Chapter 7
DAISY
He lets me in.
The penthouse is enormous and dark. Not unlit: there are lamps, low and amber, casting pools of warmth across a space that could hold my entire Idaho apartment many times over, but it carries the darkness of a man who lives alone and prefers it.
Leather furniture. A wall of glass overlooking the harbour.
A bar cart with a bottle of something expensive and a single glass, recently used.
He walks ahead of me and doesn’t sit. He stands at the window with his back to the view and his drink in his hand and he waits, and the waiting is a performance in itself, because Anton Almazov is a man who controls rooms by standing still in them.
“You wanted to talk,” he tells me.
I’m standing in the centre of his living room.
My hands are clasped in front of me. My cardigan is still buttoned to the throat because I buttoned it in the lift, a small, stupid act of armour that means nothing and comforts me anyway.
I can feel my pulse in my wrists and my neck and behind my eyes, and the espresso from the coffee shop is sour in my empty stomach, and I’m about to tell this man the truth and he isn’t going to believe me.
I start talking.
“Blythe told me about the firm.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. I clear my throat and try again. “She told me what Keyes is. What the women do. What paralegal means to the clients who come through the door.”
His expression doesn’t change. The glass turns in his fingers. He is listening completely, with his whole body, cataloguing every word and every micro-movement of my face.
“She told me that Kaye—my aunt—told you I was willing. That I understood the arrangement. That I was bright and eager and—” My voice catches. I breathe through it. “And comfortable with the terms.”
A beat. His eyes on mine.
“I didn’t know.”
Three words. I push them out of my chest like stones. They fall between us on the polished floor and lie there, small and heavy, and his face gives me nothing.
“I didn’t know what the firm was. I didn’t know what Kaye implied.
I didn’t know why you offered me an arrangement at that restaurant, and when you did, I thought you were—” I stop.
I press my nails into my palms. “I thought you were a man who saw a girl from Idaho and assumed she was for sale because she was young and new and didn’t know any better.
I thought it came from you. I didn’t know it came from her. ”
He takes a drink. The amber liquid catches the lamplight. His throat moves when he swallows and I can see the tension in his neck, the tendons pulled taut, and I push forward because if I stop now I will never start again.
“The kiss on the balcony was real.” My voice is shaking. I let it shake. “It wasn’t a game. It wasn’t a strategy. It wasn’t me playing a role for a client. It was me. Just me. Kissing you because I wanted to and hating myself for wanting to and not being able to stop.”
I’m trembling. My whole body, from my clasped hands to my ankles, is trembling, and I can’t hide it and I’m not trying to.
I’m standing in his penthouse with my cardigan buttoned to my throat and my espresso-sour stomach and my shaking hands and I am telling this man the truth with everything I have.
He sets his glass down.
He crosses the room. Three steps. He stops in front of me and he is close, close enough that I can smell the whisky and the cedar and the warmth underneath, and his face is above mine and his eyes are grey and searching and something in them is working, calculating, running the numbers on every tremor and every crack in my voice.
He lifts his hand. His palm cups my cheek. The touch is warm and gentle and devastatingly kind, and his thumb traces the skin beneath my eye where I haven’t cried but where the almost-crying has left its mark, and his voice when it comes is soft. So soft.
“You’re remarkable.”
My heart does something complicated.
“I’ve never seen anyone commit to a story this completely.”
The room empties.
Not the furniture, not the lamps, not the harbour through the glass.
Me. I empty. The hope I carried into this penthouse, the brave, stupid, Idaho-girl hope that I could stand in front of a man who reads people for a living and make him see me, drains out of my body through the soles of my feet and into his polished floor and what’s left is a shell in a cardigan with her hands still clasped and her face still tilted up toward his palm.
He thinks I’m performing. He thinks the trembling is technique. He thinks the balcony kiss was strategy and the coffee I threw away was a gambit and the tears I didn’t cry were discipline, and he is cupping my face and calling me remarkable and what he means is: you’re the best liar I’ve ever met.
I try one more time.
“Anton.” His name in my mouth. It costs me everything. “I’m telling you the truth.”
His eyes hold mine. His thumb is still on my cheek.
His expression is tender and certain and immovable, the expression of a man who has already decided and whose decision is reinforced by every word I speak, because in his world the more passionately someone insists they’re innocent, the more skilled the deception.
He leans down. His lips press against my forehead. The kiss is gentle. The kiss is a verdict.
“I know you believe that,” he tells me, his mouth against my skin.
