Chapter 4
Dante looked at her for a moment without speaking.
“You’ve been doing this on your own,” he said.
“You asked me to use my eyes.”
“I asked you to sit at a desk.”
“Sitting at a desk is how I use my eyes.”
Something shifted in the quality of his expression. Not the almost-smile from before. Something less legible than that. He reached across the desk and picked up a pen and set it down again. The small fidget of a man who was not, despite appearances, entirely comfortable being surprised.
“The user ID,” he said.
She opened her notebook and read it to him. He wrote it on the inside cover of a different folder—not the one she’d seen, a new one already on his desk—and closed it.
“Don’t tell anyone what you found.”
“I haven’t.”
“Not Marco. Not anyone.”
She looked at him. “Not even Marco?”
“Marco is loyal,” he said. And the way he said it had a specific texture to it. A careful handling. Like something he believed and was also paying attention to. “But loyalty has geography. It covers what it covers. Keep your findings to yourself until I tell you otherwise.”
She nodded. She started to stand.
“The dinner,” he said. “The contacts. How did you find out about Caruso’s dinner if it wasn’t in any organizational calendar?”
She settled back into the chair.
“The building’s service entrance log. His car service booked a pickup at 11:45 PM that Tuesday. The destination was logged as Midtown. The duration of the booking implied he wasn’t at the office. He’d left at six and the car didn’t bring him back. I looked up the restaurant at that address range. Private club. Members only. Required a guest list request for event verification.”
“You requested the guest list.”
“I requested the event schedule as part of an administrative review I invented for the purpose.” She paused. “I’m the executive secretary. Nobody questions administrative reviews. That’s the thing about being underestimated. The paperwork always goes through.”
The city had gone fully dark behind him. The lights of it spread out in every direction, cold and brilliant and indifferent to everything happening in this room.
“Go home,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
“You should too.”
She immediately pressed her lips together because that was absolutely not the kind of thing she should be saying to Dante Moretti.
“Go home, Miss Harper,” he said. But the edge of something was in his voice that wasn’t quite severity.
She went home.
The confrontation she had been sensing building in the hallways and conference rooms and careful silences of the forty-third floor finally broke surface on a Thursday, twelve days into her new desk assignment.
Vincent Caruso walked into the anteroom and stopped in front of her desk.
“I need to see him,” Caruso said. He didn’t say good morning. He didn’t say her name.
“Mr. Moretti is in a call until ten.”
“I need to see him now.”
“He’s unavailable until ten. I can put you in the first slot after.”
“I’ve been with this organization for twelve years.” His voice was quiet, which was worse than if he’d raised it. “I built the operation structure that this company runs on. I was here when this floor was half the size it is now and the man inside that office had seventeen people in a bad lease in Chelsea. I don’t wait for ten.”
“You do today,” Evelyn said.
He looked at her the way you look at something when you’re recalibrating your assessment of it.
“Who put you here?”
“Mr. Moretti.”
“Why?”
“That’s above my clearance level. Would you like the ten o’clock slot or should I look at ten-thirty?”
He held her eyes for another four seconds. She counted them. Four was a long time in that kind of silence.
Then he turned and walked away.
She waited until the sound of his footsteps had completely disappeared before she let out a breath. Her hands, flat on the desk, were steady. Her heart was not. But that was the heart’s problem.
She wrote the time in her notepad. She wrote Caruso. Confrontational, pressed for access. Didn’t ask what the call was about. She underlined that last part. Then thought better of the underline. Then left it.
That afternoon, she made a mistake.
Not a physical one. No spilled coffee. No dropped files. No heel caught in a grate. A different kind. The kind that came from moving too fast through a corridor because she was carrying four folders and a legal pad and trying to make it to the copy room before the machine went into its scheduled maintenance cycle.
She cut a corner too sharply and collided hard with a man coming out of the stairwell door.
The folders went everywhere. The legal pad skidded under a credenza. The man—tall, late forties, expensive haircut, a face she had seen before in meeting photos—caught her by both arms to stop them from going down.
“Sorry,” she started.
“My fault,” he said. Which surprised her. Because it wasn’t. And men who came out of stairwell doors in buildings like this one were not typically in the habit of accepting fault.
She crouched to gather the folders. He crouched too, which surprised her more, and handed her two of them.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re the new secretary. Forty-third floor.”
“Yes.”
“James Whitfield. Legal counsel, third floor.”
She knew the name. It was on her organizational chart. More specifically, it was on a list she had compiled from three months’ worth of meeting logs—a list of people who had attended, in various combinations, a series of informal gatherings that she couldn’t classify as official meetings because they weren’t on any calendar she could find.
“Evelyn Harper,” she said.
He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t entirely decode. Something professionally pleasant on the surface. Something with more geography underneath.
“You’ve been busy up here,” he said.
“It’s a busy floor.”
“It is.”
He stood. She stood. He was still holding her legal pad. He handed it to her with a small, precise motion.
“Be careful,” he said. “The copy machine on this floor jams if you use the lower tray. Use the middle one.”
She looked at him.
“The copy machine,” he said again, pleasantly. “Notorious for it. Middle tray.”
“Thank you,” she said.
May you like
He nodded and walked back toward the stairwell door. Went through it.
She stood in the corridor for a moment with her folders and her legal pad and the distinct sensation that the word “careful” had not been about the copy machine.
