Searching for the catch she was certain must exist, and finding, to her growing unease, none at all. One evening, waiting for a print out to finish, she asked him without any real expectation of an answer what he had wanted to become before he ever picked up a wrench for a living. Darius told her after a pause long enough that she thought he might not answer at all, that he had once studied structural engineering for 2 years before his daughter was born, and the tuition became a luxury he could no longer justify. He said it without bitterness, the way a man states a fact about weather rather than a wound, and Celeste found that harder to sit with than if he had sounded angry about it. She had never once in her life been forced to choose between an education and a child, and something in the plain honesty of his answer made her ashamed of how easily she had first dismissed him as nothing more than a uniform in her hallway.
From that night on, she stopped thinking of him as staff and started thinking of him uneasily and against every instinct her upbringing had trained into her as an equal. She found herself, in the days that followed, arranging small reasons for him to remain in her office a little longer than the work strictly required, a shared meal ordered in during a late review of documents, a question about his opinion on a matter that had nothing to do with ventilation systems at all. Darius noticed and said nothing about it directly, though he made no effort to shorten those evenings either. Neither of them named what was happening between them. Both too consumed by the danger circling Celeste's life to give it language, but it settled quietly into the space around their work all the same.
A warmth neither of them could fully explain away as simple gratitude. One night, working late over the mechanical schematics spread across her conference table, Celeste finally asked him directly why he was helping her when he had nothing obvious to gain and every reason to walk away from a fight that was not his. Darius answered simply that someone was hurting her. She pressed further, asking if that alone was truly enough reason for him, and he told her without hesitation that it was enough. Something in his certainty unsettled. the careful control she kept over her own emotions, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, Celeste felt the cold composure she wore like armor begin to slip.
That same night, working alone in a supply closet off the mechanical room, Darius identified a trace industrial compound in an air sample he had collected days earlier, a substance capable of producing symptoms remarkably similar to what Celeste had endured for 3 years. He could not yet prove who had introduced it or how long it had been circulating through the executive floor's air supply. And before he could gather a second sample to confirm his findings, the power across the entire executive level cut out without warning. In the sudden darkness, Celeste called his name once and received no answer at all. The lights returned moments later, but Darius was gone from where he had been standing, and Celeste found the door to the records room standing open when she was certain she had locked it herself.