《HIS BLIND OBSESSION 》全部章節：第 11 章 - 第 20 章

I was fine. Completely fine. Totally normal. Just a guy at his desk doing his job like he hadn’t been fired and un-fired in the same sixty seconds by a man who had given absolutely no explanation and expected absolutely no reaction. Fine. I typed the same sentence in the Henderson prep document four times before I noticed it was the same sentence and deleted three of them. The thing was I had been ready. When he said fired I had felt the floor drop out and I had said okay because okay was all I had left and I had picked up that tray and I had walked to that door and in the three steps between the desk and the exit I had run the numbers. Eli’s timeline. The sixty percent. Caleb’s face when I came home and told him it hadn’t worked out. Three steps and I had run all of it and come out the other side with nothing except okay and apparently that had been the wrong answer because then he had called me back and said sit down like the last thirty seconds were something that had happened

The shirt was hanging on my door when I woke up Thursday morning. White. Crisp. The kind of fabric that had never been near a sale rack in its entire life. No tag because the tag had been removed but I could tell from the weight of it alone that Mrs. Hale had not gone to Zara. I stood in my doorway in my socks and stared at it. Damien Cole had bought me a shirt. Not Damien Cole personally, obviously. Mrs. Hale had arranged it, which he had instructed, which meant he had thought about what I was going to wear to a dinner he had summoned me to and decided my three shirts weren’t good enough and done something about it without making it a conversation. I took it off the hanger. Put it on. Looked in the mirror. Looked away. I had bigger things to think about than shirts. I had Victoria Mercer to think about, and whatever she was planning, and the fact that Damien had told me don’t accept it like that was a complete sentence that required no further explanation and I had said okay

I should not have said that. The second it left my mouth I knew it. Too honest. Too much. The kind of thing you say at two am to yourself in the dark, not out loud in a hallway to your employer who was standing close enough that I could hear him breathing and still gave me absolutely nothing back. Nothing. Just silence. The specific Damien Cole variety that could mean anything or everything or the simple fact that he had filed what I said under irrelevant and was waiting for me to finish embarrassing myself so we could go back to dinner. I turned back around. “Forget I said that,” I said. “I’ll go back in.” “Noah.” I stopped. Not Mr. Carter. Noah. He had never. Not once in four weeks and four days. Always Mr. Carter, flat and professional, the two syllables of my last name a distance he maintained as deliberately as the two inches between his coffee cup and the corner of his desk. I turned around slowly. He was closer than I expected. I didn’t know when he had moved. He wa

I had not slept. Not properly. I had laid in the dark staring at the ceiling doing the specific kind of not-sleeping where your body is horizontal and your brain is running a full board meeting without you. Agenda items included but were not limited to: Eli’s bills being paid, Victoria Mercer’s chess piece smile, Daniel Cole’s voice carrying clearly through the penthouse saying you are allowed to want things, and the way Damien had stopped walking when I said his name. He had stopped walking. I had said Damien and every muscle in that man’s body had gone still and I had noticed and I was never going to unknow that I had noticed and that was a problem I had no solution for. I got up at five fifty-eight. Made his coffee. Six twenty-eight. Right side. Two inches from the corner. “Good morning,” I said. Silence. Normal. Expected. Fine. I went back to my desk and worked until eleven thirty and did not think about anything except Henderson and Mercer and the three emails

Something was wrong. I didn’t know what. That was the part that was making me slightly insane, the not knowing, because I had spent five weeks learning the precise language of this penthouse and right now it was saying something I couldn’t translate. Damien had not come out of his office. Not at six. Not at seven. Not at eight when I brought his coffee and knocked and he said come in and I set it down right side two inches from the corner and said good morning and he said nothing and I left and he still hadn’t come out. It was ten forty-three. His coffee was getting cold in there. His second one, because I had brought a replacement at eight forty-five and gotten the same nothing in response to good morning and left again. I sat at my desk. Worked. Or tried to. I had the Mercer correspondence open and the Henderson prep alongside it and three other things that needed doing and I had been staring at the same email for twenty minutes. The medical appointment. Monday. Eight am.