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“I’m better at useful ones,” I reply.

“That’s not a denial.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Marcus laughs once and heads for the door. The room goes quiet after he leaves. I look down at the papers in front of me but don’t immediately start reading.

Theo has a wife waiting for him, a daughter expecting him in a school auditorium and a dinner table he plans to get home to afterward. Sebastian has Jane. Marcus has chosen work and seems comfortable with that choice.

I have never thought of my life as empty. It isn’t. The company grew. The family stabilized. The work expanded across continents, and responsibility became ordinary because there was always another decision waiting behind the one before it.

My personal life became simpler for the same reason. There was Vanessa. There were other women before and after her, but nothing that lasted because I never let anything become complicated enough to require more.

Then Blaire crosses my mind before I can stop the memory from creeping in. Not dramatically—just the fact of her.

I know she moved to San Francisco. I saw her name in an industry piece years ago, then again in a professional biography connected to a collection advisory firm. I have come across references to her work more than once since then.

I never looked beyond that. I never searched for an address, never tried to find out whether she married, whether she had children or who she might be seeing.

It would have been easy. That was precisely why I didn’t do it. I ended us. Regret did not give me the right to monitor the life she built afterward. And also, perhaps a part of me didn’t want to know if she moved on.

There are still moments I remember more clearly than I should; a late night in the library. The sound of her laughing when she stopped trying to be careful around me. The quiet that once felt easy between us. I leave it there. I pick up the next file and go back to work.

***

The following evening, I am still in the London office when my assistant appears in the doorway carrying a slim folder and a tablet.

“I have one more approval for you,” she says.

I look up from the acquisition memo in front of me.

“What is it?”

“Collections,” she replies. “It would normally go through the family office before it reaches this level, but the usual signatory is in Geneva and they were told you were here.”

I hold out my hand. “Leave it.”

She crosses the office and places the folder on my desk.

“They only need authorization to open the discussion. Nothing is being sold yet.”

“Fine,” I say.

She turns toward the door, then glances back at me.

“They said it isn’t urgent tonight.”

“That usually means someone wants it tomorrow morning.”

She smiles. “That was my interpretation too.”

“I’ll look at it.”

“Good night, Ross,” she says.

“Good night.”

The door closes behind her, and I finish the paragraph I was reading before pulling the collection file toward me.