Finally, she set the tablet down and looked up. "Explain to me how this happened."
"I received your email while at dinner Tuesday night. I read it but failed to immediately update the calendar. By the time I returned to work the next morning, I'd forgotten about it entirely." No excuses, no deflection. Victoria despised both.
"You were at dinner."
"Yes."
"With?"
The question caught him off guard. "Former colleagues from McKinsey. It was a birthday gathering."
Victoria's expression didn't change. "And this social obligation was so consuming that you couldn't take thirty seconds to update my calendar?"
"No. It was my error, plain and simple."
"Not simple, James. The Hanson Group represents a potential eight-figure contract. Their CEO and CFO just wasted time waiting for me because you couldn't manage to perform the most basic function of your job." Her voice remained eerily calm. "Do you know what I had to do to get back here by 11:37?"
James shook his head.
"I left during a standing ovation, cut through the kitchen to avoid the event coordinator, took service elevators to the parking garage, and had Marcus arrange a police escort citing a medical emergency." She leaned forward slightly. "I lied, James. I manipulated public servants. I left three hundred industry leaders wondering why I disappeared during my closing remarks. All because you were distracted by drinks with friends."
Each word landed like a precise blow. This wasn't Victoria's typical demanding behavior—this was genuine anger at a genuine failure.
"I'm sorry," he said, meaning it.
"Sorry doesn't undo the damage to my reputation with that audience. Sorry doesn't give me back the forty-five minutes I spent creating contingency plans instead of focusing on my presentation." She stood, smoothing her skirt with practiced precision. "I selected you from sixty-four applicants because you demonstrated an exceptional ability to anticipate and manage complex logistics. That ability seems to have deserted you recently."
The implied connection to his lunch with Winters yesterday wasn't subtle. James felt a flush of indignation, mixed with something more complicated. Despite knowing better, part of him had hoped she'd been jealous of his meeting with Winters. Victoria's words in the car had confused him—"mine to lose"—and he knew he shouldn't take them to heart, shouldn't read anything personal into her possessiveness. Yet he couldn't help the way his heart had pounded when she'd said it, the jittery feeling that had lingered afterward.
"This has nothing to do with Chad Winters. It was a simple oversight that unfortunately had significant consequences." He tried to keep the emotion from his voice, to remain as coolly professional as she always was, even as he recognized the pattern of his own self-torture—reading meaning into her words, hoping for something he knew would never materialize.
"Nothing in this office is simple, especially not mistakes." Victoria gathered her materials. "The Hanson contract is salvaged, no thanks to you. I expect a complete audit of all upcoming scheduled commitments by end of day, with triple verification on any involving travel or external executives."
"Of course."
She moved toward the door, then paused. "You missed the quarterly performance reviews while handling the Petrov aftermath. We should schedule that. Next Thursday, 7:00 PM."
The statement was loaded with subtext. Quarterly reviews typically happened during business hours. Scheduling his for 7:00 PM suggested it would be particularly unpleasant—a deliberate incursion into his personal time as punishment.
"I'll add it to the calendar. Immediately." He couldn't quite keep the edge from his voice.
Victoria turned, catching the tone. "Problem?"
"No."
"Good. Because while I value your contributions, James, I need absolute reliability. If you can't provide that because you're distracted by social engagements or recruitment meetings with my competitors, perhaps this isn't the right environment for you after all."
The threat was clear, and entirely unlike Victoria. She demanded perfection but had never before suggested his job was in jeopardy. It was an escalation that felt disproportionate to even this significant error.
"Are you firing me over one scheduling mistake?"
Victoria's eyes narrowed. "I'm reminding you that your position here requires absolute focus and commitment. I can't afford errors caused by divided attention or divided loyalties."
"My loyalty has never been in question," James replied, his own anger finally surfacing, intensified by the feelings he'd been fighting to control for years. "I declined Winters's offer, as I'm sure you already know since you have Marcus tracking my movements."
A flicker of something—surprise?—crossed Victoria's face before she controlled it. "Your meetings are your business, as long as they don't interfere with your duties here."
"That's not what you said in the car after the Petrov dinner. You made it very clear you consider me 'yours to lose.'" He met her gaze directly, his heart pounding traitorously in his chest. Victoria's mixed signals were the worst form of torment—he knew he shouldn't let them affect him, knew he was just prolonging his own suffering by reading into them, but he couldn't stop himself. "You can't have it both ways, Victoria. Either I'm just an employee who made a mistake, or I'm something more to you—in which case, this overreaction suggests something beyond professional disappointment."
The words hung between them, charged with implications. James felt the familiar conflict rise within him—the rational part of his brain telling him to stop this self-destructive attachment while the rest of him held on to the smallest signals that might indicate Victoria saw him as more than just an efficient assistant.
The room went silent. Victoria's expression was unreadable, but James could see the subtle tension in her shoulders, the slightly too-controlled breathing. He'd crossed a line, bringing their unspoken dynamic into explicit discussion.
After what felt like an eternity, Victoria spoke, her voice unusually quiet. "You're right. I can't have it both ways." Something vulnerable flickered across her face, so quickly he might have imagined it. "Complete the calendar audit. We'll discuss everything else at your performance review."
She turned toward the door again, paused for a fraction of a second as if she might say something more, then left without another word. The soft click of the door closing behind her was somehow more devastating than a slam would have been.
James remained standing in the empty conference room, the aftermath of his mistake expanding far beyond a simple scheduling error. For the first time in three years, he questioned whether Victoria's impossible standards were worth meeting. More troubling was the realization that despite everything—her cutting remarks, her impossibly high expectations, her hot and cold behavior—he still cared deeply what she thought of him.
He sank into a chair, confronting once again the truth he'd known for years but could never seem to escape. He was in love with Victoria Sharp. Against all logic, against his better judgment, despite knowing exactly how this would end. Every day was a fresh exercise in self-torture—watching for signs that she might feel something beyond professional appreciation, analyzing her words for hidden meanings, letting his heart race at the briefest moments of connection.
And that, far more than any scheduling error, was his real mistake. Yet knowing the futility of his feelings didn't make them any easier to dismiss. After three years, they should have faded. Instead, they had only grown stronger, more entrenched, more impossible to ignore—especially in moments like this, when the professional veneer between them cracked to reveal something raw and undefined.