Thursday came faster than Olivia thought physics should allow.
One minute she was double-checking her notebook and pretending to listen while Raj pitched bad headline puns (*“Coding the City’s Heartbeat” is *not* happening, she’d told him*), the next she was watching the doors of TerraNova’s building loom closer through the window of a rattling cab.
She’d debated taking the subway—a quiet little act of ideological defiance. But the F train had decided it was feeling particularly chaotic this week, and she refused to risk being late.
“You sure this is the right place?” the cab driver asked as he pulled up to the curb.
Olivia looked up at the façade.
It had been a freight terminal once. You could still see the bones of it—the heavy arches, the thick columns—under the sleek glass and steel TerraNova had grafted onto it. Their logo—stylized city grid morphing into a circuit board—gleamed above the entrance.
“Yeah,” she said, more to herself than to him. “This is it.”
She paid, stepped out, and the city air hit her—colder up here by the river, with the wind knifing between buildings.
A small knot of protesters stood across the street, near the corner. Hand-lettered signs: *OUR DATA, OUR LIVES.* *NO MORE SURVEILLANCE.* *SMART CITIES, DUMB DECISIONS.*
A woman in a puffy coat chanted into a megaphone. “Whose streets?”
“Our streets!” the small crowd called back.
Olivia’s journalist brain flicked on, cataloguing details—the slogans, their faces, the fact that at least one of the signs misspelled “surveillance.”
She checked her watch. Ten minutes until two.
*Later,* she told herself. *If you get anything good with Jake, you can talk to them after.*
Inside, the lobby was all polished stone and light. High ceilings, a living wall of greenery, a reception desk that looked like it had been grown, not built.
“Hi,” she said to the woman behind the desk. “Olivia Martinez, here to see Jake—I mean, Mr. Morrison.” She slid her press badge across the counter like a peace offering.
The receptionist smiled with the kind of neutral warmth that said she’d been professionally trained not to react. “Of course. One moment.”
She tapped something on her tablet. Somewhere above, a soft chime sounded.
“Carla will be right down to get you,” the receptionist said. “Can I get you water? Coffee? Tea?”
“Water would be great. Thanks.”
A sleek glass appeared in front of her almost instantly, condensation beading on the sides. She took a sip. It tasted like the fancy kind you paid eight dollars for at Whole Foods—no traces of metal or chlorine.
Luxury, she thought wryly. Clean water out of a fancy tap instead of the slightly rusty one in her apartment.
“You’re early,” came a voice.
Olivia turned.
Carla approached, tablet in hand, navy blazer sharp enough to cut.
“I like to pretend that means I’m prepared,” Olivia said.
“Or anxious,” Carla replied, not unkindly. “Come on. We’ll do a quick walk-through.”
They stepped into an elevator that hummed upward so smoothly Olivia’s stomach only dipped once.
“You’ve been briefed on the parameters?” Carla asked.
“Yeah,” Olivia said. “No family and no romantic history. Everything else is fair game.”
“Within reason,” Carla said. “We’re not here to do a profile on his favorite burrito spot, either.”
“I don’t have the budget for that anyway,” Olivia said. “Our food vertical is struggling.”
Carla’s lips twitched. “You’re funny. That’s dangerous.”
“How so?”
“Jake has a weakness for people who can make him laugh.” She shot Olivia a look. “Don’t weaponize it.”
The doors slid open onto… another world.
The hum hit her first: conversations, keyboard clacks, the faint whir of some nearby devices. Natural light poured in from huge windows, washing over rows of desks and clusters of people bent over screens and whiteboards.
The walls were covered in maps. Not the decorative kind you bought at a home goods store, but city grids dotted with colored pins and digital overlays. Traffic flows, temperature gradients, shaded clusters Olivia guessed were something like “infrastructure vulnerability indices.”
She slowed, scanning.
Carla noticed. “We’re not giving you a full tour today,” she said. “We can arrange that for your infrastructure piece. Right now, you’ve got an hour with him in Conference 4.”
“I get it,” Olivia said. “No trade secrets.”
“It’s not that,” Carla said. “It’s… focus. He’s in launch mode. He’ll want to show you every bug he ever fixed if you let him.”
Olivia swallowed a sharp laugh at the unbidden image: Jake at twenty, shoving his old laptop toward her, eyes bright. *Look. Look what I did.*
She forced the memory away.
A few heads turned as they walked past—some curious, some distracted. No one stared. To them, she was just another journalist. One more person in a parade of cameras and notebooks that had been increasing over the last year.
