Chapter 5
THE MORNING AFTER
Summer Knoll
Ihead back to my apartment for the rest of the day.
I get absolutely nothing meaningful done. I just keep wondering how I went from professional negotiator to lifting my skirt for Kittredge.
Yeah, he's hot and powerful, and that's attractive. But I don't really know anything about the man yet.
He could be evil, for all I know.
My phone buzzes with a text from Ezra. I read it with a giddy smile that is unlike me, and I realize the electricity between us is going to be a problem.
I waste the afternoon trying to plan thought-provoking questions for interviewing him. I feel ineffective at best.
So I switch to wine and relaxation for the rest of the night.
I manage to answer the text professionally, without promises of a date.
Thank you for agreeing to my terms. I look forward to our first appointment.
I let the date invitation hang until I'm not drunk.
The morning after is supposed to bring clarity.
Instead I wake up in my own bed, in my own sheets, staring at my own water-stained ceiling.
His jacket is on the back of my desk chair. My buttonless blouse is in the trash.
It wasn't expensive, thrifted like most things I own. But there's something about seeing it crumpled against the bin that makes yesterday afternoon feel more real than I'd like.
I don't remember hanging his jacket there.
I remember the subway. The guitar player. The toddler who stared at me with uncomplicated curiosity while I sat with my hand in my coat pocket, tracing the inside of my wrist with my thumb, like a woman who had not just done exactly what she'd done.
I remember struggling to plan my questions and giving up in frustration. I remember the wine, and texting Ezra back.
The jacket is charcoal wool, softer than it has any right to be. It smells like cedar and clean linen and that sharp underneath-note I still haven't named.
I'm a professional. I have a story to write and a source to maintain, and I have zero business developing feelings about the warmth of a jacket that belongs to the subject of an active investigation.
My phone buzzes from the nightstand.
Three missed calls from Kenzie. A text from my editor, Robert Hale, asking where my draft is.
And a calendar notification that makes my blood run cold.
Kittredge Foundation Quarterly Board Meeting. 9:00 AM.
It is 8:47.
"Fuck."
I fly into the bathroom for the quickest cleanup ever.
The board meeting takes place two floors above Ezra's office, in a glass-and-chrome room designed to make everyone feel slightly smaller than they are.
I slip in through a side entrance at 8:58 and find a seat near the back. Notepad open, recorder running on silent in my bag.
The room is already half-full. Suits and significant watches. A Rolex here, a Patek Philippe there, the kind of wealth that assumes you already know.
I recognize faces from my research. Board members, senior investors, a woman from the SEC advisory panel I interviewed three months ago about something unrelated.
I file her away and keep scanning.
And there, three seats from the head of the table, is Marcus Vale.
He's watching the door when I enter.
Our eyes meet for exactly one second before he looks away. His expression doesn't change.
No surprise, no discomfort, no grin. Just a brief inventory. Check. Moving on.
That's the part I file. The absence of surprise.
I open my notebook and don't look at him again.
Ezra takes the head of the table at exactly nine o'clock. He doesn't look at me or acknowledge my presence by even a flicker.
He runs the first twenty minutes with the brisk precision of a man who decided how this would go before he walked in and is simply executing.
I watch him work.
This is a different version of him from the gala, from the café, from the office yesterday. This Ezra is a well-practiced system. Efficient and impersonal.
Every word doing exactly the work it's meant to do and no more. He moves through agenda items with the economy of someone who understands that a board meeting is not a conversation.
It's a series of decisions being ratified by people who have already been consulted separately. He's done the work in advance. The meeting is just the record.
Then Marcus Vale opens his mouth.
"If I may." His voice carries the particular register of a man who has rehearsed his casualness. "I have concerns regarding the recent personnel decisions surrounding this profile piece."
The room shifts. Attention sharpens. Conversations die mid-word.
"Concerns?" Ezra's tone is dangerously pleasant.
"The journalist in question." Vale doesn't look at me. Everyone else does. "Miss Knoll's access seems unprecedented given her history. One wonders whether her judgment can be trusted to write a piece that is fair."
Blood roars in my ears, but I don't let it show. My pen keeps moving.
My face stays neutral, professional. I have been in worse rooms than this, and I have never given anyone the satisfaction of watching me flinch.
