Page 8

No note. No explanation. Just the uniform, pressed and perfect, hanging where I'd left the old one.

I put it on. It fits like it's been made for me.

Like someone has studied my exact measurements — the width of my shoulders, the specific circumference of my waist. That’s completely impossible, yet, here we are.

I stand in front of the little mirror inside my locker door and barely recognize myself. The blouse hugs me in all the right places. The trousers follow the line of my legs without fighting them. I look — not sexy, exactly. But like I fit. Like I belong in the uniform, which means I belong in the building, which is a feeling I haven't had since I walked through the door yesterday with thirty-seven dollars in my checking account.

"Matteo." I come around behind the bar still touching the blouse, even though for the first time there's nothing to fuss with. "Did someone swap my uniform?"

He's muddling mint with the focused calm of a man performing surgery. He glances at me sideways. Glances back at the mint. "Looks like it fits better."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting." He slides the finished mojito across the bar and moves on to the next order without a hitch in his rhythm. "Station three tonight. You've been moved."

I stare at him. "Station three is by the windows."

"Yep."

"That's — those are good tables. Matteo, those are the good tables. I've been here one day. I spilled a drink on the founder. How am I on station three?"

"I don't make the assignments, Anna. I make the drinks." He sets a tray in front of me. "Table two needs a bourbon, one cube. You remember which bourbon?"

"Woodford Reserve, the one with the copper label, not the regular one."

"See? Quick learner, honey." He taps the tray. "Go."

I go.

And I tell myself the flutter in my stomach is nerves about the new station and not about the uniform that fits like someone has been paying very close attention to my body, because thinking about who might have been paying that kind of attention makes my face hot and my brain short-circuit and I need both of those things functioning if I'm going to carry a tray across marble without recreating last night's disaster.

The evening finds a rhythm. I'm getting better at this — the tray, the heels, the choreography of moving through a room full of people who expect perfection without being asked for it.

I learn the difference between a coupe and a Nick and Nora glass, which sounds like nothing but turns out to be the kind of detail that matters here. Matteo drilled it into me during training and now I can spot the difference at ten feet, which is a skill that's absolutely useless anywhere else in my life but makes me feel competent in this one small arena, and I'm taking the win.

Mr. Sterling is not on the main floor.

I'm not tracking his absence. That would be insane. I'm simply... aware of spaces. Architecturally. The Founder's Table in the back corner sits empty, the curved green leather booth looking strangely lonely without anyone in it. His decanter on the Whiskey Wall — Matteo pointed it out yesterday, crystal etched with a single S — hasn't been touched. The private elevator opens twice during my shift. Both times I look. Both times it's someone else.

I am not tracking his absence.

I'm coincidentally noting his absence while doing my job, which is different, and if my eyes happen to drift toward the elevator every time I hear the soft chime of it opening, that's just good situational awareness. Professional vigilance. Definitely not the behavior of a woman who can't stop thinking about gray eyes and the way a man's stomach felt under her palm.

"You keep looking at the elevator," Matteo says when I come back to refill a tray.

"I'm not."

"You've looked at it nine times. I counted."

"You're counting?"

"I count everything. Occupational hazard." He pours without looking, two fingers of something dark and smoky. "He's upstairs. He's usually upstairs."

"I wasn't asking."

"You weren't not asking." He sets the glass on my tray and gives me a look that's half amusement, half warning. "Table three, Anna. Go."

The trouble shows up at quarter to eleven.