Except it wasn't shredded. It was here in his email forwarded by someone who wanted him to see it. And the cover note said simply, "Before you believe she's different, you should know how you got in the picture." He did not call Victoria. He drove to work.
He put in 6 hours. He fixed a condensation issue on the east refrigeration unit. Completed a compliance inspection on dock 2, submitted three maintenance reports with the kind of meticulous documentation that meant no one in any future audit could claim they hadn't been informed. He did his job. He went home.
His phone had 11 missed calls. Three from Victoria. Two from a number he didn't recognize. One from his mother. Five from numbers with area codes he didn't recognize at all.
There was a voicemail from Victoria. He played it once. I know you saw it, she said. Her voice was controlled, but only just. I know about the email and I know what it says, and I need you to know, Darius.
I need you to hear me. I rejected that proposal. The day it landed on my desk, I told Renata to shred it. I never used it. I never intended to.
And whoever sent you that email used it specifically to hurt you at this specific moment for reasons that have nothing to do with you and me and everything to do with a board vote that someone is trying to manipulate. A pause. Please call me. He listened to it twice. Then he put his phone face down on the counter and started dinner.
He made pasta. Simple, automatic, the kind of cooking that didn't require him to think because the rest of him was thinking very hard about something else. He thought about the morning she showed up in his kitchen in his shirt. He thought about every conversation at the four-table coffee shop. He thought about soup at midnight and Amara's pink flowers and the way Victoria had said, "Honest or nothing is exactly the only deal I know how to make."
He thought about the document. He thought about the word asset. He put the pasta on plates. He called his mother back. He told her he was fine.
She said she knew he wasn't, but she also knew him well enough to know that he would talk when he was ready and she would be here when he was. He told her he loved her. She told him the same. He ate alone. The corporate event was the next evening, a Langford Logistics stakeholder reception at the Drake Hotel, an event that had been on the calendar for 2 months, an event that Victoria had asked him 3 weeks ago if he would attend.
He had said yes. He had said yes because she had asked him honestly and because he had made a decision about what they were and he intended to honor it. He still went. He did not wear the jacket that someone in Victoria's communications department sent of his apartment two weeks earlier a gesture that had seemed thoughtful at the time and that now felt like a costume, like staging, like a detail in someone's strategy document. He wore his own jacket, dark blue, the one he'd had for 3 years, the one that was his.