Kimberly
A legacy is a heavy thing to inherit, but a heavier thing to steal.
"So just to be clear," the receptionist said, walking fast enough that I had to half-jog to keep up, "he doesn’t like small talk. He doesn’t like when people knock more than once. He doesn’t like it when the coffee is above or below a hundred and sixty degrees, and yes, he does check with a thermometer; I have seen it happen. "
Her name was Sophie. She was twenty-three, freckled, and wore her lanyard like a shield.
She moved fast and talked faster, narrating the place as we went, and I got the distinct feeling I was being walked through a minefield by someone drawing the map as we crossed it, while the mines were still going off.
"He also doesn’t like when people hover outside his door," she continued, badge swinging as she rounded a corner. "Or inside his door. Or near his door, honestly. The door is just a bad area in general."
"Good to know."
"And he hates lavender. Like, the smell. Someone brought a candle in once for the break room. She doesn’t work here anymore." Sophie glanced at me. "Not because of the candle. I mean, probably not because of the candle. Nobody really asked."
I was getting the picture. Jackson Whitlock ran this building the way winter runs January, and the people inside it moved the way you move through a house where the heat’s been cut off. Carefully. Quickly. Without drawing attention.
Sophie had been the one at the front desk when I’d walked in earlier.
After the scene with the secretary and the firing that followed, she’d watched me standing in the middle of that lobby like a woman who’d been set down in the wrong country without a map, and she’d come around the desk and touched my elbow and said, "I think I’m supposed to show you around?
Unless you want to stand here until the floor absorbs you.
Which, honestly, I considered once during my first week. "
That was twenty minutes ago. Since then, she’d walked me through the second and third floors, pointed out the break room, the copy room, the supply closet where someone had taped a note reading DO NOT TAKE SOPHIE’S CREAMER, and a small kitchen that smelled like burned microwave popcorn.
She talked the way some people run, like if she stopped she might not start again.
"You're going to be his secretary, right?" she asked, gently, the way I imagined you’d break it to someone that their parachute might have a hole in it.
"I still don’t know."
"Okay." She nodded, then pressed her lips together like she was bracing for something, and nodded again. "Okay. So, tips. Don’t agree with him just to agree with him, he can tell and it makes it worse. Don’t disagree with him unless you have a reason and a backup reason. Don’t bring up his personal life.
Don’t bring up his brother. Don’t bring up his mother.
" She paused. "Don’t bring up much, actually. "
"Is there anything I can bring up?"
"Quarterly reports. He likes those." She gave me a look full of genuine concern. "You’re gonna be fine. Probably."
I checked the time on my phone. Twenty-six minutes had passed since Jackson Whitlock told me to be in his office in thirty. Four minutes. Something cold turned over in my stomach.
"Where’s his office?"
"Thirtieth floor. You need a badge to get up there, and I don’t think yours is ready yet, but the elevator should take you since he would have cleared it." She bit her lip. "Good luck. Seriously."
I thanked her, found the elevator, and stepped inside.
The doors closed. The car started climbing and then kept climbing, past the hum of the lower floors, all the way up to where the noise of the working floors fell away, the silence you can only buy with thirty stories between you and everyone else.
Thirty. The doors opened onto a hallway with nothing in it. No directory on the wall. No front desk. No person. Just a long stretch of pale carpet and a key panel beside a glass door that blinked red when I put my hand near it.
No badge. No card. No way through.
I stood there for ten stupid seconds trying to decide whether waving my hand at it again would produce a different result, which it did not, because I wasn't a wizard and this wasn't a fairy tale.
There was a door at the far end of the hall, plain, no label. I tried the handle and it gave. I figured stairwell, or another corridor, or anything at all that might connect me to a human being who could point me in the right direction.
It was not a stairwell.
I stepped into the largest office I had ever stood inside.
Glass on three sides, floor to ceiling, and through it the whole gray skyline of Seattle spread out below like something on a postcard, the water, the cranes, the low clouds pressing down on all of it.
The room was enormous and almost empty, a wide dark desk, a wall of bookshelves, two low chairs, and a silence that only money can buy.
I turned around to leave.
