For a moment he had forgotten that he was a majority owner of a multinational tech company. Sometimes, when he was surprised enough, that knowledge left him and he became some normal man, who had to deal with his problems using whatever limited resources were available. But he was Quentin Blake, and he had no such limits.
After a little bit of digging and calling in a years-old favor, he obtained the security footage from the coffeeshop. The weasel's retelling of their encounter had been mostly accurate, unfortunately. They spent a total of eight minutes in the bathroom together, alone. The thought of it made his blood boil, but he knew Em had higher standards than that. He used Alisa's old email-retrival software to find Dominic's daily schedule for the past three months. There was no indication that he had planned his interaction with Em. He went to that coffeeshop fairly regularly, due to its proximity to the Aurora building. He then accessed the search history associated with Dominic's personal and work emails and filtered it to see if there were any records related to Em. He also reminded himself to buy Alisa lunch one of these days.
Despite all his searching, he didn't find anything. As far as he knew, their encounter had been a complete coincidence. It wasn't impossible, but it was infuriatingly unlikely.
In the end, it didn't matter whether Dominic had planned it or not. They clearly had some sort of… rapport. They smiled at each other almost the whole time they talked. She'd saved her number in his phone. Quentin had gotten her number after they decided to continue their relationship. She'd written it down for him on a pink post-it note and stuck it on his wallet, then handed it back to him and sent him out the door. It had been… endearing, which at the time he thought was strange. He hadn't known back then what she would mean to him. He'd saved the number and thrown the note away. But she'd never written him another note. He rarely ever got to see her lilting handwriting, the way her letters all sort of bled together.
He told Travis to cancel the event in the conference room next week and move the market research event back there. They wouldn't have to go to the Pavillion, so they wouldn't have to use Dominic's connection. Of course, that wouldn't stop Dominic from reaching out to her. It was possible they were already texting. The program he had gotten from Alisa couldn't retrieve texts. If he wanted them, he would have to ask her about it directly, and she would have questions… For now, it was better he figured it out himself. He wasn't ready for them to know about her yet. Someday everybody would know about him and Em. When people thought of him, they would think of her, the brilliant woman who had stolen his heart. Someday their relationship would be… formal. Official. Permanent. He wanted to keep it to himself for a little while longer. He wanted to keep her to himself.
Which meant he needed to deal with Dominic. He had to reconfigure his plan to account for this. More than anything, though, he needed to talk to Em. He felt like he would know, if he talked to her, if something had changed. He just needed to hear her voice once, needed to see her and feel her and know her again. He pulled out his phone. Still no reply to his text. It had been five hours and twenty-two minutes since he had sent it. She would have had plenty of chances to see the text. Maybe she just wasn't going to reply during work. That was okay. He could wait.
He ended up staying late to finish his actual tasks, having spent too much time looking into Dominic. He finally finished up around 8:20 and checked his phone again. Still no text. It was possible she was working late too, she often did. Or she could still be on the bus. He had heard that public transportation could be unreliable. Perhaps he could fix that… He would look into it tomorrow. He had to head home to his brothers, for now. He drove home, had dinner and did his best not to think about her, and he went to sleep still waiting for his phone to ring. In the morning, he got ready for work imagining all the circumstances under which she couldn't have answered his text. Maybe she left her phone at work. Maybe she had dropped it somewhere. Maybe she had meant to and had fallen fast asleep. Sometimes she would sleep so deeply a car horn couldn't wake her. Sometimes she just forgot to check her phone, too. She would be so busy thinking about other things that she just… didn't. It was a Friday, so she'd probably be busy during work, especially because of the event next week. She'd most likely only end up texting him back later tonight when she was all finished. They'd met up every weekend for the past two months. She'd text him. She would definitely text him.
The day passed abysmally slowly, with him constantly trying not to check his phone, and failing time and time again. But she was busy. She was at work, too. She had her own life. She had all sorts of things she had to do besides work. He was really being too much, expecting her to text back on his schedule. He should stop thinking about it and wait. She would text him. She would respond and let him know when she was free, and he would go over to her place like he always did and they could talk. He would finally talk to her and they would sort everything out and he would know for certain that she still wanted him. He let those hopeful thoughts push him through until five, then ten, then twelve. It wasn't until three am that he finally let himself think the truth.
She was ignoring him.