Chapter 2
VIOLET
He walks back to the desk.
I stay on the wall, because the wall is the only thing in this room currently holding me up, and I watch him go.
Six-foot-something of restraint in a three-piece suit, walking away from me like he didn't just tell me, in his own voice, in the first person, exactly what his hand does when it's done being polite.
I don't trace the edge of anything.
I'm going to hear that sentence every night for the rest of my life. I already know it. My body has taken it down as a formal announcement and filed it somewhere that will never, ever be audited.
He sets the pages on the desk, and I get one second, one, where I see his hand.
It isn't steady.
Then it is. He's behind the desk, and the man who was breathing against the corner of my mouth ten seconds ago has been filed away somewhere I can't reach, and the CEO of Russo Industries looks at me like I'm the next item on an agenda.
"I didn't know you were a writer."
I stare at him.
That's the sentence. That's what he leads with. Not get out. Not you're fired. Not let's revisit what happens when I'm done waiting. He has just rearranged my entire nervous system, and he wants to talk about my hobbies.
Air comes back into the room. I peel myself off the wall with as much dignity as I can locate, which turns out to be none.
What was I supposed to say? Good morning, Mr. Russo. By the way, in my spare time I write filth about a man who looks exactly like you. See you at the quarterly.
I could barely get him to approve a reimbursement without sweating. The idea of casually mentioning the fictional handcuff scene felt optimistic.
"It's a side thing." My voice is steadier than the rest of me. "And it's under a nom de plume."
"A pen name."
Of course he knows what it means. "Right. Which is the point. It's separate. It has nothing to do with this building."
"It has a great deal to do with this building." He straightens the pages, taps the edges square. "And I have notes."
"Notes."
"The hero. Dark hair with silver in it. Italian. Built like..." He checks, though I'd put money on him not needing to. "...'a man whose body is as good as they come, and who knows it.'"
He looks up.
"Am I wrong to recognize myself?"
I could lie. Composite character. Pure fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead.
The standard disclaimer, except mine came with cheekbones, a bespoke suit, and an employee badge that could apparently ruin my life.
But he's read every line, and he's been sitting with it since Friday, and there is genuinely no version of this where I get away.
"You're not wrong."
He doesn't gloat.
That's almost worse.
"How much is observation," he says, "and how much is imagination?"
"More observation than I'm comfortable admitting."
The ghost of a smile.
"You're observant."
"Professional hazard."
"For an office manager?"
"For a writer."
He goes quiet, and it should be uncomfortable, and it isn't.
It's the air before weather.
The kind that makes sensible people go inside and me wonder whether I have time to make a dramatic exit before lightning hits.
"Which part did you object to?" I ask.
"I'm sorry?"
"You've got a pencil in there. You marked things." I nod at the manuscript. "You've told me it's compelling twice and that I got something wrong once, and you haven't said which. That's very bad editorial practice, Mr. Russo."
He looks at me for a long moment.
"You're going to be difficult," he says, and he sounds pleased about it, and something warm and stupid unfurls in my chest.
Excellent. I've managed to turn impending professional ruin into flirtation. My therapist would need a whiteboard.
He flips to the last page and turns it over.
Blank.
"It isn't finished."
"Sixty percent. Then edits."
"Finish it. I want to see how it ends." In exactly the tone he'd use to approve a capital expenditure: "I'll comp your hours. Move whatever you need to Chance."
Of everything I'd braced for on the ride up, fired, humiliated, reported to HR, weighted and dropped somewhere off Red Hook, this was not on the list.
Mostly because I try not to make contingency plans involving severance packages and dockside cement shoes. It feels pessimistic.
"Mr. Russo, I can't possibly..."
He lifts one finger.
Just the finger.
My sentence dies in my throat, which is embarrassing for both of us.
Then he says something I don't expect.
"You can say no."
"...What?"
"No is available to you." He sits back. "Say it, and this conversation is over. Your job is unaffected. You'll have my word on that, and my word is not a small thing. Nobody read the file. There's no one to tell."
He waits.
And here's what I'll be thinking about at two in the morning for the rest of my natural life: I don't say it.
The word is right there, one syllable, free of charge, and I stand in his office and I don't say it.
He watches me not say it.
He knows exactly what he's watching.
Which is annoying, because I would prefer to be mysterious and unknowable while I make objectively terrible decisions.
"There's a caveat," he says.
Of course there is.
He comes around the desk again and stops in front of me.
Close.
Too close, given everything.
"Your intimate scenes."
"What about them?"
"They're good." He tilts his head. "They could be better."
"Better how?"
"A shiver runs the length of her." He says it flat, without inflection, and hearing my own sentence in that voice is like hearing it read back in a deposition.
