Comfortable.
The word sits in the air between us and it rearranges everything.
The dinner. The proposition. The word arrangement on the white linen. The unsigned coffee and the car in the rain and the navy dress with no back and the knowing smiles at Ace Royale and the woman in red who told me he has good taste and the woman across the room who used to stand where I was standing. All of it. Every second of the past weeks rebuilds itself in my mind with a new foundation underneath it, and the foundation is this: Anton Almazov didn’t assume I was for sale. He was told I was. By my aunt. By the woman who braided my hair at Thanksgiving and sent me a first-day card with a lipstick kiss on the envelope and bought me a green dress and a navy dress andput me in his path like a gift-wrapped present and never, not once, not for one second, told me what I was being wrapped for.
“Excuse me,” I tell Blythe.
I make it to the bathroom. I lock the door. I kneel on the tile floor of a coffee shop bathroom a few blocks from Keyes, Inc. and I’m sick, thoroughly, completely, my body rejecting the last three weeks in the only language it has left, and when it’s over I sit back against the wall and press my hands against my eyes and I don’t cry because crying would require a kind of processing I haven’t reached yet.
I wash my face. I rinse my mouth. I go back out.
Blythe is still there. She hasn’t moved. Her espresso is untouched and mine is cold and she is sitting with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the door and when I sit down she reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine. Just that. Her hand on my hand, warm and firm and present, and it’s the first time Blythe has ever touched me.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
I turn my hand over under hers. I grip her fingers. I hold on a moment because I need a moment of someone’s hand in mine before I can say what I’m about to say.
“I’m going to tell him the truth.”
Blythe’s face does two things at once. The first is admiration, bright and fierce, the face of a woman who respects a move even when she thinks it’s suicidal. The second is pity. Deep and real and stripped of the hard shell she wears at the office. The two expressions layer over each other and neither wins.
“He’s not going to believe you,” she tells me.
“I know.”
“He’s been reading people his entire life. He’s built a career on it. An empire. He’s never been wrong.”
“He’s wrong about me.”
Blythe holds my eyes. Then she nods. She squeezes my hand once and lets go and picks up her espresso and drinks it cold and I pick up mine and do the same and it’s bitter and it’s perfect and we sit in the coffee shop a moment longer, two women who started this morning as colleagues and are ending it as something closer, and then I stand up and I leave.
BLYTHE
She let her go.
Through the coffee shop window, past the grey light and the scarred tables and the ceramic cups, Blythe could see Daisy Fletcher walking up the street toward the main road. Small. Straight-backed. Her cardigan pulled tight around her shoulders and her bag gripped in one hand and her chin up, and the chin was the thing that got her, because it was the chin of a girl who had just learned that her aunt sold her and her employer was a front and the man she kissed on a balcony thought she was a transaction, and instead of collapsing she was walking toward his door to tell him he was wrong.
She was going to walk into a lion’s den and tell the lion he’d been reading the menu wrong.
Blythe picked up her phone. The screen lit. She scrolled past the firm’s group chat and the client notifications and the calendar reminders and found a number she hadn’t called in years. She’d kept it. Always kept it, like keeping a fire exit marked even when you’ve convinced yourself you’ll never need to leave the building.
She pressed call.
It rang twice.
“Mum,” Blythe said, and her voice cracked on the single syllable, and the crack surprised her because Blythe didn’t crack. “It’s me.”
DAISY
His building is on the coast road. I know this because Kaye mentioned it once, casually, dropping it into conversation like something she wanted me to file away for later, and I filed it, and I hate that I filed it, and I’m grateful that I filed it, and both of those things are true at the same time.
The lobby is marble and glass and a concierge in a suit who asks my name and speaks into a phone and nods and gestures toward a private lift, and the lift requires a code that the concierge enters for me, and the doors close and I rise through the building and I can see Monaco falling away beneath me through the glass walls, the harbour shrinking, the yachts becoming toys, and I am rising toward the penthouse of a man who thinks I’m a liar and I’m going to tell him the truth and he’s not going to believe me and I’m going anyway.
The doors open.
He’s there. Standing in the hallway. He knew I was coming. The concierge called ahead, or the lift announced me, or he simply knew, because a man who reads people can feel them approaching before they arrive.
He’s in shirtsleeves. The jacket is gone. The tie is gone. His collar is open and his sleeves are rolled to the forearm and he is holding a glass of something amber and his face, when he sees me, does something I’ve never seen.
