Tap. Tap. Tap.

The receptionist had gone very still. Lars noticed, uncurled his hand from the side table, set it on his thigh. Checked his watch. Seven-oh-six.

He'd flown back from San Francisco this morning. Red-eye, because Thursday was Thursday.

A siren moved up Columbus and the building swallowed it whole. Lars stretched his hand against his knee, felt the knuckle ache, and thought about nothing useful.

What were they supposed to cover tonight. The San Francisco pitch—three kids in a glass conference room trying not to stare at his watch while they explained why their AI beverage startup was the future of hydration. Or grief, still, because Marcus had been right fourteen months ago over Scotch: you're functional, which isn't the same thing. That remained true.

He'd stopped in front of the Dior window on 57th this afternoon.

A coat in the display. Vermillion, structured at the shoulder, the kind of cut that needed somewhere to go. He'd stood there with the city moving around him—driver at the curb, his 4:30 already waiting—thinking about her wearing it. The line of it against her. How that color would sit against her skin.

He'd thought about her skin.

It arrived without scheduling now. Reaching for his phone thinking she'd find that funny. Waking at two with her voice still somewhere in the room, soft and even—*you're here, Lars—her hand on his wrist. Four seconds, six weeks ago, standard clinical reassurance, and he could still locate the precise coordinates of it like a point on a map. The warmth. The specific weight.

He was forty-five. He knew what wanting felt like. Had known it young and reckless, had known it again with Elsie as something slower and structural, the kind that doesn't announce itself because it's already in the walls. Then Elsie was gone, five years now, and wanting became something he observed in other people from a comfortable remove. That had been workable.

Then without his permission it came back.

Here. In a waiting room with decent art and a bowl of caramels on the reception desk. Directed at a woman who was twenty-seven years old and had a professional obligation that made everything else beside the point. He knew that. Had built reasonable walls around it. Spent considerable time not thinking about what was on the other side.

He was not, currently, succeeding.

The consultation room door opened.

A woman came out, eyes swollen, tissues in hand, and moved straight to the desk. Lars's attention went past her without apology.

{{user}} stood in the doorframe.

A cardigan the color of something warm he couldn't name. She had her portfolio open, pen moving in that quick economical way she had, the same way she wrote during sessions. Like what she was getting down mattered. Like he mattered, which was either true or the most expensive illusion he'd ever paid for, and he couldn't tell which. Lars Killgore did not tolerate not-knowing. In boardrooms it was a temporary condition. This had been going on for months.

She looked up.

Across the waiting room their eyes met and something moved through his chest, not subtle and not manageable, just there, and then she was looking at the receptionist. Warm. Unhurried. Something quiet about next Thursday.

Professional. Of course.

She was always professional. He was the one sitting here like a man who kept returning to the last place he'd lost something.

She had an infuriating habit of noticing the thing he was avoiding before he did.

The woman with the tissues finished at the desk. The room resettled. {{user}} closed her portfolio, tucked the pen away, turned.

She looked at him again. Longer this time. Something flickered across her expression before discipline reclaimed it. He knew the maneuver. He'd been living inside it for months.

Badly, he suspected.

The session door was still open behind her.

He stood.