Her palms started to sweat.
“You good?” Carla asked quietly.
“Fine,” Olivia said. “Just… taking it in.”
They stopped outside a glass-walled conference room. Inside, a long table, a couple of chairs, a screen on the far wall.
Empty.
“He’ll be here in a minute,” Carla said. “He’s wrapping something with the legal team. I’ll sit in, as we discussed, but only to time and redirect if needed.”
“I remember,” Olivia said. She’d argued halfheartedly when the condition had come through—*no private one-on-one without PR present*—but only because some part of her had wanted the option to say something off the record.
Now, the idea of a witness felt like a relief.
Carla’s tablet buzzed. She glanced down.
“He’s on his way,” she said. “You can go in. Get set up.”
Olivia stepped into the room.
The glass walls made it feel both private and exposed. She chose a chair facing the door, not the window, so she wouldn’t accidentally fixate on the city instead of the man she was here to interview.
She pulled out her notebook and pen, set her phone to record and placed it beside them. Her heart thudded, too loud for such a quiet room.
*Professional,* she told herself. *Ask your questions. Listen. Write. That’s it.*
The door handle clicked.
She looked up.
And there he was.
Jake came in without fanfare, no entourage, no theatrics. Just him in a charcoal suit that fit like it had been engineered, white shirt open at the collar, no tie. His hair was shorter than in the billboard photos, a little messy on purpose, like he’d run his hand through it on the way here.
He moved like he always had—economically, like he knew exactly how much space his body took up and refused to take any more.
For a second, everything else blurred—the glass, the buzzing tablet in Carla’s hand, the muted office beyond.
It was just the two of them, ten years older than the last time they’d been in a room together.
His gaze flicked from Carla to Olivia.
When their eyes met, the air shifted.
She saw it hit him—the recognition. The brief stutter in his smooth CEO expression. His pupils flared, just a fraction. His jaw tightened, then eased.
“Olivia,” he said.
Her name in his voice was a punch.
She swallowed and forced herself to stand.
“Jake,” she said. Her voice stayed mostly steady. She counted that as a win.
Carla’s eyebrows went up almost imperceptibly. She’d been told they’d “overlapped,” but clearly hadn’t expected quite *this* familiarity.
“Thank you for taking the time,” Olivia added, extending her hand like she hadn’t once tangled her fingers in his hair in the dark.
He looked at it for a beat, then took it.
His grip was warm. Firm. The contact sent a treacherous little jolt up her arm.
“Happy to,” he said. “Have a seat.”
He took the chair opposite her, leaving a polite professional distance between them.
Carla settled at the far end of the table, tablet at the ready. “We’re recording on our end as well,” she said. “Standard practice. Off the record will be explicitly agreed to by both parties if necessary.”
“Understood,” Olivia said.
Jake leaned back slightly, assessing her.
“So,” he said. “You’re at *Metro*.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You’re… doing okay too, I see.”
His mouth twitched. The ghost of the old smirk.
“Can we start with the questions?” Carla interjected smoothly. “Jake has a hard stop at three.”
“Sure,” Olivia said, flipping open her notebook. “We’ll get right into it.”
She looked at her first question.
*Let’s start at the beginning. You grew up on West 19th…*
Her throat closed for a second. Not because of the question itself, but because she knew that street so intimately she could still map every crack in the sidewalk from memory.
She lifted her gaze.
“Let’s start with the beginning,” she said. “You grew up in South Side. West 19th. How does a kid from that block end up here?”
For a second, something flickered in his eyes. Wariness. Amusement. Maybe both.
“Slowly,” he said. “Then all at once.”
She didn’t smile. “Walk me through ‘slowly.’”
He exhaled. For the next few minutes, his answers were smooth, well-practiced. The beats she’d expected—parents who worked too much for too little, school teachers who told him he was “smart but unfocused,” the first time he got his hands on a computer that wasn’t in a school lab.
He talked about the public library, about sneaking extra time on the computers there. About coding as an escape.
“It was something I could control,” he said. “The neighborhood, the buses, the heat in our apartment? All out of my hands. The code… it did what I told it, or it told me exactly where I messed up.”
“You dropped out of college,” she said. “A decision most people around you called ‘reckless’ at the time.”
His gaze sharpened. “Did they?”
“Your advisors, your professors,” she clarified. “I’ve read the profiles. They quote them.”
“Right,” he said, some tension easing. “Yeah. Reckless. Stupid. Irresponsible.”
