd just handed him proof that some version of us, the old, easy, teasing version had actually survived the last eight years intact.

His hand was still wrapped around mine. Neither of us seemed to be in any particular hurry to let go of that fact, and I found, humiliatingly, that I wasn't either.

"Welcome home, Genevieve," Bryan said, and something in the word home landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water, as though this building, as though he himself, were a place I'd simply left by accident rather than on purpose. His hand tightened slightly around mine.

"That's a strange thing to call an office building," I said, aiming for lightness and mostly missing.

"Maybe." His mouth curved. "Doesn't make it less true."

"Careful," I told myself, silently, sternly. "You have not even had the interview yet. Do not fall apart in a lobby over a real estate metaphor."

"Are you always this sentimental with job candidates?" I asked him, out loud this time, grateful for something to say that wasn't the truth.

"Only the ones I used to know," Bryan said. "You're a special case."

"Is that supposed to reassure me or terrify me?"

"Depends how the interview goes."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

"Your desk," he continued, tipping his head very slightly toward the wall of glass behind him, toward an office with a nameplate reading B. MITCHELL, MANAGING PARTNER in brushed steel letters, "is right outside my office."

I felt my whole plan for staying composed quietly combust.

"Six feet," I said, before I could stop myself. "That's... is that a coincidence, or should I be worried?"

"Would it help if I said coincidence?"

"Not remotely."

"Then no. Not a coincidence."

"Bryan."

"Genevieve."

"You can't just say my name like that and expect me to keep functioning."

"Like what?"

"Like you have a right to."

He laughed a real one, warm and surprised out of him and I felt something in my chest do a slow, complicated flip that had absolutely nothing to do with my career and everything to do with eight years of unfinished business apparently deciding to reintroduce itself all at once, in a marble lobby, before I'd even had my interview.

"I should let you get to Diane," Bryan said, though he made no immediate move to actually release my hand. "She's brutal. Fair warning."

"I've survived worse."

"Have you?"

"I've survived you," I said, before I could think better of it. "I think Diane will be manageable by comparison."

"Ouch."

"You'll live."

"I don't doubt that for a second." His eyes held mine a beat longer than strictly necessary, something serious moving underneath the easy charm. "It's really good to see you, Genevieve."

"You too," I said, and meant it more than I was prepared to admit out loud, even to myself.

"For what it's worth," he added, quieter now, the charm falling away just slightly, "I hoped it would be you. When I saw your name on the candidate list. I hoped."

"You could have called," I said, and hated how much it sounded like an accusation.

"I could have," he agreed. "I didn't think I had the right."

"And now?"

"Now you're standing in my lobby about to interview for a job forty feet from my office," he said. "I figure the universe made the decision for both of us."

"That's very convenient for you."

"I'll take convenient."

He finally let go of my hand and stepped back, gesturing toward the elevator bank with the same easy authority I'd watched him command a room with minutes earlier.

"Good luck in there," he said. "Not that you'll need it."

"Careful," I said. "Compliments before an interview could be considered favoritism."

"Duly noted," he said, and the corner of his mouth curved again in a way that undid several years of hard-won composure in half a second. "See you on the other side, Genevieve."

I followed him across that marble floor telling myself, silently, one more time, that I could absolutely do this get through an interview, get through a job, get through working forty feet from a man who apparently still knew exactly how to make my whole careful composure collapse with a single word.

"You've got this," I told myself, one last time, as the elevator doors slid open. "You've survived worse than one impossibly handsome ex-something standing between you and a corner office."

I did not, even slightly, believe myself.

But I followed him anyway.