"Something inside her melts. You have the wanting, Miss Wolfe.
You have it in every line. What you don't have is the having.
At present it reads like a very talented woman describing a room she has looked at through a window.
" A pause. "And a writer of your ability shouldn't have to guess. "
My mouth has gone completely dry, partly because he's right.
Which is deeply inconvenient. I would have preferred him to be a terrible editor and a worse man. Life has given me neither courtesy.
"And how exactly do you propose I stop guessing?"
The second it's out, I realize I'm afraid of the answer.
And that the fear isn't the main thing I'm feeling.
He looks at me, and for the first time I see the whole weight of what lives underneath the tailoring.
Not a CEO.
Something older than the corner office and considerably less civilized.
"I'll help you," he says. "With the research."
The word lands somewhere south of my navel and detonates.
"Help me write sex scenes."
"Help you write better sex scenes." He doesn't blink. "From experience instead of imagination."
I should say absolutely not.
I should say this is wildly inappropriate, you're my employer, this crosses every line in the handbook and several that nobody's bothered to write down.
I should say a lot of things. Instead, my brain is spinning up a slideshow titled Reasons This Is a Terrible Idea, and every slide is somehow just his mouth.
"Keep writing," he says, before I can find any of it. "Don't stop until it's done. I'll be in touch."
He turns to a file on his desk, and that's that. Dismissed with the efficiency of a man who has rearranged my entire life and doesn't consider the matter to require further discussion.
I push up out of the chair.
My legs are unconvincing.
I smooth my skirt, push my glasses up my nose, and get most of the way to the door before I turn around.
"Mr. Russo?"
He looks up.
"I should warn you. The man in the book doesn't always get what he wants."
Amusement, and something hotter under it.
"Some men always get what they want, Miss Wolfe."
That should have annoyed me more than it did. It definitely should not have made my pulse flutter like a Victorian heroine with poor judgment and no chaperone.
I make it fourteen steps down the hall before I put my back against the wall and let out a breath I've been holding since four o'clock.
Three men in dark suits come out of the legal wing carrying banker's boxes. A fourth is holding the elevator, checking his watch.
The box nearest me has a printed label I read without meaning to, the way you read a license plate: a long number with hyphens in it, then SDNY, then a date four weeks out.
I don't know what it means.
I know what the four men look like, and they look like the end of a very long quarter.
Or the beginning of a very bad episode of television, right before someone says, "You need to see this."
The doors close on them.
Chance, my supervisor, is packing up when I come out onto eight, coat half on.
"Nadia's downstairs, I'm out." He takes one look at me. "You're not fired."
"I'm not fired."
"You look fired."
"I look," I say, "like a woman who has had a very strange afternoon."
Which is technically true. It is also what I'd say if I'd been abducted by a cult with excellent tailoring.
My phone buzzes.
Kylie: well?? are we fleeing the city or not
Most best friends don't ask that.
But most best friends haven't erased a woman down to the studs and rebuilt her.
I type: not fired. worse. it went to the whole company list. IT killed it but he read it.
The dots start.
Stop.
Start.
Kylie: the WHOLE list
Kylie: vi call me tonight. not tomorrow. tonight.
And there it is, the thing under the embarrassment that I've been outrunning for twenty minutes.
For four minutes on Friday morning, the name I publish under and the name I answer to sat in the same email header, on a server, with a timestamp.
Four minutes. Long enough to ruin a life. Long enough for coffee to get cold. Long enough for one very dangerous man to open a file.
The clock on my monitor says 4:52.
I have eight minutes to make the train, because Patrick has swimming on Tuesdays and he will tell me about it in the same eleven sentences whether I'm listening or not, and Rudi will have him fed and damp and still furious about the splashing.
He'll start with the injustice, move to the betrayal, and end with a detailed reenactment involving his arms. I'm expected to react at the correct intervals.
A year ago, I'd have already been packing.
That was the whole system: a bag, a bus, a new name by Sunday.
But there's a cubby at his kindergarten with his name on it in his own handwriting, the P backwards, and he checks every morning to make sure it's still there.
Running used to cost me a security deposit.
Now it costs him that.
And I can survive almost anything. But I will not make my son pay for my fear.
I catch my reflection in the mirrored wall of the elevator on the way down. Red hair pinned flat, thick frames, a blouse two sizes too generous.
My costume.
Eleven months of being the most forgettable woman in a building full of sharks, and it worked.
It has always worked.
Being unmemorable is the only real skill I have.
Gianni Russo read forty-seven pages of my filthiest, most private thinking, and he didn't flinch.
He wanted the rest.
I have a terrible, wonderful, catastrophic feeling that invisible isn't going to be available to me anymore.