September brought with it cooler mornings and sharper deadlines.
Q3 was closing.
Q4 forecasts loomed.
BridgeOps had quietly expanded to twenty-two slides.
Maya’s document called *Exit Options* had sprouted dates and notes in the margins.
— *Revisit in December. See where Hart / board / Mom / Bridge are.*
She’d given herself that milestone.
Four months.
If by then she still felt this…pulled, this full, this certain, she’d set a real timeline.
Six months.
A year.
Something she could aim at instead of just circling.
She hadn’t told Marcus about the December marker.
She didn’t need to.
He was already giving her enough.
She didn’t want him trying to game her schedule to match his own.
“God forbid he be manipulative,” Kai said wryly when she confessed the kiss on FaceTime one night, glass of wine in hand.
“Yes,” she said. “He’s trying so hard not to be. I want to meet him halfway.”
Kai arched a brow. “So. The kiss.”
Maya groaned. “It was…a problem.”
“On a scale from one to ‘install spyware in his calendar,’ how big a problem?” Kai asked.
“Thirty-seven,” she said.
Kai wheezed. “Good for you. I’m proud.”
“Shut up,” she muttered.
“You going to do it again?” they asked.
“No,” she said firmly. “Not until I’m not on his payroll.”
“You’re really sticking to that,” Kai said, sounding impressed.
“I have to,” she said. “It’s the only way any of this has a chance of being…clean.”
Kai nodded. “Then we channel that energy into something else.”
“Like?” she asked.
“Your deck,” they said. “Your logo. Your rates. Your ‘fuck you, I’m worth it’ graph.”
She smiled.
“I’ll put that on slide thirteen,” she said.
***
One Tuesday morning, she walked into the office to find a single piece of paper on her keyboard.
In Marcus’s writing.
*“Slide 5: add examples of chaos. People need stories.”*
Below, he’d scribbled a list.
— Board meltdown over missing report. — Production company romantic disaster. — Nonprofit burnout pizza nights.
She smiled.
She loved that he’d internalized her stories enough to feed them back to her as business case studies.
She booted up her laptop and added a new slide.
*Case Studies: Before & After.*
For each, she wrote two bullet points.
— Before: 80-hour weeks, unpaid overtime, emotional blackmail. After: boundaries, processes, actual vacation days.
She didn’t name companies.
She didn’t have to.
Her brain did.
At nine, he called her into his office.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing to the conference table. “We’re doing something different at ten.”
“Different how?” she asked warily.
“You’re leading,” he said.
Her pulse skipped. “Leading what?”
“The Ops stand-up,” he said. “I’m not going.”
She blinked. “You’re…what?”
“I’m not going,” he repeated. “Hart scheduled a ‘spontaneous coffee’ with the board chair. I’m going to be there to make sure he doesn’t pitch a leveraged buyout between sips.”
“Your presence will keep him from being evil?” she asked skeptically.
“My presence will at least keep him from promising things we can’t deliver,” he said. “You’ll take the Ops meeting. You know their issues. You’ll make better decisions than I would on three hours of sleep and a simmering urge to strangle an activist.”
“I’m not…a VP,” she said. “I can’t…decide things.”
“You can,” he said. “Within scope. Which you understand better than half the people with that title.”
Her stomach fluttered.
“This is a test,” she said.
“Everything is a test,” he said. “Consider this one graded on a curve.”
She thought about it.
She could say no.
Push it back to him.
Let him carry the weight.
She didn’t.
“Okay,” she said. “You’ll back me up?”
“I already do,” he said simply.
He handed her a printed agenda.
Key points to hit.
Decisions that could be made.
Ones that should be kicked up to him later.
“You know this,” he said softly when she scanned it. “You’ve been running my life for a year. This is smaller.”
“No stakes,” she said sarcastically.
“Low stakes,” he corrected. “No one’s suing us in this meeting.”
“Yet,” she said.
He smiled.
“Go,” he said. “And try not to start a coup.”
She walked into the Ops stand-up at ten with her heart pounding and a chunk of buttered toast in her stomach attempting to become sentient.
“Where’s Marcus?” someone from Seattle asked, glancing at the head of the table.
“He’s dealing with Hart,” she said. “You have me.”
A ripple went through the room.
Not entirely comfortable.
Not entirely skeptical.
“Hart?” a Tacoma manager said warily. “Is he—”
“Breathing,” she said. “For now. Let’s talk about cranes.”
They worked through the agenda.
Shipping delays.
Maintenance windows.
Union follow-ups.
Every time a question came up that would usually default to *ask Marcus,* she paused.
Assessed.
Made a call.
“We’ll schedule the maintenance window for Saturday night,” she told Tacoma. “You’ll lose one shift. You’ll make it up next week. No double-shifts to compensate. Non-negotiable.”
There was some grumbling.
She held firm.
“When the crane falls, you lose more than a shift,” she said. “We learned that. We’re not going to learn it again.”
No one argued.
At the end of the meeting, as people filed out, the Seattle manager—middle-aged, practical, with a keen eye—lingered.
“You did good,” she said.
“Thanks,” Maya said, surprised by how much the words warmed her.
“I’m not just saying that,” the woman went on. “We’ve had execs sit in that chair for years who treated us like lines on a chart. You know what’s happening on the ground. That matters.”
Maya swallowed.
“It’s my job,” she said.
“It’s more than that,” the manager said. “Don’t let him burn that out of you.”
“Him who?” Maya asked, though she knew.
“Whoever,” the woman said. “Bosses come and go. You—people like you—are the ones who keep things from collapsing.”
She left.
Maya sat there for a minute, alone in the conference room, letting it sink in.
She mattered.
Not just as an extension of Marcus.
As herself.
