Back to You

POV: ANGELIC

“I’m sorry, miss, but Mr. Verschoor’s calendar is completely closed today.”

The receptionist doesn’t even look up from her screen when she says it. Like she’s said the exact same sentence forty times already this morning, and I’m just the forty-first idiot who thought I’d be the exception.

I probably am the forty-first idiot.

“I understand,” I say, and I make myself smile, because that’s what teachers do. We smile at things that make us want to scream. “It’s for a class project. My students are studying local leaders in industry, and Mr. Verschoor came up as someone they’d love to—”

“I can schedule something.” She finally glances at me, already reaching for a tablet. “Let me check... we have an opening in eight weeks. Possibly nine.”

Eight weeks.

Anna doesn’t have eight weeks. Anna might not have eight days, depending on which doctor I ask and how honest they’re feeling that morning.

“That won’t work,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel, because underneath the blazer I stole from the back of my closet — the one that still smells faintly like the dry cleaner’s because I haven’t worn it since my last parent-teacher conference — my heart is doing something violent.

I lied to get up to this floor. I told security I had an appointment. I said his name like I had every right to it, like it didn’t cost me something just to say it out loud after six years, and the guard barely looked at my badge before waving me through.

Getting past his front desk is apparently harder than getting past armed security.

“I’m afraid there’s really nothing I can do,” the receptionist says, not unkindly, already turning back to her monitor, already done with me.

I could leave. I could walk back out, take the elevator down thirty-two floors, and tell Anna I tried. I could let this be one more thing I tried and failed at, quietly, the way I’ve learned to fail at things quietly these last few years.

Or I could do the one thing I swore to myself in the elevator that I wouldn’t do unless I had absolutely no other card left to play.

“Could you just—” I clear my throat. “Could you just tell him my name? That’s all. If he says no, I’ll leave. I promise.”

She sighs, the particular sigh of someone who has learned that sometimes the fastest way to get rid of a person is to humor them for ten seconds. “And your name is?”

“Angelic.” My mouth goes dry. “Angelic Lemans.”

Something shifts in her face the second the name leaves my mouth. Not recognition, exactly — more like she’s heard it somewhere before and can’t place it, the way a song title tugs at you before the melody catches up.

“Angelic,” she repeats slowly, like she’s testing the shape of it. “Like... the foundation?”

My stomach drops before I even understand why.

“I don’t — I’m not sure what you mean,” I say, which is true, and also the first honest thing I’ve said since I walked in.

She’s already picking up the phone, murmuring something too low for me to catch, her eyes flicking back to me twice like she’s trying to solve a puzzle she wasn’t handed all the pieces to. Then she hangs up, and the professional mask slides right back over her curiosity.

“He’ll see you now,” she says. “Someone will be out in just a moment — he’s wrapping up a meeting.”

I don’t move for a second, because some small, stubborn part of me had already made peace with being turned away. I hadn’t planned past this point. I hadn’t let myself.

A man in an expensive suit exits through the double doors a minute later, nods politely at me on his way past, and then the receptionist gestures me forward. “This way.”

I follow her down a hallway lined with glass and steel and views of a city that clearly belongs to whoever sits at the end of it. Through the glass wall of the office ahead, I can already see him rising from behind his desk — mid-motion, one hand still braced on the surface, like he’s only just ended whatever conversation was happening in that room seconds before mine began.

And then I’m standing in the doorway, and he’s looking at me, and every plan I had for how this conversation was going to go leaves my body at once.

Andrew Verschoor.

Dark hair, a little longer than he used to keep it. The same blue eyes that used to make me feel like he was reading something written on the inside of my ribs — except now there’s a whole company’s worth of steel behind them, a decade of boardrooms and headlines and being the kind of man who never lets anyone see him rattled.

He’s rattled now.

He goes still. Not composed-still. Not CEO-still. Actually still, the way a person goes still when the floor has just tilted underneath them and they’re too proud to let anyone see them reach for something to hold onto.

“Angelic.” My name comes out of him like it costs him something to say it. Like it’s been sitting behind his teeth for six years waiting for permission.

“Hi, Andrew.”

His jaw tightens at that. Not at my voice — at the space between us, maybe, or at whatever he’s doing right now to stop himself from crossing it.

I remember, stupidly, out of nowhere, the first time he ever asked me to drive his car — some absurd, obscenely expensive thing his father had bought him for his twentieth birthday — and how I’d refused, over and over, because I was terrified of scratching something worth more than my entire tuition. He used to laugh at that. He used to say I was the only person he’d ever met who was more careful with his money than he was.

He was never careful with his money. He spent it on me constantly, recklessly, like it embarrassed him to have so much of it and none of it going toward something that made me happy. I learned what good wine tasted like because of him. I learned what a five-star hotel breakfast looked like because of him. I was a girl who grew up clipping coupons with her mother, the first person in my family to walk into a lecture hall, and somehow — for two years — I also got to know what it felt like to be someone’s whole reason for spending.

We were good together. We were, before everything else got complicated, a genuinely good team.

“You look—” He stops himself, drags a hand back through his hair, and for one unguarded second he’s not a man who closes restaurants for parties and sits on the cover of business magazines. He’s twenty-two years old again, standing in my dorm hallway at midnight with two coffees because he knew I’d still be up studying.

“I need to talk to you about something,” I say, before he can finish that sentence, before either of us can afford whatever he was about to say next. “It’s important.”

Something in his face shutters, quick and controlled, like a door closing behind glass so you can still see the room but you can’t get back in.

“Okay,” he says, and gestures toward the chair across from his desk, the professional distance dropping back over him like armor. “Sit. Tell me.”

I sit. I make myself say it plainly, the way I rehearsed it in the elevator, because if I let myself soften it even a little I’m not sure I’ll get through it at all.

“I know the trial for cancer is closed. I know your company is the one sponsoring it. I need you to put someone on it.”

Something crosses his face — not surprise, exactly. More like he already knew, somehow, before I said it, that this was never going to be a simple reunion. He sighed.

“Angel—”

The nickname lands somewhere under my ribs I thought I’d sealed off years ago, half a syllable of my old name catching in his throat before he can stop it.

He hears himself say it. I watch it happen — the exact moment his own voice betrays him, the flicker of something helpless crossing his face before he locks it back down.

“Sorry,” he says, quieter now. “Force of habit.”

He straightens, and when he speaks again it’s with the careful, deliberate tone of a man choosing every word like it might be used against him later.

“The trial is closed because it has to be. My company sponsors the foundation — we don’t run it, and we don’t choose who’s admitted. That’s not me being difficult. That’s the whole point of how it’s built.” A beat. “I know you, Angelic. I know you’d walk through fire for anyone who needed help, and I know exactly what it’s going to look like if I start making calls for people just because they know me.”

“I’m not asking for just anyone.”

“I know that’s what it feels like to you,” he says, gentler now, and something about the gentleness is almost worse than if he’d just said no. “But I need you to understand—”

“It’s Anna.”

The words come out smaller than I mean them to. Smaller than six years and one dying sister and every ounce of pride I swallowed to walk into this building should sound.

He goes quiet.