“You disagree?” she asked.
“I think it was all of those things,” he said. “And also necessary.”
“Necessary,” she repeated.
He tilted his head. “You going to echo every word I say like that?”
“I find it helps turn vague statements into actual answers,” she said.
His mouth curved, reluctant. “You haven’t changed.”
Heat climbed her neck. “We’re not here to talk about me.”
“No,” he said. “We’re not.”
Silence hummed between them for a moment.
She pushed forward.
“Necessary how?” she asked.
“Look around,” he said, spreading his hands. “This doesn’t happen if I stay. I was teaching myself things in my dorm room that I couldn’t get in class. I’m not saying no one should go to college. But for me? Time was the resource I couldn’t waste. I had a window before I had to start sending money home.”
“Did you?” she asked. “Send money home?”
His jaw flexed.
Here was one of the fault lines. Personal. Family.
“No family questions,” Carla said quietly, eyes on her tablet.
“That wasn’t a family question,” Olivia said. “That was a question about trade-offs. Financial pressure is part of your origin story. You bring it up all the time.”
Jake cut in. “I sent money when I could,” he said. “It was never enough.”
There was a weight in the way he said it that made her pen pause.
“Not enough for what?” she asked softly.
He looked at her, gaze suddenly direct, like they were alone and not flanked by corporate glass and a watchful PR director.
“For the electric bill,” he said. “For rent. For the idea that maybe my little brother wouldn’t have to work night shifts just to be able to pay for community college.”
Her chest tightened. She hadn’t expected him to give her that much, not so soon.
“Is that what drives you now?” she asked. “Making sure other people’s little brothers don’t have to do that?”
“That drives policy,” he said. “TerraNova is infrastructure. It’s… bigger than my family.”
“That sounds like a line,” she said.
His eyes narrowed. “A line?”
“Something you say because it plays well in a quote,” she said. “I’m asking about *you*, Jake. Not the press release.”
“Ms. Martinez,” Carla said warningly.
He held up a hand without looking at Carla.
“You want honesty?” he asked Olivia. “Fine. Yeah, my family is part of it. So is the fact that I watched my whole block deal with shitty buses and flickering lights while other parts of the city got fixes overnight. So is the fact that I used to stand outside city hall with classmates holding protest signs, and no one looked us in the eye when they walked past.”
He leaned forward slightly, forearms on the table.
“I’m building TerraNova because I’m tired of systems that treat people like glitches,” he said. “If we do this right, the next kid who writes a complaint about a broken streetlight doesn’t have to wait three years for someone to fix it—because the system knows it’s broken before they do.”
Her heart hammered. She scribbled furiously, even though she knew she could pull the quote from the recording later.
“This is the part where I’m supposed to challenge you,” she said. “Point out that private companies controlling public infrastructure leads to all kinds of concerns about accountability and access.”
“You can point that out,” he said. “I’ll agree with you. That’s why we build in oversight.”
“What about the criticism that you’re installing a surveillance panopticon one ‘smart sensor’ at a time?” she asked.
He gave a small, humorless laugh. “Ah, the panopticon. I thought that would take at least fifteen minutes to come up.”
“It’s on people’s minds,” she said. “There were protesters outside when I came in.”
“I know,” he said. “We monitor protests as part of our risk assessment.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “I really hope you’re joking.”
“Half-joking,” he conceded. “We don’t ‘monitor’ them like some supervillain. But if there’s a protest that might disrupt traffic patterns, the city wants that data. We provide it.”
“And your personal take?” she asked. “On people who say you’re enabling a surveillance state?”
“My personal take is that we built a system that can count how many people cross an intersection without storing their faces,” he said. “We work with civil liberties watchdogs on every deployment. We’ve turned down contracts with cities that won’t agree to our privacy standards. Does that get us less money? Yes. Do I care? Less than I care about not being the villain in some dystopian YA novel ten years from now.”
“Nice line,” she said.
“It’s not a line,” he said. “It’s my baseline for not being an asshole.”
A huff of laughter escaped her.
There he was.
Carla cleared her throat. “This is good,” she said. “But we’re veering into the weeds. Olivia, you said you wanted to get into the human story as well.”
Olivia resisted the urge to glare at her. The human story was where the weeds lived.
“Right,” she said. “Let’s talk about… risk.”
He sat back, wary again.
“Dropping out was a risk,” she said. “Starting TerraNova was a risk. Betting everything on version 3.0 is a risk. How do you decide which ones are worth taking?”
