This is the part I didn’t tell Beata, the part I’d spent three years not telling anyone:
Tanvi and I had met before the firm. Before Oslo. Before any of it.
A conference in Amsterdam. Four years ago. I’d been new to international logistics, nervous in the specific way of someone who has prepared too much. She’d been at a rival company, sharp and certain in a way I’d found both irritating and magnetic.
We’d argued about supply chain ethics over bad conference wine. We’d ended up at a canal-side bar until two in the morning. We’d talked about everything except work—her family in Mumbai, my years in Chennai before London, the strange freedom of being far from home and slightly anonymous.
I’d thought about her for weeks afterward.
Then she’d joined my firm, and the version of her I met in the office was professional and precise and gave no indication that any of it had happened.
So I’d done the same.
I’d told myself it was the smart move. The professional move.
I’d told myself that so many times it had almost become true.
—
After dinner, most of the group moved to the living room. I stepped outside.
The fjord at night was something else entirely. The last of the light had gone but the sky wasn’t fully dark—that particular Norwegian summer quality where dusk stretches past its welcome and everything glows faintly at the edges. The water was black and silver. The air smelled of pine and cold stone and the faint brine of deep water.
I heard the door behind me.
Tanvi came to stand beside me at the railing. Not close. But not far.
“You’re avoiding the aquavit toasts,” she said.
“I’m pacing myself.”
“Beata’s watching us through the window,” she said. “Third pane from the left.”
I didn’t turn to check. “Of course she is.”
A beat of quiet. The fjord made no sound. It was the loudest silence I’d stood in for years.
“Amsterdam,” Tanvi said.
One word. Dropped into the air between us like a stone into still water.
My chest did something complicated.
“Amsterdam,” I said back.
“I thought about saying something,” she said. “When I joined the firm. I thought about it for about a week.”
“What stopped you?”
She was quiet for a moment. The water caught a sliver of moonlight and held it.
“You seemed like you’d decided not to,” she said. “And I didn’t want to be the one who made it awkward if you’d just… moved on.”
That landed harder than I expected.
Because she’d been reading me correctly. And she’d protected me from the awkwardness I’d been too cowardly to risk. And I’d spent three years interpreting that protection as indifference.
—
This is the version of events I hadn’t let myself look at directly:
I hadn’t gone cold in the office because I’d moved on.
I’d gone cold because I hadn’t. Because she’d walked into that first Monday briefing and I’d felt the same thing I’d felt at the canal bar at midnight, and I’d panicked. Because wanting something that exists inside a professional relationship is a complication I’d spent a decade learning to avoid. Because I was better at building walls than I was at admitting they were walls.
Beata had called us the same person.
Maybe she’d been right. Maybe we’d both been doing the same thing, just from opposite sides of the same silence.
—
The sharp moment came just before midnight.
Beata appeared on the deck with a blanket over her shoulders and the expression of someone who had been patient for a very long time.
“I need to say something,” she announced.
“Beata—” I started.
“No. Three years.” She held up a hand. “Three years of watching you two be excruciatingly professional at each other. I invited you both here because my cousin is getting married tomorrow and I wanted to feel something hopeful this weekend, and the two of you are the most stubbornly hopeless people I have ever met.”
She looked at Tanvi. Then at me.
“Figure it out,” she said. “Or don’t. But stop pretending the other one isn’t there.”
She went back inside.
The door clicked shut with the finality of someone who has said exactly what they meant.
Tanvi let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
“She’s not wrong,” she said.
“She’s almost never wrong,” I said. “It’s one of her most annoying qualities.”
This time Tanvi did smile. Full and unguarded, the way she’d smiled at the canal bar when I’d said something that surprised her.
I’d missed that smile without ever admitting I’d missed it.
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