Chapter Eight
Fallon’s hands shook against the lock of her apartment door.
It took three tries to get the key in, and the shaking bothered her more than the reason for it. She got the door open, shut it behind her, turned the deadbolt, and stood with her back to it for a count of ten before she trusted her legs to carry her any further.
The apartment was dark and quiet, exactly the way she had left it. She crossed to the kitchen counter and emptied her clutch onto it.
Money clip. Cocktail napkin. Phone. A receipt she didn’t remember picking up.
And Isaac’s watch.
She stared at it.
Four months she had spent putting him away, and he had been right where she’d left him until tonight. A man from Boston with old money in his accent and the kind of suite at the kind of hotel that confirmed every assumption she had let herself make about him.
She’d interpretedworkingas code for the soft obligations of inherited money. Galas. Charity boards. The polite version of a job that had no actual duties.
He had been kind, and he had been funny, and he had been good in bed, and she had let herself have one night she shouldn’t have because she would be gone the next morning and he would never be anything but a story she didn’t tell.
Then tonight happened.
She almost jumped when the phone lit up on the counter beside the watch.Shit. Cassandra. Fallon was nearly an hour late on her check-in.
She answered. “Hey.”
“You didn’t call.” Cassandra’s voice was calm, which meant she’d been worried for at least thirty minutes and had already cycled through the worst of it into forced composure. “How’d it go? Anything unexpected?”
Fallon bit back a slightly hysterical laugh. “Unexpected. Yeah, you could say that.”
“What? Oh my God. Did someone see you? Was it cops? Tell me.”
Fallon braced her palms against the counter on either side of the watch and made herself say it. “The man from Boston was there tonight.”
A beat of silence on the other end. Fallon could picture Cassandra at her desk, both hands lifting off the keyboards, eyes going wide behind her glasses.
“The dance-floor man,” Cassandra said carefully. That was all Fallon had told her about Isaac.
“Yes.”
“He’s in Austin.”
“Yes. He’s in Austin.”
“Did he see you?”
“Worse. He saw me work.”
The calm evaporated.
“He saw you. He saw you work. Definework. What exactly did he see? Did he see the approach? Did he see the lift? Did hesee you leave? How close was he? Was he recording? Does he have photos? Has he told anyone? Why was he at your event? How did he find you in Austin? How did he know where you’d be? Is he investigating you? Is he working with someone? Is this a coordinated?—”
“Cass. Stop. Slow down.”
“Don’t tell me to slow down. Someone saw yousteal, Fallon. That’s not a slow-down situation. That is the opposite of a slow-down situation.”
“He’s not what I thought he was.”
“What? What does that mean?”