The door clicked behind me. A small, definite sound, the lock engaging on its own, and my stomach dropped straight through the floor.
I grabbed the handle. Nothing. I pushed. Pulled. Pushed again, harder, because panic wasn't a thinking person's emotion, and it had both hands on the wheel. I slapped the flat of my palm against the surface, and the sound bounced off all that glass and came back to me like a joke I wasn’t in on.
"Hello?" I knocked harder. "Can someone, I’m locked in, the door just, can anyone hear me?"
Nothing. Thirty floors up and sealed in a glass box with the whole city watching. I hit the door again, twice, three times, the knocking getting louder because apparently my survival strategy was to simply become noisier until the universe cooperated.
"Most people just knock once." A man's voice came from behind the bookshelves.
"You’ve been at it for almost a minute. Are you trying to get out, or are you punishing the door for something?"
I spun around so fast my heel caught the carpet and I stumbled back a full step.
Jackson Whitlock walked out from behind the far shelf with a glass of water in one hand and his suit jacket off, sleeves pushed to his forearms, and he looked at me the way you’d look at a stray cat that had wandered into your kitchen and knocked over the good china.
"You." It came out before I could make it sound like anything other than an accusation.
"Me," he confirmed, like that settled the matter. He set the glass down on the edge of his desk and leaned back against it, arms crossed. Those gray eyes found mine and held. "You seem nervous."
"I’m not nervous."
"You were screaming at my door."
"I wasn’t screaming. I was knocking with enthusiasm." My heart was hammering and my face was hot. I was very aware that I was standing in the CEO’s private office and that this was, by any measure, not the impression I was going for. "The door locked behind me. I didn’t know anyone was in here."
"So you broke into an unmarked office on the top floor of a building you don’t work in yet, and your plan was to wander around until someone found you."
"I was looking for your office. I was told thirtieth floor."
"You were told right." He pushed off the desk and walked toward me, and I took a step back before I could stop myself, and then another, because Jackson Whitlock up close was a different experience than Jackson Whitlock across a lobby. He was taller than I’d registered, broad through the shoulders, and he was in no hurry to reach me.
His face was sharp, clean and built for boardrooms, a face that made you forget what you were about to say, then resent him for it.
He stopped about two feet from me. His gaze dropped from my face and landed below my chin, and every nerve in my body went off at once.
I crossed my arms over my chest. "Excuse me?"
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Then he scoffed, a short exhale through his nose, and lifted his hand.
His fingers caught the pendant at my throat and turned it in the gray light from the window.
The chain pulled gently against the back of my neck, and his knuckles grazed the skin just below my collarbone as the necklace shifted.
I forgot how to swallow.
He studied the pendant for a long time. Turned it over. Ran his thumb across the face of it. When he let it drop back against my skin, the small weight of it felt different from how it had five seconds ago, heavier, as if his hands had left something on it.
"This was my mother’s necklace," he said. The boredom was gone. His voice was the same low register, but there was a blade in it now, cutting me with its underlying sharpness. "It’s been in family portraits going back three generations. How do you have it?"
"She gave it to me."
"She gave it to you."
"Yes. Near the end. She clasped it on me herself."
He watched me. I tried not to squirm.
"My mother," he said, slow, "gave a family heirloom to her gardener."
"Housekeeper. And gardener. And yes, she did."
"How convenient."
That one hit me square in the chest, and the heat climbed up the back of my neck all over again, except this time it wasn't embarrassment. "Mr. Whitlock, your mother gave me this necklace of her own free will. I didn’t ask for it. I wouldn’t have.
She wanted me to have it, and I am telling you the truth. "
"Even a thief will insist they’re not one," he said. "And I’m supposed to just take your word."
"I’m not asking you to take my word." My voice stayed level, but my hands were shaking at my sides and I pressed them flat against my thighs to keep them still. "I’m telling you to check. Call the estate. Call Mr. Hollis. The butler stood right there in the room and watched her put it on me. You want proof, go get it. But don’t stand here and call me a thief when you weren’t even there. "
I don’t know what I expected. An apology would have been nice. Recognition, even, that I was a person who had loved his mother too and was standing in his glass tower trying very hard not to fall apart.