He was quiet for a second.
“Cost-benefit analysis,” he said finally.
She waited.
“And gut,” he added. “And… I don’t know. The question I kept coming back to at twenty was: *Can I live with myself if I don’t try this?* At thirty, it’s more: *Can I live with myself if I do this and it hurts people I care about?*”
“Has it?” she asked. “Hurt people you care about?”
His eyes met hers, something unreadable in them.
“That’s a family question,” Carla said quickly.
“Not necessarily,” Olivia countered. “It could mean investors. Employees.”
“Or ex-girlfriends,” Jake said, very softly.
The air left the room.
Olivia’s hand tightened around her pen.
“You put those off-limits,” she said.
“So I did,” he said.
They looked at each other.
There it was again—that underlayer of electricity that hadn’t dimmed as much as she’d hoped over ten years.
Carla, oblivious or just willfully ignoring it, glanced at her tablet. “You’ve got about thirty minutes,” she said. “Maybe shift to TerraNova’s future roadmap?”
Olivia forced herself to look away from Jake.
“Sure,” she said. “Let’s talk about version 3.0. You’ve built a company on making invisible systems visible. What happens when people start to see *you* as the system?”
He blew out a breath, tension easing into something like a rueful smile.
“Then I’ve screwed up the messaging,” he said. “Because this isn’t about me. I’m just the guy who got pissed off enough to start tinkering with the machine.”
“Plenty of pissed off guys never get past tweeting about it,” she said. “What makes you different?”
“Stubbornness,” he said. “An allergy to sleep. And I had people who… pushed me.”
“Who?” she asked. “Mentors? Friends?”
He hesitated.
She knew who he was thinking about. Because she was thinking about them too. Nineteen, on a freezing campus bench, arguing about whether his app idea was actually feasible. Him trying to give her his hoodie; her refusing and then taking it anyway ten minutes later.
“Professors,” he said.
A little sting. Fair. She’d walk around the landmines too, if she were him.
“And enemies,” he added. “People who told me I was an idiot. That helped.”
“You seem like the type who gets motivated by ‘no,’” she said.
“You would know,” he said before he could stop himself.
Silence dropped heavy and sharp.
“Do you… need a break?” Carla asked, looking between them.
“No,” they both said at the same time.
Carla’s mouth flattened. “Okay then.”
Olivia dragged in a shallow breath.
“Let’s talk criticism,” she said, pushing forward. “There are people who say TerraNova is just gentrification’s best friend. That you’re making cities more efficient for people who can already afford efficient lives.”
“We deploy in public systems,” he said. “Buses, subways, water. We don’t do private commuting apps for hedge fund guys.”
“No,” she said. “But you put data in the hands of governments that may or may not use it to serve everyone equally. Do you ever worry that you’re just putting a nicer face on the same inequities?”
“Every day,” he said quietly.
She blinked.
He wasn’t deflecting. There was no PR sheen on that answer.
“Then why keep going?” she asked.
“Because walking away doesn’t make the inequities go away,” he said. “If we’re in the room, we can push back. We can build in friction. We can tell a mayor that, no, they can’t have face recognition as part of their package, even if they wave another fifty million at us.”
“And if you lose the contract because of that?” she pressed. “If a competitor says yes?”
He shrugged, but it wasn’t careless. “Then we lose it. And I sleep at night.”
“Nice line,” she said again.
He gave her a look. “You keep saying that like I have some PR goblin feeding me these in my ear.”
“You don’t?” she asked.
He huffed a laugh. “No goblin. Just too many late-night conversations with my own conscience.”
“And lawyers,” Carla added.
“And lawyers,” he conceded.
She checked her notes, flicking through questions.
There was one she’d written and underlined twice, then circled, then almost scratched out.
*If you could go back to that night, would you still choose the laptop over her?*
She would not ask that. That was not journalism. That was self-harm.
Instead, she said, “Do you think success has made you a better person, or just a more powerful version of who you already were?”
His eyebrows rose. “That’s your segue?”
“Answer the question,” she said.
He leaned back, thinking.
“Power doesn’t make you better,” he said slowly. “It just makes it harder to hide who you are. Money gives you options. Some people use it to build walls. Some use it to build… other things.”
“Like smart city platforms,” she said.
“Like that,” he said. “Or like shell foundations that quietly fund community centers without slapping their logo on every brick.”
Her pen froze.
He knew.
