Page 162 of Reckless Obsession

Maksim has sent me three different lists over the past two days of what he plans we should do together, each one contradicting the last. He wants boat rides. He wants to do nothing but sleep for an entire day. He wants a full five-hour oil massage from me. He wants dinner by the beach, and so on and so forth.

“Coffee,” Grace says, setting the cup pointedly closer to my hand.

“Thank you.”

She doesn’t move.

I look up. “Is there something else?”

“You’re smiling.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. At a folder you haven’t opened.”

I look down.

She is right. The file is still closed.

I clear my throat and open it properly. “You seem to have a lot of time this morning.”

“I make time for professional observations.”

“Is that what we’re calling it?”

“It is when my employer has spent the better part of all the years I’ve known him treating happiness like a scheduling error.”

That earns her my full attention.

Grace doesn’t flinch. She rarely does.

“You’ve been different lately,” she continues, more gently. “Less… stoic.”

“I’m not stoic.”

Her expression remains perfectly neutral.

“You are,” she says. “You used to come in here looking like you had personally declared war on the entire legal profession. Lately, you’re still terrifying, obviously. But you answer questions. You leave before 8pm sometimes. You even said good morning to the receptionist yesterday.”

“She said good morning first.”

“And you responded.”

“I’m not sure why that is remarkable.”

“Because a few months ago, you would have nodded at her and kept walking.”

I have no response to that.

She isn’t wrong.

The change has been gradual enough that I had not noticed it until now. The way I leave my office before the building empties. The way I check the time because I know Maksim will be waiting at the apartment, pretending he has not been. The way I have started buying two of things without thinking: his coffee, his preferred snacks, his energy drink, the obnoxiously spicy noodles he claims I cannot handle.

The way I have begun to expect him in my life.

That is the dangerous part.

Not the secrecy, Pavel’s suspicion, or the questions that will eventually come.