Chapter 4
NOTHING STAYS SECRET
Ezra Kittredge
She's seven minutes early.
I know because Diana texts me the moment Summer Knoll steps off the elevator. I spend those seven minutes finishing a call I could have ended five minutes ago.
An old habit, designed to control the entrance. Let people wait just long enough to feel the differential without making it insulting.
I end the call earlier than I usually would.
There's something clarifying about watching her through the glass panels of my outer office. She doesn't fidget or check her phone.
She doesn't do what most people do in that chair. Scan the art, the view, the careful architecture of accumulated success, and perform being impressed.
She sits perfectly still and thinks. I've had senators in that chair who couldn't manage that.
The outer office is forty-seven floors above Lexington Avenue. All glass and polished concrete and the particular silence expensive architecture produces.
"Mr. Kittredge." Diana appears at my door. "Miss Knoll is here."
"Send her in."
Diana brings her in. On my desk sits a Giacometti bronze my mother sent when I made my first billion, which I've kept because throwing it away would require explaining why.
On the wall behind me, a Basquiat I bought at auction because I understood it immediately and couldn't stop thinking about it. The only two reasons I've ever bought anything.
None of it moves her.
She's looking at the middle distance with the focused stillness of someone working through a problem. Not performing patience. Not awed by the wealth.
I move to the window to watch the city below do what it always does. Indifferent, relentless, the machinery of eight million separate agendas running in parallel.
I've found the view clarifying for fifteen years. Today it's just glass.
"Ezra."
Her voice is different in my space.
Most people soften slightly when they walk into this office. Something about the scale of it, the view, the accumulated weight of the expensive objects.
Summer Knoll sounds like she's walked into hundreds of rooms just like this.
I turn.
She's wearing the vintage blazer again, recorder in her hand, the same set to her jaw. I've come to recognize the particular focus she carries as her working mode.
Everything unnecessary stripped away. Everything relevant already catalogued.
She looks exactly like someone who has spent the last eighteen hours preparing for this conversation. She also looks exactly like someone who hasn't slept.
Good. That makes two of us.
"Your assistant said you were finishing a call," she says.
"It finished faster once I knew you were waiting."
The corner of her mouth moves. Not quite a smile. "Should I be flattered or concerned that you're using me as a negotiation tactic?"
"Both seem appropriate."
I gesture toward the sitting area, deliberately away from the window and the desk, my usual power positions, which I've decided not to take today. I watch her clock the choice as she crosses the room.
The fractional pause. The unimpressed assessment. She sits without comment, crossing her legs like the geometry of the room is beneath her notice.
It isn't beneath her notice. She's decided it doesn't matter.
I sit across from her rather than remaining standing, which I hadn't planned to do.
She sets her recorder on the low table between us. Her declaration of intent, the same as yesterday.
I look at it and don't ask her to turn it off.
"Tell me what you've observed," I say.
What follows is a precise inventory.
She lists the tells. My assistant knowing her name before introductions. The call ending on cue.
The chair placement in the outer office. The desk I'm not sitting behind. Each one accurate, each delivered with the calm of someone reading from a brief she's had time to prepare and chose not to soften.
"Most people don't notice the chair height," I say.
"Most people aren't looking for the machinery behind the magic trick."
That's it. The thing that kept me awake, reduced to a single sentence.
She's not interested in the performance. She wants the nuts-and-bolts reality, the mechanism that makes it all work.
Nobody wants the mechanism.
"You wrote about Hartwell," I say.
"Two years ago."
"Three indictments."
"Three guilty pleas, eventually," she corrects. Her eyes are steady on mine. "I'm not interested in indictments, Mr. Kittredge. I'm interested in what's true."
"And if what's true isn't flattering?"
"Then it's still true. That's what matters to me."
I look at her for a long moment. The recorder sits between us, its small red light steady, and I make a decision I don't fully examine.
"Ask me what you came to ask."
She does.
The conversation moves through the profile, through what she wants, through what I've built and what I've hidden and what I've spent fifteen years making sure nobody looks at too closely.
I say things I don't usually say. About the work that actually matters underneath all the noise. About the distance between what I've built and why I built it.