I close my eyes. His lips are warm on my forehead. His hand is warm on my cheek. His voice is warm and his conviction is warm and all of it, every degree of warmth, is the temperature of a man who thinks he’s being kind while he breaks the last piece of me that was holding.
I step back. His hand falls.
His eyes follow me. They are calm and grey and fond, the eyes of a man who admires a performance, and the fondness is worse than cruelty because cruelty I could fight.
I don’t know how to fight fondness. I don’t know how to fight a man who dismisses my truth with a kiss on the forehead and the gentlest voice I’ve ever heard.
“Thank you for hearing me out,” I tell him, and my voice is level, and the levelness isn’t composure. It’s the silence after the monitor goes dark.
I walk to the door. I don’t look back. I press the lift button and the doors open and I step in and I press the lobby button and the doors close and he doesn’t follow. He doesn’t follow because he thinks I’ll be back. They always come back.
The lift descends. Monaco rises around me through the glass walls, the harbour expanding, the yachts becoming real, and I am sinking through a building that belongs to a man who kissed my forehead and called me remarkable and told me he knows I believe my own story, and the city below me is blurred because I’m crying now.
Silently. Hands at my sides. Tears running down the cheeks he just touched.
The lobby. The concierge. The glass doors. The night air.
I walk home. It takes a long time. I don’t call a taxi.
I walk because walking is the only thing that belongs to me and the pavements of Monaco are real under my feet and the tears dry somewhere along the way and by the time I reach my apartment I’m not crying and I’m not shaking and I’m not anything at all.
ANTON
The lift doors close and she’s gone.
I stand in the hallway with my hand still raised where her cheek was and the warmth of her skin is fading from my palm and the penthouse is silent and the harbour burns through the glass and I lower my hand and I walk to the bar cart and I pour myself another drink and I sit down.
She was perfect.
The trembling. The cracked voice. The way she clasped her hands and buttoned her cardigan to the throat like a girl going to church.
The balcony-kiss confession, timed to the exact moment when sincerity would hit hardest. Even the forehead, tilting into my kiss instead of pulling away, letting me feel the warmth of her scalp against my mouth, a submission so exquisite it borders on art.
I’ve seen women perform innocence in six countries and four languages. I’ve had mistresses who could cry on command and lovers who could tremble with surgical precision. Daisy Fletcher is better than all of them. Daisy Fletcher almost made me believe.
Almost.
I finish the drink. I pour another. The ice cracks in the glass and the sound is too loud in the empty penthouse and I press the cold glass against my forehead where her skin was and I close my eyes.
The problem is the almost.
Because I’ve been doing this for years and I’ve never almost believed.
Not once. Not the woman in Geneva who wept real tears and turned out to be recording the conversation.
Not the lawyer in Milan who quoted Rumi and was wearing a wire.
I’ve built an empire on the ability to read people, and the foundation of that ability is the knowledge that everyone performs. Everyone lies.
Everyone has a version of themselves designed for the person across the table, and the real self is behind it, protected, calculating.
Daisy Fletcher stood in my penthouse and told me she was the exception.
My chest hurts. Somewhere behind the sternum, in a place I don’t have a name for, something is pressing outward, and I don’t know what it is because I haven’t felt it before, not since my father’s funeral when I was fifteen and Andrei gripped my hand so hard the bones creaked and I swore I would never let anyone close enough to make my chest do this again.
I pick up my phone. I call Alexei.
He answers on the second ring. My eldest brother does not make people wait for answers and does not wait for them himself.
“She came to the penthouse,” I tell him. “The girl from Keyes. She told me a story. Elaborate. Detailed. She claims the aunt lied, the firm misrepresented her, and she’s been genuine from the start.”
Silence. Alexei’s silences are not empty. They are full of calculations I will never be privy to, run on hardware I don’t understand.
“Are you certain?” he asks.
“I’m always certain.”
Another silence. Longer than the first.
That’s what concerns me.
The line goes dead. Alexei doesn’t do goodbyes.
I set the phone down. I stare at it. I stare at the harbour.
I stare at the glass in my hand and the ice that has melted and the whisky that has diluted and I think about a girl from Idaho who buttoned her cardigan to her throat and told me she kissed me on a balcony because she wanted to and not because it was strategy, and I think about the tremble in her voice on the word truth, and I think about Alexei’s silence, which was not agreement.
That’s what concerns me.
I set the glass down. I stand. I go to the window.
If she’s lying, I’ll prove it. I’ll go to her apartment. I’ll touch her. I’ll take her to bed. Because a woman who is performing innocence will perform it to the end, and a woman who is telling the truth—
I don’t finish the thought. I pick up my keys.
Tonight.