"The boss will be with you shortly," she says.
"The boss?" I say.
But she is already gone, pulling the door closed behind her. I stand in the center of the room and breathe.
It is another suite. Larger than the one I walked through, furnished with the same expensive taste. A long table, chairs, and a bar cart along one wall that no one has touched. Whatever this room is used for, it isn't for television interviews.
I smooth the front of my blazer and tell myself to think clearly.
Small stations sometimes operate unconventionally. Intimate formats are popular right now, the kind of unscripted, close-quarters conversations that perform well online. Perhaps the boss is the interviewer. Perhaps this is exactly the personalapproach I anticipated and I am simply reading the atmosphere wrong because I arrived early and the room hasn't been prepared yet. That is plausible. I came twenty minutes ahead of the scheduled time, which in retrospect might have been excessive, but I wanted to be composed and settled and ready rather than rushed.
I straighten my back and fold my hands in front of me and wait.
The door opens. A tall man comes in ahead of the two men who follow him, which tells me immediately that he is not staff. He is dressed in an expensive three-piece suit and hangs on his body to show his perfect proportions. He is middle-aged but his hair is dark, almost black, pushed back from a face that is, almost unreasonably, structured.
His hands, when I notice them, are large and unhurried at his sides. There are tattoos at his wrists where his cuffs sit, dark ink disappearing into the fabric. His eyes find me the moment he crosses into the room and they don't move.
They are green, pale, and very, very still.
I feel a pull of familiarity so faint it might be nothing, a face that reminds me of someone I have perhaps seen before in passing, on television maybe, or in a photograph. I can't place it and I don't have time to try. I am here for a purpose and I have prepared for this and I am not going to let an expensive suit and a significant physical presence make me forget that.
I straighten and stretch my hand.
"Hello," I say. "I'm Nathalie Keller. It's wonderful to meet you. You're the interviewer?"
He stops and his eyes move to the two men standing behind him. Then he looks back at me.
"Is this a fucking joke?"
The silence that follows lasts approximately three seconds. It feels considerably longer.
Chapter Three
Luca
"Does your father know you're here?"
Her dark brown hair is back from her face, her blue eyes are remarkably steady for someone who should be frightened right now. Two small moles beneath her left eye give her face an asymmetry she is probably unaware of. And her blazer is slightly too formal for her age.
Those blue eyes hold mine and she answers, "I'm not playing with anyone. I'm here for the interview."
She is young, mid-twenties at the most. Slender, medium height, and beautiful. She is wearing heels that she has clearly practiced walking in. It was clear that she thought carefully about what this meeting required of her.
She thought carefully and prepared but she had absolutely no idea where she was.
I sit and she sits too, immediately, straightening her back like she is in a job interview, and I watch her place both hands flat on the table in a gesture that I recognize as someone controlling the urge to fidget.
"I'm not my father," she continues, and there is a quality to her voice that I find difficult to categorize, something that is simultaneously rehearsed and genuine, like she prepared the words but actually means them. "But I represent him and I can offer something he can't. A personal perspective. A candid view of who Phillip Keller actually is as a person, not just as a candidate. That's a unique?—"
"Does your father know you're here?"
She stops.
I watch it move across her face, the brief disruption of the composure she has assembled so carefully, and then I watch her reassemble it.
"That's not the most important thing right now," she says.
I look at her for a long moment. "Does your father know that you are here?"
