Nine Months of Distance
Chapter 05 - Nine Months of Distance
Marcus hadn't slept properly since the hospital room, and by the third day he'd stopped pretending to his own team that everything was fine.
He sat in his office at Colton Development, the Halbrook merger documents spread across his desk, and stared at a calendar with the anniversary date circled in red, fourteen days that had suddenly become meaningless.
Bianca found him there that evening, closing the office door behind her the way she'd learned to over the past year and a half.
"She filed already," Bianca said. Not a question. She'd heard the same thing Marcus had, through channels she shouldn't have had access to but somehow always did.
"Two weeks ago," Marcus said. "Before I even brought her the papers. She was ahead of me the whole time."
"How," Bianca asked.
"I don't know," Marcus said, though a cold suspicion had already started forming, one he wasn't ready to say out loud yet. "Sandra withdrew from my case yesterday. Cited a conflict of professional conscience. I think she's the one who tipped Rachel off."
Bianca's face tightened. "That's a problem for us."
"It's a problem for the merger," Marcus said. "If the filing predates the anniversary, the vesting clause doesn't apply. Every dollar of the Halbrook valuation splits with Rachel fifty fifty."
"There has to be a way around it," Bianca said. "A later amendment, a technicality."
"There isn't," Marcus said. "I had my own lawyer draft that clause. I know exactly how airtight it is, because I made sure of it myself, back when I thought I was the one controlling the timing."
He sat back, rubbing his eyes, exhaustion finally catching up in a way three days of adrenaline had kept at bay.
"I built this whole plan around the ten day window before her due date," he said. "I never once considered she might move faster than me."
"You underestimated her," Bianca said.
"I've been underestimating her for months," Marcus said, and something in his voice made Bianca look at him differently, some fracture starting to show that had nothing to do with strategy anymore.
He thought about the early years, before Colton Development had grown into something worth splitting, back when Rachel had been the one balancing his first small business's books late into the night, the one who'd caught two accounting errors that would have cost him his first major client contract.
He'd built half of everything on her patience and precision, and somewhere in the last two years, he'd started treating that precision as a threat instead of the reason any of this existed at all.
"What do we do now," Bianca asked.
Marcus looked at the merger documents, at the calendar with its now meaningless red circle, at the folder he'd carried into a hospital room three days ago thinking he still had the upper hand.
May you like
"We wait to see how much she actually knows," he said. "And we hope it's less than everything."
He didn't say the other thought sitting cold in his chest, the one he wasn't ready to admit even to Bianca. That somewhere in the last year, he'd stopped being a man protecting his business, and started being a man who'd chosen convenience over the person who'd built the foundation he was now trying to protect from her.