“Off the record,” she said, reflexively, heart thumping.
“Off,” he agreed.
Carla’s fingers tapped twice on her tablet, a pre-arranged signal.
“How did you know about that?” Olivia asked.
“I signed the check,” he said.
“I mean how did you know *I* knew,” she clarified. “I never mentioned it. Not here.”
“You wrote the piece,” he said simply. “About the center. Last year.”
“You read it,” she said.
He held her gaze. “I read everything with your byline.”
The world narrowed.
She hadn’t expected that confession to land in her chest the way it did.
“That sounds like a line,” she said, but the words came out thinner than she’d intended.
“It’s not,” he said. “I needed to know if the person writing about my company understood what it was like on the ground. You do. You always did.”
Heat flashed under her skin.
“You don’t get points for lurking on my articles, Jake,” she said, sharper than she meant. “You left my life a decade ago. You don’t get to suddenly pop back up and… and read me.”
“I didn’t ‘pop back up,’” he said. “Your editor called Carla. I said yes.”
“You could’ve said no,” she snapped.
“So could you,” he shot back.
They stared at each other, years of unresolved words vibrating between them.
“Okay,” Carla said, voice like a scalpel. “We’re officially off script.”
Olivia exhaled, long and shaky.
“You’re right,” she said to Carla. “Let’s pivot.”
She looked down at her notes, forced the lines of ink to steady under her eyes.
“Let’s talk about failure,” she said.
Jake gave a small, disbelieving laugh. “That’s a pivot?”
“You didn’t get here without failing at something,” she said. “What do you regret most?”
He sobered.
“Keeping this to professional regrets,” Carla interjected pointedly.
He looked at Olivia.
“Not listening sooner,” he said. “To people who told me I needed help. That I couldn’t do it all alone.”
“Business partners?” she asked.
“And others,” he said.
She bit her tongue.
“Can you give me an example?” she pressed.
“Early on, I thought bringing in outside investors meant losing control,” he said. “So I burned myself out bootstrapping instead of taking help that could’ve gotten us here faster, with fewer… casualties.”
“Casualties,” she repeated quietly.
He looked away. “Engineers who quit. Relationships. Sleep.”
“Is that what I was?” she asked before she could stop herself. “A casualty?”
The word hung there, heavy.
His eyes snapped back to hers.
“Off the record is still in effect?” he asked Carla without breaking eye contact.
“It is,” Carla said warily. “But—”
“Yes,” he said.
Her stomach dipped.
“Yes?” she echoed.
“Yes,” he said. “You were a casualty. Of my… inability to prioritize anything that wasn’t TerraNova. Of my ego. Of my belief that if I just worked hard enough, the people I loved would stick around and wait for me to finish building this thing.”
Her throat tightened. “You think I should’ve waited?”
He shook his head. “No. I think you did what you had to do to survive me at twenty-two.”
The rawness in his voice scraped at something inside her.
She hadn’t expected contrition.
Anger, maybe. Defensiveness. Or cool indifference—*We were kids, it doesn’t matter anymore.*
Not this.
“And now?” she asked, before she could stop herself. “If you’re so good at self-reflection now, would you… do it differently?”
He hesitated.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I’d at least have tried to sleep once in a while. Maybe take you out to dinner somewhere that wasn’t the campus taco truck.”
She felt a startled laugh clog her chest. It came out half-sob, half-huff.
“You think dinner fixes everything?” she said.
“No,” he said quietly. “I think listening does.”
Silence.
Carla shifted in her chair. “We should—”
“I’m not putting any of that in the piece,” Olivia said to her. “Don’t worry.”
“You can’t,” Carla said. “It’s off the record.”
“I know,” Olivia said. “I meant… I wouldn’t. Even if it weren’t.”
She looked at Jake.
“This story isn’t about us,” she said. “Not directly. It’s about what you’ve built and what it means for the city. I’m not going to turn it into some… soap opera reunion.”
He studied her face, searching for something.
“Why’d you say yes then?” he asked. “To this assignment.”
“Because it’s my job,” she said. “Because if I didn’t, they’d give it to someone who sees South Side as scenery, not home.”
His mouth softened, just a fraction. “That’s very noble.”
“It’s very practical,” she said. “I need the byline. And the paycheck.”
Some of the tension bled out of the room.
Carla glanced at her tablet. “We’ve got about ten minutes left,” she said. “Maybe we can steer back toward the future now?”
