Her Surrender (L.A Ice Queens #3)

SERENA

The numbers were small. Eight hundred dollars here, eleven hundred there, scattered across eighteen months of petty cash reconciliations in handfuls thin enough that not a single one of them looked like theft.

"Who flagged it?" she asked.

"One of the juniors in accounting. She caught a reconciliation that didn't tie out by forty dollars and didn't let it go.

" Peter set a second folder beside the first. "I pulled the full eighteen months over the weekend.

It's all there. Amounts, dates, the approval codes.

Every entry is signed off under Diane's login. "

"Could someone have used her credentials?"

"I checked. The withdrawals match her badge records and her calendar. Twice she processed entries from the Maui trip we paid for." He said it without inflection, which was a comment in itself.

Serena turned the page. The lobby refurbishment fund. The gifting budget for the Aspen clients. The float for the valet team's holiday bonuses, which Diane herself had proposed three years ago, standing in this office with a folder of her own and a smile Serena had taken at face value.

Eighteen months. Six years of employment, eighteen months of theft, and a forty-dollar discrepancy caught by a twenty-something in a cubicle who didn't let it go.

"The junior accountant," Serena said. "What's her situation?"

"Second year. Sharp. Terrified she's done something wrong by finding it."

"She hasn't. Make sure her manager knows it, and make sure there's something in her bonus letter this year that says so without saying why.

" She closed the folder and squared it against the edge of the desk.

"Thank you, Peter. This was clean work. I'd like to be in the office alone for a few minutes. "

He paused at the door, one hand on the frame, and for a second she thought he'd say something that had nothing to do with spreadsheets. He didn't. The door clicked shut behind him, and the click was the loudest sound the room had produced all morning.

Serena sat with it.

Through the glass, Century City went about its mid-morning business twenty-two floors down, indifferent and bright.

She'd hired Diane Marsh six years ago over four stronger résumés because Diane had asked better questions than any of them.

She'd given her the calendar, the inbox, the codes, the keys to a life that ran on access.

Diane knew which calls Serena took in the car and which she took standing at the window.

Diane knew she drank her coffee at one temperature and her whisky almost never.

Diane had sat four metres from this desk for six years and stolen from her in increments small enough to be polite about it.

The orchid on the windowsill had been watered that morning. Serena had watched her do it.

There had been a version of Serena who would've been shocked.

She remembered that woman like someone she'd gone to school with, fondly, vaguely, from a distance.

That version had been thirty-two and standing in a half-renovated lobby in West Hollywood when her business partner stopped returning calls, and by the time she understood why, she'd taken two flagship investors and a year of brand work out of the building in her head, where no audit could find it.

She'd rebuilt alone after that, and she'd built the rebuilding into the walls.

Sole signatory. Redundant approvals. Nobody indispensable, including, in her more honest moments, herself.

Twelve years of that architecture, and a woman with an orchid on her windowsill had walked through it at eight hundred dollars a time.

What she had now wasn't shock. It was a tiredness with a very specific shape, worn smooth from use, and the worst part was how easily she recognised it. Each betrayal arrived at the same door. Each one was let in, processed, filed. The procedure existed because it had been needed before.

Less shocked and more tired. She wasn't sure when that exchange had happened, but she knew it wasn't a good trade.

She allowed herself exactly four minutes of it. Then she picked up the phone and called legal.

The dismissal took forty minutes and produced no scene, because Serena had built it not to.

Employment counsel on the speaker. The head of HR in the second chair, a witness with a notary's face.

The folder, the printouts, the badge records laid out in order on the conference table like a meal nobody would be eating.

Diane cried, briefly, and then stopped, and the stopping told Serena more than the crying had.

She asked whether Serena would press charges.

Serena said the company would recover the funds through the separation agreement and reserved everything else, which was the lawyer's sentence and also the true one.

Diane signed where the tabs indicated. Her hand shook on the first signature and steadied by the third.

At the door, Diane turned. "Six years," she said. "Doesn't that count for anything?"

"It did," Serena said. "That's what it cost."

