No catch, Nathan said. Go put on the shirt, get some sleep. She changed in the bathroom. When she came out in his old gray t-shirt, hair down face scrubbed clean of the ruined makeup, no armor left at all. She looked 10 years younger and about a hundred times more human.
And Nathan had to look away because it wasn't his to look at. He'd made up the couch with sheets and the good blanket. She stood beside it, suddenly awkward. This titan of industry unsure how to lie down on a stranger's sofa. Nathan, she said, "Yeah, thank you. " She swallowed.
I don't I'm not good at this, saying things like this. I run a company. I don't thank you for coming for all of it. I won't forget it. Get some sleep, he said gently.
Everything's smaller in the morning. He turned off the lamp. He went to the hallway and then her voice small in the dark stopped him. He'll call in the morning. She said, "Adrien, he always calls the next day once he's decided I've had enough time to feel bad.
And he'll be charming and he'll be sorry, and he'll make me feel like I imagined the whole thing. He's very good at it. " A pause. How do I not answer when it rings? How do I just not answer? Nathan stood in the dark hallway for a moment.
You don't have to figure that out tonight, he said. Tonight, all you have to do is sleep. Tomorrow when it rings, you look at your refrigerator, not yours. Think about the one in there, the drawings, the dat. He heard her breath catch.
And you ask yourself if the man who's calling would ever in a million years put your drawing on his refrigerator. And if the answer's no, you let it ring. Silence. Then so quiet he almost missed it. Good night, Nathan.
Good night, Victoria. He didn't sleep much. He lay in his bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the radiator tick, and the rain finally taper off. And he did the math on what he'd done. There was a billionaire on his couch, his boss, the woman who signed the checks that paid for the peanut butter and the crayons and the roof over his daughter's head.
If this went wrong, if this got twisted, if the wrong person heard about it, he could lose everything. He knew that he'd known it in the truck and he'd known it at her building and he'd done it anyway. He thought about that, about why he'd done it anyway. And somewhere around 3:00 in the morning, lying there in the dark, Nathan Walker admitted something to himself that he'd been refusing to admit for a long time, longer than tonight, longer than he wanted to count. He cared about her.
Not the CEO, not the billionaire, her. The woman who ate lunch alone, the woman whose hands shook after meetings, the woman who'd cried in an empty conference room and thought nobody saw. He'd seen for three years. He'd seen. And he told himself it was nothing that a man like him had no business caring about a woman like that, that the whole idea was so far outside the lines of his life, it wasn't even worth the ache.