Leah's POV
For exactly two seconds when I woke up, I thought I was home.
Same ceiling, my brain decided. Same morning light. Same quiet. I was in my apartment and StyleShift was fine and none of the last three months had actually happened.
Then I turned my head and saw the bedside table. Too clean. Too expensive. A lamp I didn't buy and a window I didn't recognize and curtains that cost more than my first month's rent in my old place.
Two seconds. That's all I got before reality walked back in and sat on my chest.
I stared at the ceiling of Roman Ashford's master bedroom and took a slow breath. I had cried myself to sleep last night, which I was not proud of, and my eyes felt tight and small the way they always do after that. I lay there for a few minutes just existing, not thinking, not planning, just letting my body remember how to be awake before I asked anything more of it.
Then I heard something from down the hall.
Movement in the kitchen. A cabinet opening. The specific sound of a coffee machine running through its cycle.
He was already up.
I considered staying in the room. The contract didn't say anything about shared mornings. I could technically remain behind this door until noon and Roman couldn't say a word about it. The thought was genuinely tempting.
I got up anyway because hiding felt worse than facing it.
I found him standing at the kitchen counter with his back to me. He was in a dark shirt and trousers, already dressed for work even though it was barely past seven. He moved around the kitchen with the ease of someone who knew exactly where everything lived, which made sense because everything in this kitchen belonged to him.
He heard me come in. He didn't turn around immediately. He just reached into the cabinet and took out a second mug and set it on the counter beside his.
He poured coffee into both and slid one toward me without a word.
I sat on the stool at the kitchen island and wrapped both hands around the mug. It was good coffee, strong and dark, and I drank it without thanking him because I wasn't ready to perform gratitude yet. He didn't comment on the silence. He just stood on his side of the counter and drank from his own mug and looked out the window at the harbor.
This was the strangest part. I expected awkward. I expected him to fill the silence with words the way people do when they're uncomfortable, explanations and questions and careful conversation designed to make things feel more normal than they were. Roman didn't do any of that. He just existed in the quiet like it didn't bother him at all.
It bothered me.
Silence with a stranger is just silence. Silence with Roman felt like a conversation I hadn't agreed to have yet.
He made eggs at some point. Scrambled, simple, placed on a plate in front of me without ceremony. I ate them. He ate his standing at the counter. We did not speak for the entire duration of breakfast and it was somehow both the most uncomfortable and the most oddly manageable morning I could have imagined.
I noticed him watching me twice.
The first time I caught it was when I was looking down at my plate. I felt it before I saw it, that awareness of being observed, and when I looked up his eyes moved back to his mug just a fraction too late. The second time was when I stood to carry my plate to the sink. He was leaning against the counter and his gaze was on my face with an expression I couldn't fully read. Not cold. Not calculating. Something sitting between guilt and something else that didn't have a clean name yet.
I rinsed my plate and set it in the drying rack.
"I'm going to start making calls this morning," I said to the window above the sink. "To my employees. I want to tell them about the positions at your company before they hear it from somewhere else."
"The offer letters went out last night," Roman said. "Nathan handled it."
I turned around. "Without telling me?"
"I didn't want to wait. The faster they have something concrete, the less they spend this morning worried." He set his mug down. "I should have told you first. I'm sorry."
I looked at him for a moment. He said sorry the way some people say difficult words in a foreign language, carefully, like he was aware of the weight of it.
"I still want to call them myself," I said.
"Of course."
I took my phone to the second office and closed the door and started at the top of my list.
Maya picked up before the second ring. She'd already seen the offer letter. She was crying before I finished saying her name, the good kind of crying, the kind that sounds like a person breathing again. She asked me three times if it was real. I told her three times that it was. When she finally believed me she laughed through the tears and the sound of it cracked something open in my chest.
I called fourteen more people after Maya. Some of them cried. Some of them asked questions I answered as steadily as I could. Some of them were quiet in a way that meant they were trying not to fall apart on the phone. Every single one of them thanked me.
I held it together for all fourteen calls.
Then I dialed David Chen.
David answered on the first ring with a voice that was composed in a way that told me he'd been preparing himself since he saw the offer letter. He was like that, David, he processed things in advance so he could be calm when it counted.
"I got the letter," he said.
"Good. Are you going to accept?"
A pause. "Leah, I have a three month old at home and medical bills I haven't finished paying. Of course I'm going to accept." Another pause, longer this time. "But I need to ask you something."
"Okay."
"Why is Roman Ashford doing this? He destroyed our company. He spent months in court calling you a thief. And now he's hiring all of us, giving us better salaries, better benefits than we had before." David's voice was steady but underneath it I could hear something careful and suspicious, the way a person sounds when they're trying to understand something that doesn't add up. "That doesn't make sense. People like Roman Ashford don't do things that don't benefit them. So what's the benefit? What is he getting out of this?"
I opened my mouth.
I had an answer prepared. Something about image rehabilitation. Something about investor relations. Something true enough to be believable and vague enough to protect the parts of the contract I wasn't supposed to discuss.
But David knew me. He had worked beside me for four years. He had sat in meetings with me and finished my sentences and watched me negotiate with buyers twice our size. He knew when I was being fully honest and when I was giving him the version of the truth I'd curated.
The silence stretched out one second too long.
"Leah." His voice changed. Quieter. More serious. "What did you do?"
My throat tightened. "I handled it."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I have right now."
Another pause. I could hear his daughter making small sounds in the background, those tiny baby noises that somehow manage to be both soft and enormous in a quiet room. David exhaled slowly.
"Are you okay?" he asked. And the way he said it wasn't about the company or the jobs or Roman's offer. He was asking about me specifically. Whether I was safe. Whether I had done something that cost me more than I should have paid.
My eyes burned. I blinked it back. "I'm okay."
"You don't sound okay."
"David. Take the job. Take care of your family. Let me handle the rest."
He was quiet for a long moment. Then, "I don't understand why Roman Ashford would help us. I really don't. And I don't think you're going to tell me. But whatever you did to make this happen, whatever you agreed to, I need you to know it matters. What you did for us matters."
I couldn't speak for a second.
"Take the job," I said again, softer this time.
He said he would. He said thank you the way people say it when they mean something larger than the word can hold. Then he asked one more question before hanging up and it was so quiet and simple that it nearly undid me completely.
He said, "Are you sure you're safe with him?"
I looked through the glass wall of the office at the empty living room. At the penthouse that was too clean and too quiet and belonged to a man I had married four days ago for reasons I was still sorting through.
I thought about Roman sliding a mug of coffee toward me without being asked. I thought about him watching me with that expression I couldn't name. I thought about him standing outside my door at 2 AM and not knocking.
How did I know that? I hadn't heard him. But this morning when I walked past the hallway I had seen the faint scuff of a shoe on the floor right outside my door. Someone had stood there. And the only other person in this penthouse was him.
Roman had stood outside my door while I cried and chosen to leave me alone.
I didn't know yet what that meant. I didn't know if it was kindness or strategy or some combination of both that I wasn't equipped to untangle.
"I'll be fine," I told David.
I ended the call and sat in the quiet of the office and stared at the floor.
Down the hall, I heard Roman's voice. He was on a call of his own, professional and controlled, all business. I couldn't hear words, just the rhythm of his voice, low and steady, moving through some other problem in some other part of his life.
My husband's voice.
I pressed my fingers to my temple and closed my eyes.
What had I done.