Page 20 of His Wall

Julian leaned back. The chair creaked. "I'll stay. I'll run the numbers tonight, and we'll have a draft for you both by tomorrow morning."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. I want to look at the goodwill line anyway. You two go play husband and gallery owner."

Declan clapped him on the shoulder on his way out. Nolan nodded at Julian and me, lifted his folder, and was gone.

I gathered the glasses onto the tray. Julian was still at the table with the laptop open in front of him, scrolling.

I waited until the door clicked behind Nolan.

"Mr. Cross."

He looked up.

"I'll stay. I can pull Halberg & Vance's public filings, organize the data, and run preliminary comps while you do the deeper analysis."

"Claire."

"You're going to be here until midnight alone. I don't mind."

He looked at me for a long second before the grin came up at the corner of his mouth.

"Fine."

The floor emptied between 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m.

Sarah waved at me from the elevator with a tote bag over her shoulder and a paperback in her hand. James from compliance came by with a folder for Julian that I took and set on his desk. The cleaning crew had started their loop at the south end of the floor, and the sun was coming through the west-facing glass at a low angle, lighting the carpet in long orange stripes.

I sat at the small round table in the corner of his office with my laptop open and a stack of printed filings beside it. He sat at his desk with his own laptop, a notepad, and a pen between his teeth.

For an hour, we worked quietly with only the fan of his computer, the small click of my trackpad, the pen tapping against the edge of his notepad when he was thinking, and the cleaning crew's vacuum far away on the other side of the floor.

He talked at the page sometimes. Not really to me. Out loud.

"Their margin held in '21. Why did their margin hold in '21?"

I looked up from my screen. He had not asked me. He was asking himself.

I answered anyway. "Note seventeen. They let two people go in November and didn't replace them until February."

He looked over at me. "That's a weak hold."

"That's a weak hold, yeah."

He wrote something down, looked at the page, and looked at me again. "How fast do you read these things, Claire?"

"Fast enough."

"That's not an answer."

"It wasn't a question."

The grin came back.

He looked at me a beat longer than he needed to. Then he put his head down and went back to the page.

I went back to mine, but my heart was in my throat.