Sign the Papers Mr. Langford novel Chapter 370

Jude's gaze lingered for a second before he looked away.

"I thought a lot about yesterday's meeting," Willow said softly. "You were right. The project isn't about me."

Jude stared at her.

It was incredibly rare for her to concede like this.

"So?"

She bit her lip. "I already told the team, authorship will be divided by module. And we can escalate the complaints. But when you write the report, could you clarify that the early issues are just pilot friction, not systemic risks?"

He refused to budge.

"If the regulators assess it as a systemic risk, we don't have the authority to preemptively label it otherwise."

Her grip on the coffee cup tightened.

"Do you have to be this relentless?"

"This is protocol."

"But if this project goes under, I won't have a place at Langford Medical anymore." She looked up, her eyes slowly rimming with red. "You know how hard I fought to get here. Everyone says I'm just riding Lawrence's coattails, leaning on the Whitakers, living in Wren's shadow. Jude, I just wanted to prove I'm not someone's accessory."

Six months ago, those words would have melted his resolve.

Now, he simply asked, "So why were you logged into the system at two in the morning?"

The expression on her face froze.

It was brief.

So fleeting that if he hadn't been watching her like a hawk, he would have missed it.

"I couldn't sleep," she said, quickly dropping her gaze. "I just wanted to double-check the materials."

"You clicked into the legacy project search cache."

Her finger twitched.

A faint ripple disturbed the surface of her coffee.

By the time she looked up again, her eyes were swimming with pure betrayal.

"You're investigating me?"

Jude didn't let the deflection work.

"System logs are visible to all project leads."

"So now you think I'm the kind of person who would steal corporate files?"

Jude stayed quiet for a second.

"I asked why you accessed the legacy project cache."

The tears spilled fast.

She had a face built for crying. The moment her eyes turned red, she looked entirely defenseless and shattered. Jude had surrendered to those tears more times than he could count.

She said she was wronged, and he believed her.

She said she was just trying her best, and he believed that too.

But trust wasn't a subscription you could endlessly renew just because you paid for it in the past.

"I can't override the system logs," he said.

Willow stood up, abandoning her coffee.

"Understood."

She turned to leave, pausing right at the door.

"Jude, did you ever actually have feelings for me?"

He looked up.

The question came out of nowhere.

But then again, it didn't.

Willow was a master at dragging things back into the emotional mud whenever she was cornered. As long as he hesitated, she would find a crack to exploit.

He looked at her for a long time.

"I did."

Her eyes shifted.