Ezra sets down his tablet. The sound is small and precise in the sudden silence.
"Marcus." His voice hasn't changed pitch, but the temperature in the room has.
"In the eighteen months since you joined this board, you've proposed exactly three initiatives.
Two failed to achieve projected outcomes.
One was quietly referred to outside counsel after the SEC inquiry it nearly triggered. "
A pause, calibrated and weightless, before he continues.
"Miss Knoll broke the Hartwell story two years ago.
Three guilty pleas. She has more legitimate investigative credits in the past twelve months than our entire communications team combined.
I want the world to know about the work we do. We have nothing to hide."
Vale's face goes the particular pale of a man who prepared for the wrong counter.
"Your concerns," Ezra continues, "are based on speculation and personal bias, neither of which belongs in this room. I'd suggest retracting them before I'm required to consider whether your continued presence on this board serves the company's interests."
Nobody moves. Nobody breathes.
"I apologize," Vale manages. "My comments were out of line."
"Yes," Ezra agrees. "They were."
The meeting continues.
I can feel the room recalibrating around me. Curious eyes, reassessing.
Whatever they assumed about my presence here, Ezra has just made it architecturally clear that I'm not someone to be dismissed. He did it without turning me into a damsel, without framing my presence as something that required his protection.
He simply corrected the record with the same efficiency he applies to everything else.
Part of me appreciates it. Respects it, even.
The other part, the part that has been alone and careful and self-sufficient for five years because I have trauma from my ex, warns me that this is a man who may not care about how his words make me feel.
My inner radar warning could be that I also know protection from a very rich man that always comes with a price tag. One that I’m sure I can’t or don’t want to pay.
I write Vale — motivated. Find out why in the margin of my notebook, and I keep my face neutral for the rest of the meeting.
I catch up with Ezra in the corridor afterward, heels clicking against marble as I match his pace.
"That was quite a performance," I say.
"It wasn't a performance." He doesn't slow. "Vale has been a problem for months. He needed reminding of his place."
"And I was the convenient occasion."
He stops. Turns. "You weren't an occasion. You were the reason." He steps slightly closer, lowering his voice. "He was disrespecting your work. That's not something I was prepared to let stand."
"Ezra—"
"I also," he says, before I can finish, "was aware that you would have eviscerated him yourself, and that watching you do it would have been genuinely satisfying. But it would have compromised your position as an objective observer." The corner of his mouth moves. "So I handled it. Reluctantly."
I hate that he's right, and I never even thought about that alternative.
Suddenly I'm grateful I didn't feel the need to defend myself. That would have been a bad first day.
"Have dinner with me," he says.
"I have deadlines."
"Tomorrow."
"Also likely buried."
He reaches into his jacket pocket and turns his phone toward me. A calendar dense with meetings, galas, investor dinners, board commitments. The next two weeks mapped out in color-coded blocks.
He holds it still long enough for me to see all of it. I assume he's challenging me on what it means to be buried.
Instead he says, "These are yours. As many or as few as you want. No conditions."
"Why?"
"Because I trust you." He pockets the phone. "I know enough to trust you."
The elevator arrives with a soft chime. He holds the door, and I step inside.
He follows, pressing the button for the lobby. The doors close. The electricity surges.
It's just us, descending. But it feels like so much more.
"There's a tech summit in two days," he says, as if we're discussing weather. "Panel at three. Investors, industry leaders. Relevant to your story."
"I'll be there."
"And dinner tonight?"
I look at our reflection in the polished elevator doors. Him in the suit that costs more than my rent. Me in yesterday's blazer with a recorder in my bag and a notepad full of his board members' tells.
The two of us, occupying the same small space, which by any objective measure is a catastrophically bad idea.
"Okay, but somewhere that doesn't require most people to sell a kidney for the appetizer course," I say.
His smile is slow and warm and entirely too satisfied. "I know just the place."
The restaurant is on the Upper West Side. A narrow room with low lighting and no visible prices on the menu, which is how you know the prices are the kind that require not knowing in advance to survive ordering.
He's already at the table when I arrive. He stands when he sees me cross the room, an old-fashioned gesture that I categorically refuse to find charming.
Okay. I find it charming.