Chapter 3
DAISY
The coffee appears on Monday.
No note. No card. Just a paper cup from a place I’ve never heard of, sitting on my desk early, before the office filled, when the only people here are me and the cleaning crew.
The cup is warm. The coffee is black with one sugar, which is how I take it, which is information I have given to exactly one person in Monaco and that person is Blythe and Blythe does not buy people coffee.
I drink it. It’s perfect.
On Tuesday, there’s another.
Same cup. Same place. Same black-one-sugar. I arrive even earlier this time and the cup is already there, which means whoever is leaving it got here before me, which means they are either very committed or very insane.
On Wednesday it rains.
Monaco rain is not Idaho rain. Idaho rain is honest. It falls, it soaks you, it stops.
Monaco rain is theatrical. It arrives in a gust of salt air off the Mediterranean and turns the streets into something out of a film, all reflected lights and slick marble, and I’m halfway between my apartment and the office with no umbrella and a cardigan that is absorbing water like a bath towel when a black car pulls to the kerb beside me.
The rear window lowers two inches. A voice I would recognise in a hurricane.
“You walk to work.”
I keep walking. Rain in my eyes, rain down my collar, rain doing its absolute best to destroy the only professional blouse I own that doesn’t have a coffee stain.
The car keeps pace.
“I happened to notice,” Anton Almazov tells me through two inches of open window, “that you walk to work. In the rain. Without an umbrella. This seems like a solvable problem.”
“I like walking.”
“You’re soaked.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shivering.”
I am, in fact, shivering. My teeth are doing a thing.
I clamp them together and walk faster, and the car matches me stride for stride, and somewhere behind the tinted glass I can hear him, not laughing, but doing that thing with his voice that is worse than laughing, the warm hum of a man who finds something entertaining and doesn’t feel the need to hide it.
“Miss Fletcher.”
I stop. The rain doesn’t. But everything else does, because he has never called me Miss Fletcher outside of a conference room and the sound of it on a rain-soaked Monaco street does something to my spine that I refuse to examine.
“Get in the car.”
“No.”
A pause. The rain fills it.
“Please.”
The please is what does it. Not because it’s polite but because it’s unexpected, and the unexpectedness cracks something in my resolve, and I open the rear door and slide onto leather that smells like his cologne and money and I’m close to Anton Almazov in a car that costs more than my parents’ house and I’m dripping on his upholstery and his mouth is doing the half-lift thing and I want to scream.
He doesn’t speak for a moment. He lets me drip. He lets the heater do its work. Then:
“Have dinner with me.”
My hands, which have been wringing water out of my cardigan onto his leather seats, go still.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not appropriate. You’re a client.”
He turns his head. In the dim interior of the car, with the rain streaking the windows and the city blurred to watercolour, his grey eyes are close and clear and unbearable.
“Nothing about this is appropriate,” he tells me, and his voice is low and direct and carries no smile at all, and I understand, with a clarity that frightens me, that he is not talking about dinner.
The car pulls up outside Keyes, Inc. I reach for the door handle.
“Think about it,” he tells me.
I don’t think about it. I think about it for the rest of the day.
KAYE CALLS ME INTO her office late afternoon.
“Mr. Almazov has invited you to dinner on Friday,” she tells me. She’s at her window, the harbour behind her, her hands clasped like a woman delivering good news at a press conference. “It’s an important client relationship, Fletch. He specifically requested your company.”
“I already told him no.”
Her smile doesn’t change. “Sweetheart. This is the Almazov account. This is the biggest retainer in the firm’s history. When a client of this calibre extends a social invitation, the appropriate response is yes.”
I want to tell her about the coffee and the car and how he said nothing about this is appropriate like a man drawing a line in wet concrete. I want to ask her what, exactly, I’m being invited to.
I don’t ask. Kaye is my aunt. Kaye got me this job. Kaye braided my hair at Thanksgiving and sent me a first-day card with a lipstick kiss on the envelope.
“Okay,” I tell her.
Her smile widens. “Wear the green dress. The one we bought last weekend.”
I didn’t know we were buying a dress for a purpose.
THE RESTAURANT HAS no sign.
It’s on a street behind the casino district, where the buildings are old and pale and the doors are unmarked and the assumption is that if you need a sign, you don’t belong.
The car drops me at the kerb and a man in a dark suit opens a door I wouldn’t have found on my own, and inside is a room with white linen, candles that gutter in glass holders, and a hush so dense it feels like a fabric.
Anton is already seated.
He stands when I come in. The suit tonight is navy, not charcoal, and the tie is the colour of ink, and I have the disorienting thought that he has been sitting in this chair waiting for me while I was standing in my apartment in Kaye’s green dress trying to talk myself into cancelling.
“Miss Fletcher.” He pulls out my chair. His hand doesn’t touch my back but it’s close enough that I can feel the heat of it through the fabric of the dress, and I sit down too fast and nearly knock the water glass.
“Mr. Almazov.”
“Anton.”
I don’t repeat it. If I say his name in this room, in this light, in this dress my aunt bought me for reasons I’m only beginning to understand, something will become real that I’m not ready for.
