I read everything, and make two notes in the margin of the route confirmation.
By ten, I’ve cleared the morning’s calls, and I’m halfway through the Hale Group’s third revision of their terms, which are still not what I will accept, when I hear her in the corridor outside my office.
I close the folder.
She knocks once.
“Come in,” I say.
She’s dressed for the day. Hair down. I have learned what that means. It means she made a decision this morning that she’s not going to explain to anyone and does not require acknowledgment.
She closes the door. Does not sit. Stands in front of my desk with her bag on her shoulder and her hands at her sides, and the expression she wears when she has taken something difficult and organized it into the exact order she wants to deliver it in.
I’ve seen this expression in meetings, at galas, and in my kitchen at midnight. It costs her something to maintain. She maintains it anyway.
“I need to tell you something,” she says. “It involves your world. That makes it your business. I’m not here to ask you for anything.”
I lean back. “Go ahead.”
She tells me about Lena. Eight months ago, the money was borrowed from a man she had met before she understood what he was connected to.
The name she gives me when she gets to it, Dario Vasca, opens the flag from this morning’s report inside my head, and I put it beside what she’s saying, and the picture completes itself across my desk in a way I don’t allow to reach my face.
She keeps going. The calls are escalating. Four in one week.
She gives me the faction name, and I watch her say it, watch her realize she’s standing in my office, telling me her sisteris connected to the organization most actively working against mine, and she does this without her voice changing register.
She delivers it like a woman who processed her fear last night so she could present facts this morning.
She finishes. Looks at me.
“I’ll handle it,” I say.
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“I know.”
“Zane.” The way she says my name when she wants me to understand that she means what’s coming next. “I’m telling you because it’s connected to your world. That’s the only reason I’m standing here. I’m not asking you to fix something else in my life.”
“You came to me,” I say. “You didn’t have to. You understood what Dario’s name meant in relation to this organization, and you came to me anyway.” I hold her gaze.
“It’s information sharing. Don’t make it something else.”
“I’m not making it anything. I’m going to handle it.”
“What does that mean. Handle it how?”
“The way things get handled.”
She stares at me. I watch the frustration move through her, watch her take it and compress it into something manageable, the way she does with everything that threatens to get past her composure.
“I need to know Lena isn’t going to be pulled into something because of this,” she says.
“She won’t be.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do,” I say. “Because I’m going to handle it.”
