1. Julian #3
I ate the sandwich at my desk while I read through Meridian.
Lunch with Declan turned into a phone call instead — he was buried in the Halverson aftermath and rescheduled for Wednesday — so I worked through one and into two.
The Klein team came in the afternoon. I walked them through the revised allocation.
They left looking like people who had been told what to hear.
I sat down at my desk after. The block was still on the calendar. Open. Do not fill. I did not use it for nothing.
I unlocked the bottom drawer, pulled the folder out, and opened it next to the keyboard that was, I noticed, still two inches too close to the monitor. I had not moved it back. I was leaving it where it was on purpose, although I couldn't have said exactly what the purpose was.
I ran the Meridian subaccount against the older ledgers one more time. The numbers came close. They did not reconcile. Not enough to flag in any audit. Not too little to call a rounding error.
I closed the folder. Locked it back in the drawer.
By 7:00 p.m., the floor had gone quiet. The cleaning crew had started their loop on the far end of the hall. I pulled my jacket off the back of the chair and killed the desk lamp. The office went to half-dark, only the hallway light coming in through the glass.
Claire was still at her desk.
She had her head down, the low knot of her hair catching the light off her monitor, the laptop open, a printed spread of archived deal records fanned across her left elbow. She was on the board deck.
I stopped at the edge of her desk.
"Good night, Claire. Go home."
She looked up. Just her eyes.
"Good night, Mr. Cross."
I held her eyes for half a second. She held mine. Her pen did not move.
I turned and walked to the elevator.
The garage was half-empty when I came out of the stairs. My footsteps came back at me off the concrete, and the ceiling lights buzzed, low and uneven. The black SUV was where I'd left it that morning.
I leaned against my car and stared at the concrete ceiling. Across the garage, a car beeped once, twice, and pulled out of its space. The engine faded into the ramp.
The stairwell door banged open at the far end of the row.
Declan came around the back of the SUV, his coat hooked over one arm, his phone pressed against his ear, his mouth a flat line.
He held up one finger to me without breaking the call, then dropped the phone from his ear and slid it into his pocket.
"Jules."
I pushed off the door. "You okay?"
He ran a hand down the back of his neck. "Lena's got a fever. Thea just put her down. I have to go."
"Go."
"I had Claire booked at — "
I waved him off. "Declan. Go home. Kiss the baby. Tell Thea I said hi."
He squeezed my shoulder once on his way past, hard enough that I felt it through the jacket, and crossed to his car. The door slammed. The engine started. The taillights swept across my shoes as he backed out, and then he was up the ramp.
I stood there with my keys in my hand. I rolled them once across my palm and looked at the elevator bank.
The Whitfield file was on my desk. I needed it for the morning call. Three minutes up, three minutes down.
I crossed back to the elevator.
The doors opened on the forty-second floor, and I stepped off into a dark hallway. Reception was off, the overhead lights on the low overnight setting, the carpet quiet under my shoes. I shrugged my jacket higher on my shoulder and started down the hall toward my office.
Claire's desk lamp was off.
I let out a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding. I had told her to go home, and she had, finally, gone home. I walked past the empty chair, around the corner toward my office, and stopped.
The door was closed.
I had not closed the door.
I stood with one hand still in my jacket pocket and looked at the closed door and tried, for half a second, to give myself a different version of the last forty minutes. Maybe I'd done it without thinking. I had not. I'd left it open. I left it open every night.
I rubbed my jaw with the back of my hand.
My chest tightened.
I closed the last three steps to the door and pushed it open in one slow motion, my hand flat against the wood.
The desk lamp was on. The bulb threw a circle of yellow across the blotter and lit the back wall.
Claire was behind my desk.
She had her left hand braced on the edge of the keyboard. Her right hand was an inch from the closed lid of my laptop, her fingers half-curled. The folder she'd had on her own desk all afternoon was open beside her elbow.
Her chin came up. She straightened, slow, one hand sliding off the keyboard, the other dropping to her side.
The low knot of her hair caught the lamplight as she turned to face me.
Her face did not change.
I felt mine change. My jaw tightened, my mouth opening and closing once. I stayed in the doorway with my hand on the wood because I did not yet trust where my feet were going to take me.
I looked at her.
I looked at the bottom drawer, flush against the cabinet face.
I looked at the keyboard, two inches too close to the edge of the desk, exactly where it had been when I'd stood in this same doorway this morning and told her someone had been in my office.
I looked back at her.
My heart was loud in my ears.
"Claire."
"Mr. Cross."
"What are you doing?"