“You’re right. I don’t think that’s necessary. It seems silly to get HR involved in our private business. Like you said, the other partners have to be notified. It might make things awkward. We don’t have that sort of relationship, so there’s no need to blow it up into something it’s not. I just want to ensure we’re not doing anything stupid that will impact either of us down the road. I hate knowing people are whispering every time I walk into the room, but they’ll get bored eventually and move on to the next juicy bit of gossip.”

He said nothing for a long time, and she thought that perhaps he’d fallen asleep after all. She closed her eyes, rubbing her cheek against his chest, inhaling deeply. Somewhere along the line, he had started smelling like home. When it rumbled out of the darkness, his voice startled her, and her eyes popped open.

“I suppose that’s one point of view.”

He didn’t say anything further, and Vanessa forced her eyes shut, the insidious voice in her head receding, leaving behind the certainty that she had made a terrible misstep.

* * *

Chapter ten

In the end, he boiled their relationship down to fifteen minutes, and she had no one but herself to blame. Fifteen-minute blocks of time, the way he organized his schedule; tiny hash marks that kept him on track, and she — they — had been allotted one little square.

She hadn’t realized anything was wrong. Work was out of control, consuming every waking minute of the day and the hours she was meant to be sleeping. One of the firm’s minor clients — one of her clients — had taken their IPO public, becoming an overnight millionaire, and suddenly a handful of the people above her, senior associates and partners included, wanted to edge their way in, insisting the account needed tighter stewardship.

Her client, a young wolf in her twenties who had founded her own makeup line, had kiboshed their efforts. She didn’t want to deal with anyone except Vanessa and especially didn’t want that guy — pointing her long, manicured nail at Brock, who’d somehow slipped into the meeting —anywhere near her, the latter said with her nose wrinkling, winking at Vanessa once her back had turned. Grayson had remained blissfully absent for the entire debacle, and she’d handled it on her own. He had been absent for much of the month, she’d realized more than two weeks into it, shrugging it off, buoyed by her independent success. It might have seemed odd to outsiders, but he was in court constantly, and she was engaged in the big law race of billable hours, chained to her desk for much of the week. He’s as busy as you are, probably in court.

Her first clue should have been the apartment. He was having work done at the house, he’d muttered, and they’d spent their first full moon in Bridgeton in she couldn’t remember how long. She realized long after the fact that the work being done was a professional deep cleaning — every surface sanitized and steamed, the carpets and bedding and curtains, all of it — shampooed, disinfected, rugs beaten and washed, the contents of the linen closet and bathroom closet emptied and cleaned, leaving behind an empty sterility, devoid of her smell.

Not spending the day with his family after the moon had felt strange, but when he’d remained distracted and out-of-sorts, she’d begged off dinner, going back to her own apartment to catch up on some much-needed sleep, not realizing she should have been clinging to every moment, paying attention to his oddly somber, un-Grayson-like mood.

The schedule tap had appeared on her laptop calendar a week later, an hour or so after she’d first arrived at her desk, a fifteen-minute time slot. It was that fact that stuck in her throat for days and weeks afterward, keeping her company in the bath and in her empty bed. She had been there for six years, three of them with him. They had somehow managed to balance their working relationship and personal life together for three years, and it was only in the last five months that her co-workers had taken notice, an impressive feat, quite frankly.

“I wanted you to hear it from me. I’m speaking with all of the senior associates today, and an email will be going out to the staff later, but . . . I wanted you to hear it directly from me. Effective this afternoon, I’m no longer affiliated with this firm. My clients have already been redistributed, and I’m not taking any of them with me, so you don’t need to worry about any of your caseloads dropping. You’ll be running second on Hastings-Durning. Ekins will be overseeing, but you’ve always had a good relationship with him, so I don’t foresee there being any issue.”

It was a practiced speech, one he’d probably already given a dozen times in part and would do a dozen more times that day. Not one for a girlfriend or lover or whatever the hell she was.

“Did-did they fire you?! They couldn’t have, not without a vote! But-but your stake —”

“We’ve agreed to a buyout of my stake in the company.”

She reeled, unable to fully process his words. There was no way she would come in tomorrow and Grayson not be there, terrorizing some junior associate. She had to be dreaming.

“So what, you’re just . . . leaving? Retiring? You’re forty years old; what are you going to do, take up gardening?”

“I’m not retiring,” he scoffed. “Effective first of next month, I’ll be chief internal counsel for the Werewolf Defense League. I’ll be transitioning into my role there in the interim.”

Vanessa sat back in her seat. She felt winded, as if she had just run up a steep staircase, racing away from a great beast nipping at her heels.

“You think you’ll be happy doing non-profit? What happened to having expensive tastes?”

“It’s the right thing to do. And I’m employed by the agency. It’s not like I’m volunteering my time. My equity in the firm is being bought out, and I’ve been offered a generous compensation package for my clients. I could retire now if I wanted to. Financial has had plenty of time to hammer things out.”

She wanted to point out the vast difference between being a salaried employee for a non-profit agency and being the co-owner of a multi-million dollar firm, but his words froze her. She realized then that this had been a deal long in the works. And he had never told her.

“How long? How long, Gray?”

“I don’t know what you—”

“How long, Grayson?” Her voice was sharp, a mortifying waver over his name, her emotions closer to the surface than she’d thought. She realized, as soon as the words were out, that she already knew.

His head cocked, the same look he’d given her that night in his glass cube, when she’d offered to fuck him.

“A month? Maybe a month and a half?”

She realized the magnitude of her folly, that night in bed. Instead of marching into HR to make an official declaration of their relationship, he’d gone marching into the managing partner’s office to quit. He’d never let on that her words had hurt him, that he felt differently, that they did have exactly that sort of relationship. Just a stone poker face, distance these last six weeks, and now this. An exit from their shared professional life without discussion or preamble.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

“Isn’t this what you wanted,” he answered sharply, the first spark of actual emotion he’d displayed since she’d entered the office. “Give it a week, maybe two. No one will bat an eyelash when you walk into the room.”

“I only meant that I don’t want—”

“I don’t have that luxury, Vanessa. People are going to talk no matter where I go, whether here, this new place, or the fucking grocery store. I don’t care about whispers. Whoever I’m with can’t care about them either . . . and now you won’t have to. And if someone wants to start something with you, you can tell them the truth. We don’t have that sort of relationship.”