CHAPTER TWO
ROMAN
He saw her name on a Monday morning.
Nora Price. Author. In the deal memo, seven lines from the top, the way an author’s name appears when a production company is acquiring adaptation rights.
Nora Price.
He’d been looking for her for six months.
Not consistently, not in the way of a man who’d hired a team and dedicated resources. In the way of a man who understood he had no right to find her and kept looking anyway, quietly, in the moments between things.
He’d tried her old email. Changed. Her old phone number. Disconnected. The Brooklyn address she’d given the post office before she disappeared — he’d found the forwarding request, found that it had lapsed. She’d wanted to be unfound.
He’d understood why.
He’d found the graphic novel three months ago.
The Midnight Hours. Published by a small press that had the rights to something that was becoming significant.
He’d seen the New Yorker review first — a colleague had forwarded it as a cultural note, the way people in his world circulated interesting press.
He’d read the review and read the name and bought the book inside of four minutes.
He’d read it in one sitting.
He’d recognized the ballroom. The anteroom. The glass door. The dress.
He’d sat with the book in his hands for a very long time.
He’d found out about Camille in March.
His sister. His only family, after their parents died when he was twenty-four and she was thirty-one and she’d been the person who’d held the pieces together.
She was the one who’d found David Lang as a partner.
She was the one who’d brought him the evidence — the photographs, the hotel records, the specific manufactured trail that had told him Nora was sleeping with David Lang.
He’d believed her.
He’d believed her because she was Camille and he’d loved her since he was a child and also because some part of him had already been building a wall between himself and Nora and the evidence had arrived at exactly the right moment for a man who was afraid of how completely he’d come to need someone.
David Lang had come to his office in March.
He’d come with a lawyer and the expression of a man who’d been carrying something for a long time and had reached the end of his ability to carry it.
He’d told Roman everything.
The merger — the Vale-Lang partnership that had been in the works for three years.
The complication: Nora, who’d been going through Roman’s files for a birthday gift (looking for an old photograph) and had found something she wasn’t supposed to find.
Evidence of the fraud David had buried in the merger terms. She’d told Roman she’d found something and asked him about it.
Roman hadn’t connected it to anything. He’d been distracted. He’d said he’d look into it.
Camille had connected it. Camille had understood that Nora, with her artist’s eye and her complete indifference to what anyone else wanted her to notice, was going to cause a problem. She’d gone to David. They’d manufactured the affair evidence together.
David had come to his office in March because Nora’s graphic novel had made it into the world and he’d read it and understood what she’d carried through the glass door and he’d found he couldn’t keep living with what he’d been part of.
Roman had confronted Camille.
She’d admitted it.
She’d said: I did what was necessary. For you. For us.
He’d said: For the money.
She hadn’t answered.
He’d walked out of her apartment. He hadn’t spoken to her since.
The deal memo sat on his desk.
Nora Price. Author.
He stared at the acknowledgment page his assistant had pulled from the book file.
For F., who arrived at exactly the right moment, as impossible things tend to do.
He’d read that acknowledgment four times when he’d found the book in March. He’d understood, in the peripheral way you understand things you’re not ready to understand directly, what F. might mean. The timing. Two years. He’d done the math and then he’d put it in a separate room in his mind.
He was taking it out of that room now.
He picked up his phone.
He called Kim Tae-yang’s law firm, which he knew because Kim had been Nora’s law school friend and he’d tracked everything he could find and Kim’s name had come up in the new publishing contract as Nora’s representative.
He said: “I need to speak with Nora Price directly. This is Roman Vale.”
A pause.
“I’ll pass that along,” the assistant said.
“Tell her—” He stopped. “Tell her I’d rather call her myself. If she’ll give me the number.”
He hung up.
He sat in the very controlled quiet of his office.
He thought about the graphic novel. The glass door. The woman in the midnight-blue dress walking away while the New Year arrived around her.
He thought about F.
He thought: I have to get this right.
He thought: I have to get this completely right or I will have nothing.