“Yeah,” Olivia said, clearing her throat. “The future. Let’s talk about… what happens when you’re not in every room anymore. TerraNova’s too big to be one man’s crusade. How do you ensure the company holds to the values you say you built it on when you’re not looking?”
He welcomed the shift, she could tell. His shoulders straightened; the CEO armor slipped back on.
“Governance,” he said. “Board structures. Ethics committees. Contracts that say we walk away if the city crosses certain red lines.”
“Red lines like surveillance,” she said.
“Like surveillance,” he confirmed. “Or like using our systems to prioritize services in rich neighborhoods at the expense of poor ones.”
“And when your shareholders push back because that costs money?” she asked.
“Then they can sell,” he said simply.
She blinked.
“You don’t care if your share price dips because you say no to a city?” she pressed.
He hesitated. “I care. But not enough to become the thing I built this company to fight.”
Carla shot him a look that said *we will be workshopping that line before you say it to *The Journal**.
Olivia leaned in. “You realize that’s very easy to say from a glass tower with a billion-dollar valuation,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s much easier to take the moral high ground when your rent’s paid.”
Her chest prickled. “Is that a dig at me?”
“It’s a dig at me,” he said. “You remember what it was like. Choosing between groceries and the electric bill.”
She did. She remembered splitting a grocery run with him in college and watching him put back a jar of peanut butter at the register because the total blinked higher than the cash in his pocket.
“So when people from back home see your face on magazine covers and still have to time their showers around when the hot water might appear,” she said, “what do you want them to know?”
He looked at her, really looked.
“That I remember,” he said. “That I’m trying. That I know ‘trying’ doesn’t fix everything, but it’s better than pretending those problems don’t exist now that I don’t live there.”
Her pen scratched.
Carla’s tablet buzzed.
“We’re at time,” she said reluctantly. “Jake—”
“Last question,” Olivia said quickly. “Promise. It’ll be the kicker.”
Carla hesitated, then nodded once. “One.”
Olivia tapped her pen against her notebook, heart racing.
“Okay,” she said. “Ten years ago, if I’d told you—you, on West 19th, coding in your bedroom—that someday you’d be here, with this, what would you have said?”
His mouth quirked.
“That depends,” he said. “Was it you telling me, or someone else?”
Her breath hitched. “Answer the question, Morrison.”
He smiled then. Not the polished CEO smile. Something smaller, realer.
“I would’ve asked if you were going to be there too,” he said.
Her heart slammed once, hard.
“And if I’d said no?” she asked, before she could stop herself.
He looked at her, eyes dark.
“Then I would’ve done it anyway,” he said quietly. “Because needing you and needing this… were never mutually exclusive. I just didn’t know how to have both back then.”
The words hung there, shimmering.
“Time,” Carla said softly, almost apologetic now.
Olivia tore her gaze away.
“Thank you,” she said, fingers tight around her pen. “For your time. And your… answers.”
“Thank you,” he said. “For your questions.”
They both stood.
The professional thing to do would be to shake his hand again. To gather her things, nod at Carla, and walk out like he hadn’t just cracked open a part of her she’d buried.
She held out her hand anyway.
He took it.
This time, his fingers lingered half a heartbeat too long.
“Off the record,” he said quietly. “If you ever want to ask the questions you *really* want to ask… you have my number.”
“I deleted it,” she said. “Years ago.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “Carla has it.”
She swallowed.
“We’ll see what I need for the follow-ups,” she said, pulling her hand back. “I have plenty for now.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said.
She turned to Carla. “I’ll be in touch with a fact-check doc in a few days. You can send any clarifications through my editor.”
“Of course,” Carla said, back in full PR mode. “We’ll look forward to it.”
Olivia walked out of the glass room on legs that felt a little unsteady.
As the elevator doors slid shut in front of her, she caught one last glimpse of him through the glass wall—standing in the middle of the conference room, looking out at the city and not moving.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She pulled it out.
*Raj*: how’d it go? did u make him cry?
She stared at her reflection in the mirrored elevator wall. Flushed cheeks, bright eyes. A twenty-nine-year-old woman who’d just sat across from the boy who’d broken her heart and found that the fracture lines weren’t as healed as she’d pretended.
*Olivia*: he didn’t cry. I might.
She added, almost as an afterthought:
*Olivia*: I got the story though.
The elevator doors opened onto the lobby.
As she stepped out into the cold New York air, protesters’ chants still echoing across the street, Olivia realized something unsettling.
The story she’d just started to write wasn’t the only one that had been set in motion.