“I know.”
“You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to rearrange my evening with a note and a dress and expect me to appear on schedule like I don’t have a self.”
Something moves in his jaw. Not anger. The adjustment of a man deciding how much to give. “It won’t always be two hours,” he says. “Tonight it was. I don’t have a better answer for you.”
It is possibly the most honest thing he has said to me since I found page fourteen. I hate that it lands the way it does.
“Who are these people?” I ask.
“Council members. Senior figures in the organization. Their opinion of you matters for your safety inside my world.”
“My safety.”
“Yes.”
I look at him for a long moment. He holds it the way he holds everything, without flinching, without filling the silence with reassurance he doesn’t intend to mean.
“The dress is the wrong neckline for me,” I say.
“Then wear something of your own.”
I pick up the box.
“Car at seven,” he says, already looking back at his papers.
I walk out without rushing.
That’s the one thing I have. My timeline. He said car at seven, and it’s currently five fifteen. I shower slowly, and I do my makeup at a pace that has nothing to do with the clock. I stand in front of my wardrobe for ten minutes deciding between two dresses I brought from home.
I pick the black one. Knee length, structured, a dress I bought for a job interview two years ago that has done more work than it was purchased for. It fits the way clothes fit when you’ve owned them long enough for them to know your body. I do my hair. I put on the earrings Lena gave me for my birthday, small gold hoops, the kind that go with everything.
I look at myself in the mirror.
I look like someone who made a choice.
At six fifty-eight, I walk out of my room and down the corridor. Zane is in the foyer, dark suit, no tie, the particular way he wears a room before he walks into it. He turns when he hears me.
He looks at me for a moment. Not the way men look at women to approve or assess. The way he looks at everything he’s deciding about. Steady. Taking inventory.
He doesn’t say anything.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“I didn’t say a word.”
“You were about to.”
He opens the door to the elevator. I walk through it.
The car is black, and the driver is separated from us by a partition that might as well be a wall. The city moves past the window in its early evening version, lit and dense, people on sidewalks in coats heading toward wherever Tuesday nights take them. I watch it, and I think about Lena’s video call this morning, how she looked rested for the first time in weeks, how Priya had appeared in the background, waving with a coffee cup.
I think about how Lena would react if she could see me right now in a car she didn’t know about, heading to a dinner she wouldn’t believe, wearing earrings she picked out at a market stall on a Sunday three years ago.
She would have questions. Many of them. She would ask them all.
Zane is looking at his phone. He puts it away somewhere near Fifty-Seventh Street and looks straight ahead.
“There will be twelve people at the table,” he says. “You don’t have to speak unless you want to. You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to answer. If someone asks something that crosses a line, look at me.”
