JULIAN

He found out about the credit review at four-thirty, when his CFO knocked on his office door with a look Julian had learned to read over seven years — the look that said something had happened and it was going to be expensive.

"Cipher Capital sent a review notice," Marcus Chen said. He set the document on Julian's desk. "Effective immediately. Full due diligence on the credit line. Sixty days to complete."

Julian read the notice.

It was written in flawless legal language, dry and procedural, with the specific bureaucratic neutrality of something designed not to reveal anything about the sender's intentions.

He'd been dealing with Cipher Capital for three years. Their communication was always like this — thorough, impersonal, professionally excellent in a way that gave nothing away.

"Is this normal?" he said.

"Their credit agreements include a right to review at any time," Marcus said. "It's in the contract. We signed it." He paused. "It's within their legal rights. It's also —"

"Timed," Julian said.

Marcus was quiet.

Julian looked at the date on the notice. The same date as the divorce papers. The same morning.

"Coincidence," he said. The word sounded hollow even to him.

"Possibly," Marcus said, in the tone of a CFO who didn't believe in coincidences in financial documents.

"Get me everything we have on Cipher Capital," Julian said. "The full file. Who they are, who manages them, what their actual structure looks like." He paused. "We've never pushed on that."

"We've never needed to," Marcus said.

"We need to now." Julian set down the notice. "And get me a meeting. C. Voss, the managing partner — whoever's actually running this. Face to face."

Marcus nodded and left.

Julian turned to the window.

He'd sent Camille flowers that morning. Not because the lawyers suggested it — because it had seemed like the right thing to do, a gesture of acknowledgment, of — he wasn't sure. Of something.

She hadn't responded.

He hadn't expected her to. Camille had never been the kind of woman who responded to gestures. She'd been the kind of woman who didn't need them, which had been, four years ago, one of the things that had drawn him to her.

It had also been, four years in, one of the things that had made him feel like he didn't know her at all.

He pushed the thought down.

He had a credit review to manage.

Vivienne appeared in his doorway at five.

"I heard about the Cipher notice," she said.

"News travels fast."

"I'm your EVP," she said. "I'm supposed to know things quickly." She came in and sat in the chair across from his desk and crossed her legs with the ease of someone who'd sat in that chair a hundred times. "How concerned should we be?"

"Depends on what they find in the review," Julian said.

"Our books are clean."

"Our books are clean," he agreed. "Our cash flow projections for Q4 are tight. If Cipher decides the credit risk is elevated—"

"They pull the line," she said.

"They pull the line," he confirmed. "We have thirty days to find replacement financing or the Singapore acquisition renegotiates."

Vivienne was quiet for a moment.

"I always thought Cipher was a little too conveniently timed," she said. "The first deal three years ago — we needed that bridge financing and they appeared."

"They appeared because we were a good investment," Julian said.

"Or because someone wanted to be close to us," she said. She looked at him. "Julian. The notice is dated this morning."

He said nothing.

"The divorce went through this morning," she said.

"I'm aware."

"That's not a coincidence."

"I don't know what it is," he said, more sharply than he intended. "And I'm not going to speculate before I have information."

She looked at him.

"You never asked who C. Voss was," she said.

"No."

"Aren't you curious now?"

He was. He was very curious now, with a specific quality of curiosity that felt like it was sitting on top of something he didn't want to name.

"Get me that meeting," he said. "Before the weekend."

She nodded and stood.

At the door: "Julian. How are you?"

He looked at the city.

"I'm working," he said.

She left.

He picked up his phone. Looked at the message thread with Camille — their last exchange was six days ago, logistics about the lawyers. Before that, nothing substantive for months. He'd told himself it was because they were both busy. He'd told himself a lot of things, over the last year, that were easier than the alternative.

He put the phone down.

The notice sat on his desk.

*Cipher Capital Management — Review of Credit Facility Sterling Corp — Notice of Initiation.*

C. Voss.

He'd never looked at that name and wondered.

He was wondering now.

He called his assistant at five-thirty and told her to send flowers.

Not to Camille — he'd already done that, and there had been no response, and he wasn't going to repeat a gesture that had landed in silence. To his mother, who had called twice since the divorce announcement and who he had not yet spoken to properly.

His mother had liked Camille.

He hadn't thought much about this at the time. His mother had opinions about everything, and her opinion of Camille had been positive, and Julian had filed it the way he filed things that confirmed existing beliefs.

His mother had also said, once, at a dinner that Julian had attended while thinking about the Greenfield acquisition timeline: "She listens like someone who does something with what she hears."

Julian had agreed politely and turned the conversation to something else.

He was thinking about it now.

He opened his laptop and pulled up the Cipher Capital registration documents Marcus had sent. They were sparse — the firm had been deliberately minimal in its public filings, giving exactly what the law required and nothing else. But the history was there if you read it carefully.

The firm was four years old.

Exactly as old as his marriage.

He sat with that.

He thought about Camille in their apartment, reading things he'd left on the kitchen table — reports, projections, the draft of a strategy memo he'd been working through over a weekend. She'd read them, he knew, because she'd mentioned details days later in ways that couldn't have been coincidence. He'd thought she was being supportive. Being interested. Being the kind of wife who engaged with her husband's work.

She'd been doing research.

The thought should have made him angry.

It didn't.

What it made him was — embarrassed. Not at her. At himself. At the specific quality of his own incuriosity, the way he had accepted the frame she'd given him and never looked behind it.

He'd been so certain he knew the shape of his life.

The certainty had been a kind of blindness.

Marcus knocked.

"Your six o'clock is waiting," he said.

"Cancel it," Julian said. "Reschedule."

Marcus looked at him.

"Cancel it," Julian said again.

Marcus withdrew.

Julian sat at his desk and looked at the Cipher Capital registration and thought about a woman who had been in the room with him every day for four years, building something he hadn't seen, and what it said about the quality of his attention that he hadn't seen it.

He had a lot of thinking to do.

He started.