That, she thought, was the point.
BridgeOps.
Exit plans.
Boundaries.
All of it came back to this: not dissolving into someone else’s agenda, no matter how beloved.
Her phone buzzed.
Marcus: *Hart tried to pitch a “friendly spin-off.” I laughed in his face.*
She smiled.
Maya: *Ops survived without you. No one died. Tacoma hates me a little.*
Marcus: *Good. They respect you then.*
Maya: *They said I know what’s happening “on the ground.”*
Marcus: *You do. That’s why you’ll terrify your clients. In a good way.*
Warmth unfurled in her chest.
She stood, grabbed the agenda, and went back to her desk.
The day rolled on.
She scheduled. She answered. She plotted.
At five, Oliver appeared, leaning on her desk like he had a right to be decorative.
“I heard you ran Ops today,” he said.
“Like a benevolent dictatorship,” she said.
“Any beheadings?” he asked.
“Just light maiming,” she said.
He smiled.
“Proud of you,” he said simply.
She blinked.
He didn’t say that often.
“Thanks,” she said.
He tapped her laptop. “How’s the…bridge?”
“Growing,” she said. “Slowly. He keeps telling me to charge more.”
“He’s right,” Oliver said. “For once.”
“I thought you were on my side,” she said.
“I am,” he said. “That’s why I want you rich.”
She snorted.
He sobered.
“You know,” he said quietly, “if you do this—if you leave—I’ll miss you. Professionally and personally.”
Emotion pricked.
“I’ll miss you too,” she said. “Professionally and personally.”
He nodded.
“And if you stay, I’ll be happy to keep complaining to you about amortization schedules,” he added. “I want to be clear. Leaving is not…mandatory for respect.”
“I know,” she said. “It feels…inevitable. But not in a bad way.”
“Like graduation,” he said.
“Or an execution,” she said.
“Same hat,” he said.
She laughed.
It struck her then how…lucky she was.
To have allies.
Options.
A boss who was, against all odds, invested in her beyond utility.
This wasn’t universal.
This was rare.
She wasn’t going to waste it.
***
On a Thursday in mid-September, she got the email.
From: Dr. Chen.
Subject: Follow-up scan results.
Her heart dropped into her stomach.
She opened it with shaking hands.
*“Stable. No new growth. Remission confirmed. Continue current protocol.”*
She exhaled a breath she felt like she’d been holding for months.
Her eyes flooded.
She forwarded it to her mother, who responded with a gif of a dancing turtle.
Then, without overthinking it, she walked into Marcus’s office.
He looked up, mid-sentence in an email.
She held up her phone.
He read it.
His face lit in a bright, unguarded smile that made the room feel ten degrees warmer.
“Good,” he said. “Good.”
She nodded, tears spilling over.
He stood.
For a second, they both hesitated.
The memory of the hallway hug.
The kiss.
The line.
Then she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him.
It felt different this time.
Less desperate.
More…joyful.
He hugged back, solid and warm, chin resting briefly on the top of her head.
“Congratulations,” he murmured into her hair.
“Congratulate my mom,” she said, laughing through tears. “She did the hard part.”
“I will,” he said.
They separated.
Neither commented on it.
They didn’t have to.
Some touches didn’t feel like crossing a line.
Some felt like honoring the fact that they were both human.
She wiped her eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “Back to capitalism.”
He smiled.
“Back to bridges,” he corrected.
***
That night, she sat on her couch with her laptop open and her heart weirdly light.
She added a new line to the *Risks* slide.
— Family health crisis.
Then crossed it out.
Under *Mitigations*, she wrote:
— Early detection. — Good doctors. — Luck. — Love.
She stared at that last word.
Love.
It had become a variable in all her calculations now.
Not the only one.
Not the trump card.
But a constant.
Not just his.
Hers.
For her mother.
For herself.
For the work.
For the future she was building, slowly, slide by slide.
She saved the deck.
Closed it.
Opened a new document.
Title: *Resignation Draft (For Future Use Only).*
Her hands trembled as she typed.
*Marcus,*
*This isn’t a letter I’m writing today. Or tomorrow. Or next month. It’s a letter I’m writing to remind myself that I can.*
She stopped.
Deleted.
Too personal.
She tried again.
*Veronica,*
*Please accept this as formal notice of my resignation from the role of Executive Assistant to the CEO, effective [date TBD].*
The words sat on the screen, stark and terrifying.
She scrolled down.
Left the rest blank.
Not because she didn’t know what she’d say.
Because she didn’t need to yet.
But having that one line—*I resign*—in black and white felt like setting a launch code.
Not pressed.
Not activated.
But programmed.
Ready.
Her phone buzzed.
Marcus.
Marcus: *Just saw the scan note. Told Oliver. He cried.*
She smiled.
Maya: *You’re lying.*
Marcus: *He sniffled. That counts.*
Maya: *Thank you. For…being in it with me.*
Marcus: *There’s no other place I’d be.*
She looked at the almost-empty resignation doc.
The bridge deck.
The texting thread with him that now spanned crises, jokes, and one admitted love.
She felt the line under her feet like a live wire.
Still there.
Still her choice.
She wasn’t ready to cross it.
Not yet.
But for the first time, she could see the other side clearly enough to know she wanted to.
Someday.
When the bridge was built.
When the boards were laid.
When her feet were steady enough to carry both her and the havoc that would come with loving a man like him out in the open.
She closed the laptop.
Turned off the light.
Lay back on the couch and stared at her ceiling.
Her life was still a mess.
Still high-stakes.
Still full of spreadsheets and storms and men in suits.
But under it all, something new had settled.
An exit strategy.
A love story.
A plan.
Incomplete.
In progress.
Hers.
***