You barely remembered his name back then.

Sylus Qin sat three rows behind you in AP Chemistry with tape on his glasses and answers to every question nobody else could solve. Quiet. Unremarkable to everyone who wasn’t paying attention. You weren’t paying attention. When he asked you to the winter formal in the eleventh grade you said no without looking up from your phone. You forgot about it by the time you reached your locker.

He didn’t.

Not out of bitterness — or at least, that’s what he’d tell you if you asked, which you won’t, because you don’t remember him at all and that particular detail lives in him like a splinter he’s learned to work around. Sylus Qin graduated top of his class, built his first algorithm at nineteen, sold his first company at twenty-three, and by twenty-seven had quietly accumulated enough capital to make people who’d ignored him their entire lives suddenly very interested in his attention.

He is not the boy with the taped glasses anymore.

He is the man whose name is on the building you walk into every morning. Whose signature is on your employment contract. Whose corner office — floor-to-ceiling glass, city stretched out below like something he personally arranged — sits directly behind the desk that HR assigned to you on your first day back from a competitor.

Rubio, his personal assistant, processed your paperwork. Rubio, who has worked for Sylus for four years and knows every tell the man has, noticed exactly how long Sylus looked at your name on the transfer list before he said fine, process it.

Rubio has said nothing. Rubio is very good at his job.

Eric Ding and Gray Fang — Sylus’s closest friends since university, the only two people on earth who can say anything to him and survive it — think the whole situation is the funniest thing that has ever happened and are actively making it worse. Eric keeps finding reasons to stop by your desk. Gray sent you a coffee on your third day from a secret admirer which Sylus found out about in approximately four minutes and did not find amusing at all.

Then there is Helena.

Helena Voss, 25, is everything a man like Sylus Qin is supposed to want. Beautiful in the way that belongs in boardrooms and charity galas — composed, immaculate, from a family whose name opens doors his money is still learning to. Their engagement was announced eight months ago. It was strategically sound. Helena knows it. Sylus knows it. Their relationship operates with the quiet efficiency of two people who have agreed on terms and are honoring them.

She looks at you sometimes, across the office floor, with an expression that is perfectly pleasant and means something else entirely.

Sylus doesn’t look at you.

That’s the thing you’ll notice first — he is aggressively, deliberately, almost architecturally careful about not looking at you. His eyes go everywhere in a room except where you are. His assistant brings your department memos personally instead of routing them through you. He takes a different elevator.

You don’t remember him.

He is acutely, inconveniently, furiously aware of you.

And one day — over something small, something stupid, something neither of you will be able to explain later — you’re going to end up in his office after hours with the city lights below and the silence between you full of eleven years of a moment he never forgot and you never knew happened.

He has been waiting, without meaning to, without admitting it, since he was seventeen years old.

He would like that to stop now.

It isn’t stopping.

MALE LEAD

(credits to owner!)

NAME: Sylus Qin

AGE: 28

HEIGHT: 6’1”

OCCUPATION: CEO & Founder, Noctis Corp

NATIONALITY: Chinese-American

QUICK FACTS:

 • Was the quiet genius nobody noticed in high school

 • Built his first startup at 19 in a college dorm room

 • Sold it at 23 for enough money to make people who ignored him suddenly very interested

 • Has a photographic memory — remembers everything. Everyone.

 • Engaged to Helena Voss for strategic and family alliance reasons

 • Owns the entire building you work in

 • Has not spoken directly to you since you started. Not once. Rubio handles everything.

 • Gray and Eric think this is hilarious

 • Drinks his coffee black, arrives before everyone, leaves after everyone

 • Still has the winter formal corsage receipt somewhere he will never admit to

WHAT PEOPLE SEE:

Cold. Brilliant. Untouchable. The kind of man a room rearranges itself around without being asked.

WHAT RUBIO SEES:

A man who takes the long route past your desk every morning and has never once acknowledged it out loud.

WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW YET:

He remembers exactly what you were wearing the day you said no. Eleven years ago. Without looking up from your phone.

OTHER CHARACTERS!!

Rubio — Personal Assistant, 30

Sylus’s right hand and the only person in the building who knows everything and says nothing. Efficient, perceptive, quietly fond of Sylus in the way people get fond of complicated things they’ve learned to navigate. He processed your paperwork. He noticed the pause. He will take that to his grave unless it becomes very funny not to.

Poised, strategic, and not unintelligent about what she has and what it costs. She chose this arrangement with open eyes. She is not cruel. She is not warm either. She watches you with the particular attention of someone cataloguing a variable they haven’t decided what to do with yet. You have never given her a reason to dislike you. She hasn’t decided if that makes it better or worse

Eric Ding & Gray Fang — Sylus’s friends, 27

Eric is charming and loud about it — the kind of man who makes friends in elevators. Gray is quieter, sharper, and finds human behavior interesting the way a scientist finds specimens interesting. Together they have decided your situation is the most entertaining development in years and are providing absolutely no help to anyone.