The days after that dinner blurred.
Victor had been pulled into tasks Elias didn't ask about, late meetings, calls that stretched into the night, and names that only carried weight in boardrooms and behind closed doors. He had returned when he could, sometimes long after midnight, sometimes only long enough to press a kiss against Elias's temple before the world claimed him again.
And Elias, left to himself, finally sank into the kind of silence he once thought he wanted.
The lab table was spread with drafts, equations, and datasets he knew too well by now. His laptop screen burned with graphs and slides, half a dozen revisions waiting for one final thread to tie them together. This was the project that should have been Professor Stone's responsibility, a mess of broken models and dead ends, a failure that Victor's team had salvaged, refined, and then placed squarely in Elias's hands. 'Yours to present. Yours to own.'