Security walked Diane back to her desk and then down to the garage, with her box of photographs and the orchid she'd kept alive on the windowsill for six years. The whole floor turned studiously back to its monitors.

Serena returned to her office and answered eleven emails. Her hands didn't shake at all, and she noted the fact without pride.

Peter appeared in the doorway in the late afternoon.

He had a folder he plainly didn't need and made no move to bring it in.

He looked at her for a moment, and there was a sentence assembled behind his face, something about what this cost her that had nothing to do with the separation agreement.

She held his gaze and waited to see if he'd spend it.

"The Tuesday investor calls," he said instead. "I'll cover the prep until we sort the desk."

"Thank you, Peter."

He nodded and went. It was the correct choice, and they both knew he'd made it, and that was as close to comfort as either of them was prepared to traffic in on a Wednesday.

Emily Altford rang at eight that evening, when Serena was home with her shoes off and a glass of wine she'd poured and not touched, standing at the window because that was where she ended up in any building she owned or occupied.

The city ran out to the ocean in a grid of lights.

Somewhere down there, Diane Marsh was explaining her day to someone, or to no one.

She answered on the second ring. "Emily."

"You sound like a woman standing at a window," Emily said. "Sit down, I want ten minutes."

Serena sat down. There were perhaps three people alive she'd do that for, and the other two were dead.

The timing was almost offensive. Emily couldn't have known about Diane. Nobody outside the building knew, and yet here she was on a Wednesday night with her warm voice, like a barometer that doesn't know about the storm and announces it anyway.

For ten minutes they talked about nothing that mattered, which with Emily was its own pleasure.

A restaurateur they both knew who'd taken up sailing and made it everyone's problem.

A wine Emily had sent over that Serena admitted she was at that moment failing to drink.

Emily's garden, which was at war with the gophers and losing with dignity.

"You could hire someone for the gophers," Serena said.

"I could. But then I'd have nothing to be furious about, and a woman my age needs a project." Ice moved in a glass on Emily's end, sixty miles up the coast. "How was your day? You've got the flat sound."

"The flat sound."

Serena turned the stem of the wine glass a quarter rotation on the side table, not drinking it.

"You get a certain flatness when something's cost you and you've decided it hasn't. I've known you twenty years, darling, I can hear it through a phone."

Serena let a breath out through her nose. She hadn't planned to say it, and then she was saying it, because that was the entire function Emily Altford served in her life and they both knew it.

"I dismissed Diane this morning. Embezzlement. Eighteen months of it."

Emily didn't gasp, because Emily never gasped. "Oh, Serena."

"It's handled. The money comes back through the agreement, the exit was clean."

Her own voice was doing exactly what Emily had described, flat as a dial tone. She pressed on anyway.

"I'm not asking about the money."

"I know what you're asking about."

The city lights ran on below the window, indifferent.

"I'm fine. I'm always fine, it's one of my more reliable features."

"Mm," Emily said, and audibly put the answer away for later use. Serena let the day wind down a notch at a time and listened to her oldest friend grant her the mercy of pivoting back to a hole in a lawn, describing it as though it were a hostile acquisition.

Then Emily said, "I have a favour to ask."

Serena straightened without deciding to. Twenty years, and she could count on one hand the times Emily had opened a sentence that way, and have fingers left over.

"There's a young woman I'd like you to meet.

Charlotte Phillips. She was made redundant three weeks ago, a restructuring, nothing she did, and she's in LA because the rest of her life hasn't caught up with her yet.

She's wasted where she is. She's the kind of person you build around, and nobody's noticed, because she's not the kind who makes them.

" A small breath. "I see a future in her, Serena.

The way I once did with someone else, if you'll forgive the lack of subtlety. "

"You're never subtle. You're patient, which people mistake for it."

Serena was sitting forward now, elbows on her knees, the city forgotten behind the glass.

"Yes, well. Is there any chance you'd take her on? Anything. A desk. A trial."

Serena looked at the wine she wasn't drinking. "My assistant was dismissed this morning."

A pause travelled down the line. Emily had the most articulate pauses of anyone Serena had ever known.

"Well then," Emily said.

"Don't enjoy this so visibly."