There's a little voice at the back of my head that whispers I should thank her and hang up. That's the move. Just keep being happy and ignore that folder. But I don't. I stay on the line.
"Honestly, it's all come together so beautifully," Gertrude goes on, the smile right there in her voice, the easy warmth of a woman sharing good news. "I've sent the lease on the penthouse to the realtor just a few minutes ago. Oh, dear, it's a lovely place. I'm sure you'll love it. It's also a convenient thirty-minute commute to Meridian Pacific, so this will work out beautifully for you. I just want to square the Long Beach move dates with the building, and the moment you sign the Meridian Pacific offer we can confirm your start date. They're only waiting on a few details from you, your license number, that sort of thing. I told them you'd have it across by the end of the day."
The warm, oblivious stream of words keeps coming, and one word snags and stops everything. Move. The Long Beach move.
He's leaving? Demetrius is moving to the other side of the country?
The folder is very heavy in my hand for a piece of paper.
"And I'll just say." Her voice softens, confiding, like she's saving the best part for me. "I've worked for that man ten years. Ten years. I have never once seen him like this. When he told me he's relocating and arranging it all for the two of you, he sounded as happy as a little boy. I haven't heard him this giddy the wholetime I've known him." A small, warm laugh. "Whatever you've done to him, keep doing it."
There's a roaring in my ears and I talk over it.
"Right," I say. "Of course."
"Anything else you need, dear?"
"No. That's everything. Thank you, Gertrude. It was nice meeting you."
I set the phone back in its cradle like it might go off.
And then I sit in Demetrius Thornwood's enormous chair, in his enormous house, and I do the math.
He's planned all of it. Weeks of arrangements, lined up and labeled and processed. All without asking me a single question.
Heck. All without asking me the only question that matters.
I sit there with the sound of my blood rushing in my ears for long moments. It could be minutes, it could be hours.
The door opens.
"That was mercifully short. Patel actually let me go early for once."
He stops two steps into the room, then stares at me, sitting in his chair with the folder open in my hand. The understanding moves across his face like weather coming in off the water. He doesn't reach for a lie. I'll give him that much. He's never been a liar. He's something worse, which is a man certain he's done the right thing but definitively hasn't.
"Maddie, let me explain."
Yeah. Right.
"Explain what?" I hold the folder up so he can admire his own work. My voice is doing something I don't recognize, flat and level and very quiet. "That you're moving to the other side of the country, and I had to hear it from your assistant? Or that you tried to arrange my whole life without even asking me? Take your pick. I got both."
"It's not like that." But his face says different. His face says this is exactly what he intended to do: take control, decide things for me.
Men like that own things, Maddie. They own people, too. Jazz's words hit me across the face like a lash and hot tears burn the inside of my eyelids.
It makes me infinitely angrier.
"Your assistant is lovely, by the way." I stand up out of his chair. My legs hold, which is the only thing currently cooperating properly in my body. "She congratulated me on the move I didn't know about, and the job I never applied for."
Demetrius stays quiet, the only sign of him rattled at all a hard, visible swallow.
"I was afraid," he says finally, "that you would say no if I asked you to come with me without having every detail prepared."
"And you think a fancy house and a job offer that you got me would force my hand, somehow?"
I put the folder down on the desk between us, because if I keep holding it I'm going to throw it. I am trying, with the last working part of me, to be calm about this.
All that time, Demetrius just stands there and stares at me. The pier comes back to me in a wave, that day so long ago when Demetrius walked away from me instead of compromising on what he wanted.
