Annabeth grudgingly stepped off out of the dim DC Metro and instantly lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the too-bright sun. It was almost September, and while part of her still longed for cozy knit fabrics and the cute heeled boots that she'd let Piper talk her into buying years ago, nothing could really detract from the fact that it was in fact still August and therefore still summer. If autumn was in the air, no one had told whichever god controlled the weather. Annabeth adjusted the strap of her laptop bag on her shoulder and did her best to tuck her blazer under her arm as flipped her sunglasses down and strode towards the coffee shop where Piper had asked to meet her.

Gleeson's was a charming little spot tucked into the bottom floor of an office building. Greenery and floral wreaths tucked into the slats above the outdoor seating made for a pleasant break from the general gray-and-brown blockiness of the rest of the street. Annabeth slid her phone out of her pocket to check the time: 7:15am. Right on time. Inside, the cafe was open, but the morning rush clearly hadn't hit yet. Annabeth took a deep breath of the sweet, cinnamon-scented air. She spotted Piper at a back table, poking listlessly at a cinnamon roll.

"Why are you wearing sunglasses indoors?" was Annabeth's first question.

Piper sighed. "Because running on no sleep feels remarkably similar to being hungover, and frankly, I really don't want people to recognize me right now."

"Who's going to recognize you?" Annabeth asked. "I mean, no offense, but you're the… deputy, deputy Chief of Staff. You're like, three full rungs down on the White House corporate ladder. What are you worried about, People magazine doing a profile on what to wear on a secretary's salary in DC?"

Piper gave her a look over the top edge of her dark frames. "I might be a secretary, but I'm still his daughter."

"Point," Annabeth conceded.

"Also, you pay me that salary," Piper grumbled. "I could use a raise. Or like, a trip somewhere. Don't bosses take their secretaries on trips?"

"I don't set your salary, Reyna does, and okay, let's go on a trip. The next time we both have more than eight hours off of work at this ivory tower hellhole of tax dollars and patriotic purpose," Annabeth agreed. Without asking, she reached over and picked up Piper's fork to cut off a wedge of the cinnamon roll. She slid it into her mouth, eyes closing momentarily in rapture. "This is fantastic."

"I know," Piper nodded. "I love this place."

"Never have I ever heard someone say that phrase with such little enthusiasm," Annabeth frowned. "You're not eating. And you haven't even touched your coffee, despite running on no sleep. What's going on?"

Piper shook her head. "Nothing. At least, not with me. No, I'm… I'm fine."

Annabeth crossed her arms. "Then why did you ask me to meet you here? Before eight, no less. You hate early mornings."

"Because I wanted to ask what was up with you," Piper said, finally removing her sunglasses, sharp eyes fixed on Annabeth's equally-exhausted face. "Come on. Something's going on and you're not talking about it."

"Well, if you're talking about the fact that Michael Yew could have easily been a friend if we'd known him a little longer and also a police officer shot him, which screws over any possible law and order agenda we could have put in place to win over some undecideds..." Annabeth waved over the waitress, a pretty, apple-cheeked woman whose nametag read MELLIE. "Hi, Mellie. Can I get a vanilla latte please? And maybe a muffin?"

"Sure thing, sweetheart," Mellie said, pulling a pencil out from behind her ear. "We've got pumpkin, blueberry, banana, or zuchinni-chocolate-chip. The pumpkin's real good, it's got the cream cheese frosting in the middle and everything."

"Sure, pumpkin sounds great," Annabeth answered. She turned back to Piper. "So yes, I'm a little stressed out, but…"

Piper narrowed her eyes. "Nuh-uh. You've been weird since before we heard. And you've been having closed-door meetings with Silena without telling me what's going on there? I make your calendars, remember? I know when you have meetings with the press secretary. And don't you dare say it's because of some security clearance thing, because hers isn't even that much higher than mine."

"It is actually, but that's not the point," Annabeth said, crossing her arms over her chest. "It's… look, this has to stay quiet, okay? But there might be something small that could come up in the press, and it would be bad and embarrassing for me, and therefore embarrassing to Reyna and to the President. So it stays quiet."

Piper took a small sip of her coffee. "But you're squeaky-clean. You haven't even done anything out of line, except for maybe…" her eyes widened. "Wait."

"Yeah," Annabeth confirmed quietly. "That."

"But you… you swore to me that it never went anywhere. That it was just while you were in school, and not after." Piper set her coffee back down on the table with a louder thunk than was strictly necessary. "Are you telling me that it was more than that? That it was a big enough deal that it might surface?"

"It was only a few times." The words left Annabeth's mouth almost unbidden, like they had been hiding on the tip of her tongue waiting for the moment to escape. "It's not… it wasn't like it was an affair or anything."

