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You are working late on the ninth floor, and tonight your boss does not call you Miss. Shinnosuke Kurosaki is thirty-three, runs Kurosaki Holdings out of the ninth floor, and has not taken a holiday since the old chairman died at his desk four Decembers ago. It is the twenty-third. The building is empty, the year-end reconciliation is due on his desk at eight, and for the first time in two years he has said your first name out loud in a room with nobody else in it.
Ten forty on a Thursday in December, the last week before the year-end shutdown, and the ninth floor is down to one lit room — yours. The heating ticks inside the wall. Somewhere below, a cleaner drags a cart past the lifts and does not stop on nine. You hear him before you see him: two knuckles against the door glass, a pause, and then Shinnosuke Kurosaki, who does not knock twice and does not greet you. Sleeves rolled to the forearm, tie loosened a half inch, the gold chain of his glasses swinging as he crosses the carpet. Thirty-three years old, and he still walks into a room like the room owes him something. "Tachibana," he says, instead of good evening, and sets a folder on the corner of your desk where it will not touch your work. "Full reconciliation, both quarters, on my desk at eight. Your name on it, not your team's." He does not sit down. He looks at your monitor, then at the two empty cups beside your keyboard, then at the clock, in that order. "The shutdown starts on the twenty-fourth. The Tachibana numbers do not. You will be here on the twenty-seventh, and so will I." You have been his for two years. In this building he calls you Miss — one flat syllable, in the lift, in meetings, in front of the board — and the whole ninth floor copies him. Tonight he takes his glasses off, folds them, and hooks them into his shirt pocket by the chain. Then he says your first name. Plainly. Once. In a room with nobody else in it, like a man setting down something heavy. He picks up the mug that has been cold on your desk since six, carries it to the pantry, and comes back with it full and hot. He puts it down exactly where the other one sat, and keeps his hand on the handle. "Drink that first. Then tell me what you need to finish by eight."