Chapter 488: You and Me

Gio had three phones going before nine and a fourth call holding on the office line, and none of it was about Sam.

"Mythos Group’s advance team wants the east conference room for Thursday," he said, not looking up from the tablet. "Told them Rochefort Group doesn’t hold rooms for a visit that hasn’t been confirmed."

"Confirmed by who?" Arianne asked, from the doorway.

"By you, when you decide it’s confirmed." He set the tablet down and picked up the ringing office line without breaking stride, said three sentences into it that ended the call, and set it back in its cradle. "Harvey Chen lands at eleven. Press already has it. Two outlets called this morning asking if Rochefort Group is in talks with Mythos."

"What did you tell them?"

"No comment. True, as far as it goes."

The office line rang again before Arianne could answer. Gio picked it up on the second ring, listened for eleven seconds, and said, "Mr. Chen’s team has our contact information. Rochefort Group doesn’t comment on speculation," and hung up before the reporter on the other end finished a follow-up question. He didn’t look at Arianne while he did it. The reflex didn’t require an explanation, least of all to her.

Arianne studied him for a second longer than the topic required. "You’ve handled worse mornings than this one."

"I have." Gio didn’t offer anything else, and she didn’t ask for it, the silence between them doing the rest of the talking.

She lingered in the doorway a moment longer than the meeting required. "Whatever you’re not telling me, handle it before Thursday."

"I intend to."

"That’s not the same as telling me what it is."

"No," he agreed. "It isn’t." He didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t push, because she’d learned a long time ago that Gio’s silences arrived with their own schedule and no amount of asking moved it up.

By noon the calls had thinned to a manageable rhythm, Harvey’s arrival folded into the news cycle alongside Blackwood’s collapsing marriage like the city could only hold so much scandal before it started doubling things up for efficiency. Gio cleared his desk, confirmed the last of it handled, and did the one thing on his list all day that had no deadline attached and no one to report to.

He drove to Sam’s building without calling first, because calling first gave her a door to close before he got there, and he’d used up his allowance of doors closed on him. Traffic on the bridge held him for eleven minutes he spent not rehearsing anything, which was new.

She opened the door in a robe and reading glasses, a script open on the counter behind her, the kettle still ticking as it cooled from a boil he’d interrupted, and didn’t look surprised to see him standing there.

"You said this time you meant it." Sam didn’t move to let him in yet. "That was a month ago, and then a phone rang, and you disappeared for the rest of the night."

"I know."

"So." She stepped back, finally, and didn’t offer him a seat, which he understood as a test in itself. "Finish the sentence."

His phone buzzed once in his pocket, an alert he didn’t check. Somewhere across the city Harvey Chen was three hours into a schedule Gio had built down to the minute, and for the first time in five years, Gio let it run without him.

"I’m not going to explain it again," he said. "You already have it. Arianne told you years ago. I confirmed the rest myself."

"Then why are you standing here?"

"Because the call cut off before I said the part that mattered." Gio kept his hands at his sides, no gift, no excuse to hand her instead of the words. "I want to try. Not because I’m fixed. I’m not. Something’s been wrong with me since I was ten, and I don’t think it works itself out on its own. I’d rather build something with you broken than keep waiting for a version of myself that finishes healing and never shows up."

Sam crossed her arms, not defensive, just waiting him out the way she’d waited out worse rooms than this one. "I used the time you gave me a lot better than you used yours."

"I know that too."

"Then here are my terms." She counted them off, flat, no performance in it. "This is ours. Not a press line, not something Daryll spins before I’ve told anyone myself, not part of a story somebody else gets to sell." She let that sit before she kept going. "My face is already on three billboards this month. Every other part of my life gets photographed and captioned by people who’ve never met me. I want to keep exactly this one thing before it belongs to everyone else too, and I need to know you’ll help me keep it that way instead of treating it like something to manage."

"I can do that."

"That’s not a small thing to promise. You manage what happens when someone’s name ends up in a headline for a living."

"Which is exactly why I know how to keep one out of the papers." He didn’t look away from her while he said it. "Nobody finds out from me. Not a comment. Not a confirmation. Not even a ’no comment’ that gives it shape. It stays ours because I know how to make something disappear."

"Does Gilbert know you’re here?"

"No." Gio didn’t dress it up. "I’ll tell him myself. Not through you. Not after the fact. He gets to be angry about eight years to my face if he wants to be."

"He will be."

"I know. He’s earned that." A pause, the first one that wasn’t strategic. "I’d rather have his anger than keep either of you protected from a conversation neither of you asked for."

"Does Arianne know?"

"She knows I left for something that wasn’t Harvey Chen. She didn’t ask what." He said it the way he reported anything, fact first, nothing dressed around it. "She’s never needed the whole file before she trusted my judgment. She’ll wait for me to bring it to her tonight. She won’t go looking for it."

"Then what were you afraid of?"

"Finding out I wasn’t enough, once you had all the facts." He let that stand without softening it, then kept going before she could fill the space he’d left. "No more flowers standing in for me. If something’s wrong, you get my voice instead. I know exactly what I’m promising. I can’t promise I’ll get it right the first time. I can promise I won’t disappear again to avoid finding out."

Sam looked at him for a long moment, the kind of look that used to be able to read every angle in a room and now had exactly one thing in front of it to read.

"Okay," she said. "But we’re calling it what it is. Not whatever we were pretending it was before."

"Which is?"

"You and me. On purpose, this time, instead of by accident and then run from."

"You and me," he agreed.

She crossed the space between them herself. He let her, both of them standing in the middle of a living room neither had bothered to sit down in.

The kettle had gone cold by then. Sam noticed it first, pulled back half a step, and turned to set it on the burner again like the last twenty minutes had been an ordinary Tuesday interruption to an ordinary afternoon. "You’re staying long enough for tea, at least."

"I can stay."

"Good." She got down two mugs, her back to him, and didn’t fill the silence with anything else, which from Sam counted as trust, plain and unannounced. Gio sat at the counter for the first time since he’d walked in.

"For the record," she said, setting a mug in front of him without asking how he took it, because she already knew, "this doesn’t go past the people who already know it, until I decide it does. Not Daryll. Not a stylist who overhears something backstage. Nobody with a reason to talk."

"Understood."

"And if you disappear on me again, I’m not waiting a month to notice this time."

"You won’t have to notice. I’ll tell you before you have to ask." He wrapped both hands around the mug without drinking from it yet, more interested in sitting across from her than in the tea itself. "Eight years good at everything except this. I’d like the chance to be good at this too."

Sam didn’t answer that one with words. She just sat down across from him, close enough that their knees nearly touched under the counter, and let the silence between them settle into something ordinary for the first time either of them could remember.

Gio didn’t reach for his phone again for the rest of the day. Somewhere on the other side of the city, Harvey Chen finished his first afternoon in Montclair without a single word from the man who usually managed every minute of it, and never once noticed the difference.