"But it was while he was working here?" Piper asked.

Annabeth nodded, a tiny motion that betrayed so much.

"And… you didn't disclose it to Reyna at the time."

"No," Annabeth admitted. "I would have, if it had been going anywhere, but then… he announced he was leaving, he was running for the open seat, and I…"

"You didn't tell anyone. And after?"

"Once," Annabeth muttered. "Only once while he was running."

"He was running for the opposite goddamn side, Annabeth!" Piper snapped. "You didn't think that it might—"

"No, Piper, I didn't think." Annabeth looked up, and there was Mellie with a vanilla latte and a pumpkin muffin. "Thanks, Mellie," she murmured, trying to calm down the roiling mess of thoughts and emotions that threatened to explode out from inside her at any moment.

Piper waited for Mellie to walk away before continuing, slightly quieter than before. "Right. Okay. And Percy?"

Annabeth blinked. "What?"

"Well, if we're spilling secrets about your love life. He's got the job that opened up when you-know-who left. You knew him from before. There were rumors about the two of you. Remember, I've known Leo Valdez from New York since college, and they were best friends at one point, and I spend time with— never mind. Point is, I know enough to know that people talked about you two, back at Duke. And now…"

"What, you think I'd sleep with every guy who works in the communications office and who I briefly knew in law school?" Annabeth's eyebrows raised, just a fraction of a centimeter. "Wow, what a high opinion you have of me. There'd be no one left for me not to have screwed at that rate."

"I'm not trying to call you a whore, I'm trying to point out that you have a history," Piper said flatly. "But fine, if you're not going to talk about it…"

"Why are you being such a…" Annabeth sighed. "You know what, there's too much other shit going on right now. I'm not sleeping with Percy. There was a brief history. It didn't go anywhere. He went to California. I started working in New York. He came back, I was already involved with— it doesn't matter."

"Oh, I see." Piper cut into her cinnamon roll a little too aggressively. "I understand now."

"You think I made the wrong choice, back then," Annabeth noted.

"It doesn't matter, right? It's all in the past." Piper took a bite, chewed, swallowed. "That's why you're in closed-door meetings with the press secretary, because it's all in the past and would never resurface in a context that might have an impact on you, your job, my job…"

Annabeth's heart sank. "You're mad."

"No shit." Piper shook her head. "It's not really that. I'm sorry, I've just… I haven't been sleeping well lately."

"Job security," Annabeth remarked dryly. She looked more closely at her friend. "Hey, if something was going on with you, you'd say something, right?"

Piper stared at her coffee for just a second too long. "Right. Of course, I would."

Later, at the office, Annabeth found herself sitting at her desk unable to focus. There were a dozen documents open on her computer and six binders spread over her desk, but she couldn't stop herself from drumming her fingers, shaking her leg so hard the top of her desk quivered. One of those documents was the one on police reform that Luke had drafted, right before he'd left. He'd floated all kinds of ideas to her, behind closed doors.

"Just think," he'd said, "what a carefully placed plant could do. Bodycam footage, of what an unauthorized shot looks like. At what police unions will do to protect their own."

"You want to commit a crime to frame them for it just in order to prove our point," Annabeth had said, backing away.

"It's just an idea," he'd responded, with a sardonic shrug and that tilt to his lips that she'd always found irresistible. "We'd never seriously do it."

"Obviously," Annabeth had replied, heart beating too fast for the wrong reasons.

They'd had lots of closed-door meetings like that, especially in the weeks when the Brunner administration had first taken office. Even just looking at his name on the document brought back memories, wringing them out of her like water out of a shirt after an unexpected dunking into a lake. Coffee and flowers left on her desk in the mornings. Hidden, secret walks along the Potomac when they both had claimed to have lunch meetings with other people, just to sneak in a few moments together. Late nights, hands brushing over documents. Burning, feverish kisses in the dark space of the Metro parking lot where he usually left his car. The empty feeling when he skipped a lunchtime walk. The sharp twinge of betrayal at what turned out to be the last time, the night before his last day, when he didn't breathe a word of his leaving.

She pulled up his contact information in her phone before she even thought about what she was doing. Her finger hovered over his name.

Through her open office door, she took a long glance at the tall, broad-shouldered frame making its way through the office, passing speech drafts and memos around, charming his way around every secretary's desk. He looked up, caught her gray eyes with his sea-green ones. He offered her a small, reassuring smile, mouthed the words you okay?

Her finger stilled over the call button. She didn't press it. Not yet.

As always, thank you for reading, for reviewing, for acknowledging and engaging with this little scrap of story. I appreciate you all more than you know. ~GT