Page 98 of The Associate
“You. There is something different.” She took a bite, chewing thoughtfully. “And I couldn't help but notice that a certain partner is looking at you a bit too much these days.”
The blood drained from Samuel’s face, leaving him cold and then instantly, scaldingly hot. The food in his mouth turned to ash.
She knows.
The thought was pure, undiluted terror.
Of course she knows.
Alina was sharp. She saw everything. She’d seen the looks. She’d put it together. He saw it unfolding in a dizzying rush: her teasing smile freezing, turning into a mask of disgust. The accusation;You’re sleeping with him to get ahead, aren’t you? I thought you were different.
The betrayal in her eyes. The loss of the only friendly face in the office. The scandal. The end of everything.
His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. He couldn’t breathe. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
Alina’s expression shifted instantly. The teasing light vanished, replaced by wide-eyed concern. “Sam? Hey, whoa. Breathe.”
She reached across the small table, her hand hovering near his hand before closing gently around it. “Sam, I was just kidding. A bad joke. A really stupid, bad joke.”
He stared at her, his vision tunneling. He could see her lips moving, but the roaring in his ears drowned out the words for a second.
“...just me being an idiot,” she was saying, her voice soft now, earnest. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to... God, look at you. I’m so sorry.”
Slowly, the roaring subsided. He dragged in a shaky breath. The cold terror began to recede, leaving behind a shaky, embarrassed relief. She didn’t know. She was just… teasing. Playing with fire she didn’t understand was a live inferno.
“It’s… it’s okay,” he managed, his voice thin. “I’m just… tired. Jumpy.”
Alina studied him, her intelligent eyes missing nothing of his residual pallor, the fine tremor in his hands. The concern didn’t leave her face, but it softened. She leaned in a little.
“Sam,” she said, her tone quieter than he’d ever heard it. “We’re friends, okay? I know we don’t talk about the… deep stuff. Office rules and all that. But we are friends. And I just want you to know… if there ever was something? Anything you wanted to talk about? I’m a vault. No judgment. Just… ears.”
The sincerity in her voice was a balm. It was simple. It was kind. It was a hand offered in the dark without any demand.
The last of the panic dissolved, leaving a warm, fragile feeling in its wake. “Thank you, Alina,” he said, and he meant it with every aching part of him. “Really.”
She gave him a small, reassuring smile and nudged his bowl with her fork. “Eat your rabbit food before it gets soggy.”
They finished their lunch, the conversation drifting back to safer waters; upcoming cases, a new restaurant she wanted to try, a funny story about her cat.
After, as they walked back to the office, the spring sun warm on their shoulders, Samuel felt something shift inside him, a small, quiet settling.
He realized, with a clarity that was both simple and profound, that he had two friends.
Penny, who understood the shadows because she carried her own. And Alina, who stood in the sun and was willing to acknowledge the shade without needing to drag him into the glare.
He didn’t tell her about Gael. The secret was a living thing curled next to his heart, too complex, too terrifying, too precious to expose to the daylight. But her offer, her kindness, had created a space around the secret. It didn’t feel so suffocating anymore.
∞∞∞
Curled on his sofa, Samuel held the book Penny had given him. The cover was soft, a muted watercolor of a breaking wave. He’d kept it in his bag for a week, too afraid to touch it. Now, withthe weekend’s intensity a fresh, humming scar on his soul and Alina’s kindness a new, warm weight in his chest, he dared to open it.
He read slowly, the words not sinking in at first, skimming over his consciousness like stones on deep water. Then, a sentence would hook him.“The first lie you must unlearn is that your core self is flawed.”His breath hitched. He read a paragraph about the internalized voice of condemnation, the “inner critic” forged in the fires of dogma and fear. His eyes scanned the description of somatic responses to trauma; the tightening in the chest, the shallowing breath, the instinct to fold inwards.
He finished a chapter. It didn’t offer solutions. It simply asked the reader to acknowledge, with compassion, what systems of belief or communities of origin had taken from them: safety, autonomy, the right to desire, the capacity for simple joy.
Samuel leaned back against the cushions, the book falling closed in his lap. The apartment was very still. For the first time in a very long time, years, maybe, he didn’t immediately reach for a distraction. He didn’t turn on the TV, or pick up his phone, or start neurotically cleaning. He just sat in the quiet, and he thought.
He thought about his childhood, not the sanitized version with Christmas trees and obedient smiles, but the real one. The constant, low-grade anxiety of measuring up. The way his father’s approval was a distant, frosty peak. His mother’s love, a nervous, conditional thing, always tied to him being good. He thought about the first, confusing stirrings for Michael, the boy in his class. The electric joy of a shared glance, followed by the instant, freezing plunge of guilt.
