The way his hands look resting on his phone. The line of his throat above his collar. The particular quality of his attention, focused and total, when he is working through something.
I know what that attention feels like, directed somewhere other than a boardroom.
I look at my tablet.
The car moves through midtown traffic, and at some point, turning a corner, my skirt shifts. It is a small thing. The pencil skirt rides up maybe two inches above my knee, the way fitted skirts do when you are seated, and I reach to smooth it down and catch, in my peripheral vision, Roman’s eyes moving.
Not for long. A second, maybe less. Then back to his phone.
I leave the skirt where it is.
I’m going to go to hell for that.
The office is already running by the time we arrive. I step out of the elevator ahead of him, the way I always do, greet the front desk, collect the stack of morning correspondence from the tray outside my office, and sit down at my desk with my tablet, my coffee, and my completely assembled face.
Roman disappears into his office without a word, and the glass door closes behind him. Through it, I can see him moving to his desk.
I open my emails. I answer three of them before I have to stop and sit back and press my fingers briefly against my closed eyes.
He doesn’t know. I’m certain he doesn’t know. The perfume was a near thing, but he showed nothing, and the skirt was nothing, just a look, the kind of look men give without it meaning anything specific, and the question about last night was routine, the type of thing he would ask any member of his staff who was responsible for logistics.
He doesn’t know.
I open my eyes and look at the glass wall of his office. He’s on the phone now, standing at the window with his back to me, with one hand in his trouser pocket.
I turn back to my screen, and I do my job, and I am very, very good at it, and nobody in this office knows anything at all.
That’s the only thing I have left to hold on to, so I hold on to it with everything I’ve got.
5
ROMAN
Rezenkov’s contractcloses at eleven, and by eleven fifteen, I’m already onto the next thing, which is how it has always worked and how I prefer it.
There is no satisfaction in lingering. You close a thing, you move to the next thing, you keep moving. The moment you stop to appreciate what you’ve built is the moment something you were not watching takes a piece of it.
I have built a great deal. I watch all of it.
Elena brings me the signed copies at eleven thirty with a revised summary of the afternoon schedule and a note that the Wednesday dinner reservation has been moved from seven to seven thirty at the client’s request. She delivers all of this standing in front of my desk with her tablet and her eyes on the screen.
I look at the door after it closes.
Then I look back at my desk and pick up the next thing and get on with it.
This is the third day. I am aware that it is the third day in the specific way that a man becomes aware of something he has been trying not to count.
Sunday night to Wednesday morning is three days, and the woman from the masquerade has not moved any further back in my mind than she was Monday morning when I woke up and reached for cold sheets, which means she hasn’t moved at all, which is not a thing I am accustomed to.
I don’t fixate. I’m not built for it. I make decisions, I act on them, I move forward. Whatever happened Sunday night was a single evening with a woman whose last name I do not know and who left before I woke up, and there is no logical reason for it to be sitting in the center of my attention three days later like an unsolved problem on a balance sheet.
And yet.
I pull the Morrison file toward me, open it, and read the same paragraph twice.
By midmorning, the office has found its rhythm. Phones, movement, the organized hum of people doing their jobs.
I have taken two calls, reviewed a proposal that needs significant revision before it goes anywhere near a boardroom, and signed off on a personnel change in the Red Hook operation that Kostya requested yesterday.