I mean all of it, which is unusual.
I am generally very precise about meaning what I say in professional contexts. I am less precise, apparently, when Summer Knoll is sitting across from me with her recorder running and her eyes doing the thing where they seem to see slightly deeper than they should.
I stand and move around the table. I don't examine the impulse before I act on it. I just need to not be across from her anymore.
"I invited you because everyone else in that room wants something from me," I hear myself say. "You wanted to figure out how my mind works. Who I am."
"Professional curiosity."
"Is that what we're calling it?"
The air between us changes. I'm aware of it the way you're aware of a pressure shift before a storm.
Not the storm itself. The specific quality of the air in the moment before everything moves.
She stands abruptly and starts across the room. Her heel catches the edge of the rug.
My hand finds her elbow before I've decided to move.
I've caught people from falling before, by reflex. But I don't let go, and that part isn't a reflex.
I simply don't want to. An energy passes between us.
"Careful." My voice comes out lower than I intend. "This office has a number of expensive things that break easily."
"Including you?"
The question lands somewhere undefended.
Something moves in her eyes. Surprise at her own words. The same surprise moves through my chest, because nobody has ever assumed I'm easily breakable.
Nobody looks at Ezra Kittredge and wonders if he's human.
The honest answer is yes. In ways I don't discuss and have spent fifteen years building infrastructure to prevent.
Yes. I have my protective barriers and my walls, and they are tall.
I don't say that. "You have no idea what you're asking," I say instead.
"Then show me."
I don't know which of us moves first. I find I don't care.
She leans in, her lips reaching mine. She doesn't hesitate.
The part of my brain that is always running calculations goes briefly, completely quiet. Not suppressed. Just gone, the way noise disappears when something louder arrives.
My hand is in her hair without permission from the part of me that makes decisions. My other hand finds the small of her back and pulls her against me, and the sound she makes moves through my chest like something being unlocked.
I walk her back against the glass.
The city is forty-seven floors below us and the window is cold against her shoulders through the blazer. I don't think either of us cares.
I pull back just enough to look at her. Giving her a moment. Giving us both a moment to stop.
In the corner of the room, the security camera's red light holds steady. I've been aware of it since she stood up and my hand found her.
The feed goes directly to my personal server. No security-team access, a privacy measure I put in place three years ago, when I understood what it meant to have your private life become content.
It's still a decision. And I don't want to stop.
Her pupils are blown, her breathing unsteady. She's not stepping back. She's not saying no. Neither am I.
"Last chance," I say.
"Ezra." The way she says my name is the last of my restraint. "Keep going."
I kiss her again, and I don't stop.
My jacket goes, then her blazer. Her blouse opens easily and I get my mouth to her collarbone, her throat, the hollow above her breast.
She's arching against the glass, her hand in my hair, and when she reaches for my belt my hands actually shake. That hasn't happened since I was nineteen and had no idea what I was doing.
I knew then, at least, that I didn't know.
I push up her skirt and my hand finds her bare thigh. It roams higher, and the warmth of her against my fingers makes me lose another layer of whatever I'm still holding onto.
"Please." Her voice against my ear, quiet and certain. "Don't stop."
I lift her and she wraps her legs around me. I'm holding her weight with one arm, and the city is still down there, still indifferent, still running its eight million agendas, and I am briefly, completely uninterested in all of it.
I open my pants with one hand and find my way inside her.
I move slowly at first, because I need to. Because if I don't, I'll lose this before I've had a chance to revel in her.
Her fingers press into my shoulders. Her forehead rests against mine.
Once I've adjusted to the sensation, I ask if she's okay.
"Harder," she answers. "Please."
I give her what she asks for. Exactly what she asks for.
She gasps something wordless, her nails find the back of my neck, her hips meet mine. Quickly I am watching her come undone against the glass of the office where I have spent fifteen years being a man who does not do this.
"Look at me." Quiet. Precise. "Summer. Look at me."
She does.
Her eyes lock on mine, her whole body tightens, and she goes over with my name on her breath. I follow her a handful of strokes later, my face pressed against her neck, breathing in cedar and warmth and her.
We stay against the glass for longer than is sensible.