9. Karissa
Chapter nine
Karissa
The ballroom is still running on emergency lighting when Gerald Holt gets on the microphone.
Amber glow. Half the chandeliers dead. Four hundred people who know exactly how to behave in a crisis already moving toward the exits in one coordinated wave.
Noah's hand finds my elbow.
"This way."
"The exit is that way."
"So is everyone else."
He guides me left, through a side door I didn't notice, into a service corridor. Narrow. Concrete floors. The emergency strips on the ceiling are dim but holding, casting everything in the same flat amber as the ballroom.
"Where are we going?"
"Service elevator. Comes out by the parking structure."
"What about the stairs?"
"Have you seen the east stairwell? Four hundred people trying to fit through a door built for twenty." He doesn't move right away. "This one's faster. It's also not on the main circuit. I had it wired to the security backup during the renovation. It should already be running."
Should be.
The corridor is longer than it looks. We pass a linen cart, two closed doors, a catering station still stacked with plates no one is going to use tonight. My heels are loud on the concrete. His aren't. Of course they aren't.
"You planned an exit route," I say.
"I always plan an exit route."
"From your own event."
"Especially from my own event."
I don't know why that strikes me as funny. It does anyway.
The elevator is at the end of the corridor. Old. Industrial. Heavy door, button panel that looks original to the building. Noah pulls it open and we step inside.
The doors close.
He hits the button for the parking level.
We move.
Then everything dies.
Not the emergency dim. Everything. The backup cuts out completely. The elevator lurches once and stops dead between floors. Total dark. The kind that takes a second to believe.
I go still.
"Noah."
"I know." His voice is close. Steady. "Generator failed. The whole backup system is down."
"Okay." I breathe through it. "How long?"
"Someone will get it back within fifteen minutes. My facilities manager is on-site."
The dark settles. My eyes work at it, pulling shapes from nothing. The vague outline of the wall. The faint shine of the button panel. Noah, somewhere to my right, close enough that I could reach him if I tried.
I don't try.
The dress is full-length and structured, and I am not sitting on the floor of a service elevator in it, so I lean back against the wall instead and cross my arms and wait.
Silence.
Then: "Are you claustrophobic?"
"No. You?"
"No."
More silence.
"This is a very small elevator," I say.
"It's a service elevator."
"That wasn't a complaint. Just an observation."
I hear him shift. Like he moved. Like he's leaning against the opposite wall now, maybe four feet away.
Four feet in total darkness feels like nothing.
"You did well tonight," he says.
I blink at the dark. "Sorry?"
"With the press. The donors. Fletcher." Something shifts in his voice, like the words cost more than he expected. "You didn't need coaching."
That's the closest thing to a compliment I've gotten from him that didn't come with a qualifier attached. I don't know what to do with it, so I do what I always do.
"Fletcher was easy," I say. "I've dealt with men like him before."
"I know."
"Then why did you—" I stop.
"Why did I what?"
I shouldn't ask. The answer is either going to be something practical and contractual, or it's going to be something I don't know what to do with.
"Cross the room," I finish. "When he was talking to me. You came over like I'd hit a panic button."
He doesn't answer right away.
"You hadn't," he says finally.
"I know I hadn't."
"I know you know."
The silence goes a different direction after that. Less like waiting and more like something neither of us is naming.
"It wasn't in the contract," I say. "The hand on the back. The dance. None of it was in the parameters we agreed to."
"No."
"So."
"So." A pause. "I'm aware it wasn't."
That's not an explanation. He knows it isn't. I think he's telling me he doesn't have one, which is somehow more unsettling than anything he could have said instead.
I shift against the wall. The quiet is doing something it shouldn't, stripping away the context.
In the light, he's Noah Easton. Hedge fund.
Power. The man who pulled my financials like I was a line item.
In here, he's just a voice four feet away that sounds, occasionally, like someone who is tired.
"Can I ask you something?" I say.
"You're going to regardless."
Fair. "The photo on your desk. The one in the silver frame." I stop. Give him room to shut it down. "You don't have to answer."
He doesn't say anything for long enough that I think he isn't going to.
I'm already forming the apology when he speaks.
"Her name was Claire." His voice is the same. Measured. But there's something underneath it, something that cost him to say out loud. "She was three months old."
The dark feels different now.
"She died six years ago." A pause. "Undiagnosed. We had every specialist available and it didn't matter."
I don't say I'm sorry. It's not enough and he's heard it a thousand times. I know what it looks like when someone has absorbed condolences until the words lost all their shape.
"She's why you keep the office the way you do," I say quietly. "The photo. Front and center where you can see it."
"Yes."
"Not in a drawer. Not at home."
"No."
I think about that. The choice of it. Keeping her somewhere he has to look at her every day, in the room where he is most himself. Not hidden. Not managed. Just there.
"I'm sorry," I say anyway. Because some things deserve to be said even when they're insufficient.
He doesn't respond. But he doesn't close it off either. The silence that follows isn't the kind he uses to end conversations. It's something else.
I think about the apartment I've never seen but can picture clearly. Clean lines. No noise. Every object in its place. A man who built walls high enough to keep the world managed and predictable, because the one thing he couldn't manage cost him everything.
The money failed. I understood that the second I saw that photo on his desk, not as decoration, not as a reminder to work harder. As proof that there are things that don't yield to resources or leverage or ruthless, methodical effort.
He is so alone.
Not lonely the way people say when they mean they want company. Alone in the specific way of someone who stopped expecting to be known. Who keeps functioning, keeps building, keeps accumulating because the alternative is sitting still long enough to feel it.
I know that particular kind of alone. I've lived inside a version of it for six years.
The thought sits in my chest like something bruised.
"Karissa."
His voice is different. Quieter.
"Yeah."
"You're the first person who hasn't said something after."
I don't ask what he means. I know what he means. The pivot. The subject change wrapped in sympathy. The way people absorb grief and redirect immediately because sitting in it is uncomfortable for everyone.
"I didn't know what to say that wasn't useless," I tell him.
Another pause. Longer this time.
"That's it exactly," he says.
We don't say anything else after that. The dark holds us in it, and the silence is the least complicated thing that's happened between us all night.
The lights come back.
For one full second before anything else registers, my body is still in the dark version of this. Four feet doesn't feel like distance anymore. I catch myself already leaning a fraction toward where his voice was, like the rest of me hadn't gotten the memo that this was over.
Fluorescent, sudden, and entirely unforgiving. The elevator hums to life. I blink against the brightness and straighten off the wall, putting the four feet back where it belongs.
Noah is already composed. Jacket straight. Expression back in place. The version of him that exists in lit rooms, in front of people, in the world where everything is managed.
Whatever just happened is already filed somewhere I can't access.
The elevator moves. The doors open on the lobby level. Sylvia appears from the left, tablet in hand, and falls into step beside Noah like she materialized from his schedule. Someone from facilities intercepts him two seconds later. Gerald Holt is across the room, already looking for him.
He moves into it seamlessly. Of course he does.
I follow at half a step, nodding at a woman who recognizes me from the announcement photos and says congratulations with genuine warmth and a slight edge of curiosity. I smile and say thank you and keep moving.
I'm almost to the main doors when I feel it.
I turn around.
Noah is twenty feet away, mid-conversation with the facilities manager, nodding at something on the man's phone screen.
But he's looking at me.
Not a glance. Not a check to confirm I'm still in the room. He's looking at me the way you look at something you're still trying to understand. Like I moved something he thought was fixed and he's trying to work out exactly how I did it.
Like he's not sure he wants to know the answer.
The facilities manager says something. Noah's eyes drop back to the phone.
He turns away.
But it takes longer than it should.