Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Nathalie
"Ihave to say it, Nathalie, because someone has to.
This is foolish. This is embarrassingly foolish and when Uncle Phillip finds out — and he will find out — you will have absolutely no one to blame but yourself.
You deserve whatever he gives you. You are always getting in the way. Always embarrassing him and now this."
Alana's voice comes through the phone.
I hold the phone slightly away from my ear and take a sip of water from the bottle on the nightstand.
The hotel room is clean and quiet and blessedly still, which is more than I can say for the last six hours of my life.
The flight from New York to Las Vegas had been the kind of turbulent that makes you grip the armrest and quietly negotiate with whatever forces govern the universe.
I nearly missed it entirely — I was running through JFK with my carry-on bouncing off my hip and my boarding pass pulled up on a cracked phone screen and I had made it through the gate with four minutes to spare.
It was nearly midnight now. The Vegas skyline glittered through the gap in the curtains. I can't decide if it was beautiful or just loud. I have an interview tomorrow evening.
I need to sleep.
"You can still fix this," Alana continues, her voice shifting into something that wants to sound like concern but lands closer to satisfaction.
"Get on a flight tomorrow morning and come home before anyone notices.
I'll say you were with me the whole time.
I'm doing you a favor here, Nathalie, I really am, and I just think—"
"Alana."
"—that you don't think things through, you never think things through, and Uncle Phillip has enough to deal with without—"
"Alana."
She stops.
"Thank you for covering for me," I say. "Get some sleep."
I end the call before she can find her next sentence.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand and lie back against the pillows and stare at the ceiling for a moment as I finger the little crystal in my hand. A small ornament that is strangely comforting.
The truth was that my father wouldn't notice I was gone even if a week passed. I knew that. I had known it since I was twelve years old and I had learned to stop expecting anything different at around sixteen.
But knowing something and being willing to risk it were two separate things, and I couldn't afford for him to find out about this before tomorrow evening.
That was why I had told Alana. Not because I trusted her, I didn't, not particularly, but because she was the most reliable liar I knew when properly motivated.
I had promised her the limited edition Bottega bag she had been trying to source for three months.
Nobody else had been able to get their hands on it.
I had found one through a contact of a contact and I had held onto it for exactly this kind of occasion.
She had asked, before agreeing, what I was actually doing in Las Vegas.
I had told her vaguely that I was representing my father in an interview. That was what the email had said, more or less. Alana knew immediately that I was doing something I shouldn't.
"Does Uncle know?" she asked, "You know what, don't even bother answering, I know he doesn't. What is wrong with you, Nat? Why are you always doing this?"
Dad was running for Mayor of New York now.
The City Comptroller race felt like a long time ago, though it had only been a couple of years.
He had won it and used it as exactly the stepping stone he had always intended it to be, and now his name was on billboards and his face was on morning television and his schedule was so dense that Gerald, his right-hand man, carried it on a printed sheet that he updated twice daily.
My father didn't glance in my direction anymore. He barely had before, but now even the occasional acknowledgement had dried up completely.
I decided, somewhere around month three of watching him from across rooms he didn't know I was in, that I needed to be useful. Visibly useful in a way that could be dismissed or handed off to someone else. Useful in a way that made him have to look at me.
It took me two months to convince Gerald to let me help with the correspondence.
He refused the first four times I asked, politely and then less politely, and had only agreed when I pointed out that the volume of mail coming into the campaign office had tripled since the mayoral announcement and that his secretary, Mrs. Park, was visibly drowning in it.
I would help sort and draft responses. Supervised by Mrs. Park.
Nothing would go out without her approval.
He agreed, reluctantly, and I was careful and I did it well.
Then one afternoon my father had come into the office while I was there with Mrs. Park organizing his filing system and he had paused in the doorway and said, not quite looking at me, "I heard you're managing the correspondence. You don't have to do that."
It was the first thing he said to me directly in over a month.
"I want to," I had told him.
He nodded and returned to whatever he had come in for and that was the end of it. Twelve seconds, maybe fifteen. But I had carried it around for days afterward.
I wanted to do more. I knew I could do more.
Then came the email that had been sitting in the trash folder of the campaign account, already marked for deletion. I had been clearing out the backlog with Mrs. Park when the subject line caught my eye: Interview — Purple Horizon Media.
I asked Mrs. Park about it and she said she had run it past Gerald and he had told her to delete it. She hadn't asked why. That was how things worked in my father's office.
But I read it before she could close the tab.
It was an interview invitation from a television production company in Las Vegas.
Small outfit, local reach, the kind of station that covered regional politics and human interest stories, and occasionally picked up by larger networks when something caught.
They were producing a segment on the mayoral race and wanted a representative from the Keller campaign to come in and discuss his platform, his vision, and his plans for the city.
My father was in Chicago for the week. Gerald was stretched thin managing three simultaneous events. Nobody was available and evidently nobody had considered it worth rearranging for.
I considered it worth rearranging for.
A television interview, even a small one, was visible.
It was his name said out in a room with cameras.
I had watched every recorded interview my father had ever given, some of them multiple times, studying his cadence and the way he framed his answers and the particular brand of assured warmth he projected when the lights came on.
I knew his platform better than some of the people being paid to know it.
I had asked Mrs. Park, telling her I was compiling a prep document for an upcoming press briefing, for a list of the most common interview questions the campaign had fielded over the last six months.