The waiter knows him. Of course the waiter knows him.
The waiter brings bread and oil and murmurs something in French that makes Anton smile, and the smile is warm and practised and given with the ease of a man who has been making people comfortable his entire life, and I sit in my green dress and wonder if the smile he gives me is the same one.
He orders for me. Not aggressively. He glances at the menu, glances at me, and tells the waiter something in French that includes the word sole and the word *l**é**ger*, and when the food arrives it’s exactly what I would have chosen if I could read a menu in French, which I can’t, which he somehow knew.
“How?” I ask.
“How what?”
“How did you know I’d want the fish?”
He picks up his wine glass. Turns the stem between two fingers.
“You’re from Idaho. Landlocked state. People from landlocked states either hate fish or crave it.
You told me you like the coffee here, which tells me you’re open to new things.
And you held your menu a while without opening it, which tells me the French is a problem you’d rather not admit to. ”
I set down my fork. “You’re very observant.”
“It’s my job.”
“Reading people is your job?”
“Reading people is what keeps the people I love alive.”
It’s the first real thing he’s told me. Not charming, not performed, not wrapped in tissue paper. It sits between us on the white linen, and I feel it in my sternum, and I don’t know what to do with it except hold his eyes and not blink.
We eat. He asks about Idaho again, but differently this time.
Not the conference-room version. He asks about winter.
He asks if I’ve ever been snowed in. He asks what my mother cooks for Christmas and when I tell him pot roast and mashed potatoes he closes his eyes for a second and the expression on his face is so unguarded, so briefly and completely human, that my throat aches.
“You miss home,” I hear myself say.
His eyes open. The unguarded thing is gone. The performance is back, seamless, as if it was never absent.
“I don’t have a home, Miss Fletcher. I have addresses.”
The candle between us gutters. The waiter clears plates. The restaurant empties around us in degrees, table by table, until we are the last ones and the hush has thickened into something that presses against my skin.
And then he says it.
He sets down his wine glass. He leans forward. His elbows on the table, which should be wrong but isn’t, and his face in the candlelight is all angles and shadows and those grey eyes that see everything and give nothing back, and his voice drops to a register I haven’t heard before.
“I want to be honest with you, Daisy.”
My first name. He has never used my first name.
“I know how things work at Keyes. I know what the firm is. I know what the women do, and I know the arrangements that are available to someone in my position.” His eyes don’t leave mine. “I want you to know that I’m prepared to make yours very comfortable.”
The restaurant goes silent. The candle goes silent. The blood in my ears goes loud.
“Arrangement,” I repeat.
“Whatever you need. An apartment. An allowance. Access to anything the firm can’t provide.
” He recites this like terms he’s offered before, like the girl across the table in the green dress is a line item in a negotiation that’s been running since the coffee appeared on her desk Monday morning.
“You’re exceptional, Daisy. I want to make sure you’re taken care of. ”
I go still.
The stillness starts in my hands and moves inward, through my wrists, up my arms, into my chest, until my entire body is a held breath.
The green dress. The unsigned coffee. The car in the rain.
The fish he ordered because he’d read me cover to cover and knew I couldn’t read the menu.
None of it was what I thought it was. All of it was an interview for something that isn’t in the job description, and the job description was never a job at all.
“I think,” I hear myself say, and my voice comes out level, which surprises me, because everything beneath it is on fire, “there’s been a misunderstanding.”
He smiles. Not the half-lift. The full one. Both sides. The one that costs nothing and promises everything. “I don’t think there has.”
I put down my napkin. I stand, and my chair scrapes the floor, and the sound is too loud in the empty restaurant, and his smile doesn’t change, and his eyes don’t change, and he is still leaning forward with his elbows on the table like a man who has read the ending of this story and is waiting for me to catch up.
“Thank you for dinner,” I tell him.
I leave.
The door is heavy. The street is dark. The man in the suit who opened it for me opens it again and the night air hits me and it’s warm, too warm, and I walk to the kerb and raise my hand for a taxi and my hand is shaking.
A car stops. I get in. I give the driver my address and sit in the back seat with my hands in my lap and I don’t cry and I don’t scream and the city slides past the window and I’m shaking, shaking, and it’s not from anger alone.
It’s from the second before.
The second before the word arrangement hit the table.
The second when he leaned forward and said my name and his eyes were close and the candle was between us and I wanted him to mean it differently.
I wanted the dinner to be a dinner. I wanted the coffee to be coffee.
I wanted the car in the rain to be a man who couldn’t stand the thought of me getting wet and not a move in a game I didn’t know I was playing.
The taxi turns onto my street. I pay. I walk upstairs. I close my door.
The green dress goes in the back of my closet, behind the winter coat I brought from Idaho because I didn’t know Monaco doesn’t have winter, and I stand in my apartment in a t-shirt and bare feet and press my hands against my eyes and feel the trembling move from my hands to my ribs to my throat.
Not anger.
Want. The wanting underneath the insult, still there, still burning, still his.