She gave me the list without suspicion.
I spent three evenings preparing answers.
And now I was here, in a hotel room in Las Vegas, twelve hours before an interview that nobody knew I was attending, with a water bottle and a rattled nervous system and a view of a city that never turned its lights off.
I set the water bottle down and turn toward the window.
"Dad," I say quietly, to the glittering skyline and to no one, "I'll make you proud."
I pause.
"You too, Mom."
The lights outside go on doing what they do, indifferent and brilliant. I pull the curtains closed and lie down and close my eyes and stroke the crystal underneath my pillow.
I am not in the way. I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I am almost certain of it.
* * *
The address takes me to a building on the Strip that I hadn't expected.
I imagined a modest production office. Something with a reception desk and a logo on the wall and perhaps a harassed assistant carrying a clipboard.
I dressed for that version of events — a navy blazer over a cream blouse, tailored trousers, heels that were professional.
I had my hair pulled back and my notes reviewed and my answers rehearsed until they sat comfortably in my mouth. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror at the hotel at six thirty this morning and went through the most likely opening questions twice.
I was ready.
The building I am now standing in front of is not a modest production office. It occupies the upper floors of one of the larger casino hotels on the Strip, all dark glass and architectural confidence.
There is no signage for Purple Horizon Media. There is no signage for anything. There is a private entrance with a security panel and a man in a dark suit who looks at my name on his list for a long moment before stepping aside.
I tell myself this is fine. Boutique production companies operate out of unusual spaces all the time. Las Vegas is an unusual city.
I follow the suited man into an elevator that requires a key card and rise without music to a floor that opens directly into what I can only describe as a hospitality suite.
There are no cameras or lighting rigs. No crew members, no monitors, no cabling, no folding chairs arranged in the choreographed chaos of a working set.
I stand in the entrance and keep my expression neutral and feel my heart begin to knock steadily against my ribs.
A woman in a suit approaches me, hair scraped back.
"I'm here for the interview," I say. My voice comes out steady. I am grateful for that. "I'm representing the Keller campaign."
She looks at me. "You were sent by Phillip Keller?" she asks. "You represent his interests?"
"That's correct," I say.
The words cost me something. I can feel my pulse in my throat and I make a point of not touching my neck.
I wasn't sent by anyone. I am twenty-three years old and I am standing in a room that looks nothing like a television studio and the sensible thing, the rational thing, would be to thank this woman for her time and walk back to the elevator.
I didn't come from New York on a bumpy flight and a wing and a prayer to be sensible.
I hold her gaze and keep my chin level and she looks at me for one more moment and then she says, "One moment please," and steps away and makes a call.
She keeps her back to me and her voice low, I can't hear what she says but I watch her body language shift almost imperceptibly during the call, a small tightening of the shoulders, a single glance back in my direction, and I now know that I have significantly misjudged what this is.
This isn't a small station looking for a regional scoop.
I don't know what it is. But it isn't that.
She returns and leads me without further explanation down a corridor lined with closed doors and stationed, I now notice, with men.
Not hotel staff and not security in any conventional sense either.
They stand at intervals with the particular stillness and they watch me pass with eyes that catalogue me.
I count four of them before we reach the room at the end.
"When does the interview start?" I ask, keeping my voice light. "I don't see any crew. Are they setting up somewhere else?"
The woman looks at me. It is a brief look, almost involuntary.
"The boss will be with you shortly," she says.
"The boss?" I say.
But she is already gone, pulling the door closed behind her. I stand in the center of the room and breathe.
It is another suite. Larger than the one I walked through, furnished with the same expensive taste. A long table, chairs, and a bar cart along one wall that no one has touched. Whatever this room is used for, it isn't for television interviews.
I smooth the front of my blazer and tell myself to think clearly.
Small stations sometimes operate unconventionally.
Intimate formats are popular right now, the kind of unscripted, close-quarters conversations that perform well online.
Perhaps the boss is the interviewer. Perhaps this is exactly the personal approach I anticipated and I am simply reading the atmosphere wrong because I arrived early and the room hasn't been prepared yet.
That is plausible. I came twenty minutes ahead of the scheduled time, which in retrospect might have been excessive, but I wanted to be composed and settled and ready rather than rushed.
I straighten my back and fold my hands in front of me and wait.
The door opens. A tall man comes in ahead of the two men who follow him, which tells me immediately that he is not staff.
He is dressed in an expensive three-piece suit and hangs on his body to show his perfect proportions.
He is middle-aged but his hair is dark, almost black, pushed back from a face that is, almost unreasonably, structured.
His hands, when I notice them, are large and unhurried at his sides. There are tattoos at his wrists where his cuffs sit, dark ink disappearing into the fabric. His eyes find me the moment he crosses into the room and they don't move.
They are green, pale, and very, very still.
I feel a pull of familiarity so faint it might be nothing, a face that reminds me of someone I have perhaps seen before in passing, on television maybe, or in a photograph.
I can't place it and I don't have time to try.
I am here for a purpose and I have prepared for this and I am not going to let an expensive suit and a significant physical presence make me forget that.
I straighten and stretch my hand.
"Hello," I say. "I'm Nathalie Keller. It's wonderful to meet you. You're the interviewer?"
He stops and his eyes move to the two men standing behind him. Then he looks back at me.
"Is this a fucking joke?"
The silence that follows lasts approximately three seconds. It feels considerably longer.