Chapter 4: Guests 

Chapter 4: Guests

I had the corrected file sent and my laptop half packed when the elevator chimed, followed by Lucinda's voice pitched into the register she used only for people worth performing for.

"They're early," she said, though her face said she'd planned it exactly this way. "Amara, be a dear and put on a fresh pot of coffee. The good cups."

Two years ago I'd have been moving before she finished the sentence. I noticed myself hesitate now — half a second, just long enough to feel it before old habit won anyway.

I was rinsing the good cups when Bianca Ferrer walked in like she already owned the floor. Beautiful in the specific, engineered way that took a team of people to maintain. She looked at me once, a sweep from my flats to my ponytail, and decided I wasn't worth a second glance.

"Oh." To Damian, not to me. "I didn't realize your assistant would still be here."

"Amara was helping with the Hensley numbers."

"Of course she was." Bianca smiled the way people smile when they've already won and want you to watch them enjoy it. "Some women just have such a talent for being useful."

She turned to me, warm as anything, the compliment already loaded. "You're so composed, Amara. Most women would've made a scene by now."

Behind her came Priscilla, Damian's sister, shaking rain off an umbrella, sharp in a way that made Lucinda look gentle by comparison. "Is she still here? I thought this was finalized today."

"It is," Damian said, flat, final the same voice from my office that morning.

"Wonderful." Lucinda clapped once, delighted. "The Ferrer name goes back four generations in this city. It will be nice, finally, having someone at the table whose family history doesn't require an explanation. No offense, Amara, dear. I'm sure the system did its best with what it had to work with."

I set the tray down with more care than the moment deserved. My hands wanted to do something else entirely.

"None taken," I said, and poured Bianca's coffee first, because that was what the good staff did, and I was, tonight, still very good at being staff.

"Amara," Bianca said, sweetness stretched thin over something sharper, "since you know the household so well, you wouldn't mind helping coordinate the engagement dinner? Just until the new staff settles in. Some women make these transitions so ugly."

I thought about the board seat I'd turned down four years ago without telling him why, because his calendar had mattered more than mine. I thought about a dozen opinions I'd swallowed whole to keep the evening short.

I smiled. "I'm sure you'll manage beautifully without my help. You strike me as someone used to getting exactly what she wants."

"Amara has always known her place," Lucinda said smoothly. "One of her better qualities."

Then she rose, with the flourish she reserved for announcements she'd rehearsed all day.

"There's more to celebrate than the merger." She reached for Bianca's hand, beaming in a way I'd never once seen her look at me. "Bianca's expecting. A grandchild, finally and from the right family this time."

The room went still, everyone looking at me at once, waiting to see if I'd fall apart.

I looked at Damian instead. His face had gone the particular shade of pale that meant this was news to him too.

"You told him about the merger this morning," I said, doing the math out loud because someone had to. "How is she far enough along to announce a pregnancy the same day?"

Bianca's eyes filled on command — the fast, glassy kind I'd watched enough negotiators fake across a table to spot instantly. "I don't need to justify my body to her, of all people."

"Amara." Lucinda's sweetness dropped away, gone flat and businesslike, the way it did whenever she felt cornered into honesty. "You had three years. Bianca's managed it in considerably less. I don't say that to be cruel. I say it because a woman who can't seem to conceive isn't in much of a position to lecture anyone about timelines."

My thumb found the plastic edge of the strip in my coat pocket without meaning to. For one reckless second I wanted to set it on the table between the good cups and let the room choke on which Cross wife had actually managed it first. There had never been anything wrong with my body. The marriage itself had been barren, built and maintained entirely on his terms.

I looked at Damian instead of saying any of it.

"You don't know what this week has been like for me," he said quietly, to no one in particular, rubbing the back of his neck. "Everyone wanting something. Nobody asking how I'm holding up through all of it."

I stared at him. His fiancée had just announced a pregnancy that couldn't be his by any math either of us could do, in front of his mother and his ex-wife, and the thing he'd found room to feel sorry for was himself.

"Congratulations," I said instead, voice level. "I hope she's a better fit for all of this than I turned out to be."

Across the room, Priscilla leaned into Bianca. "Did Marcus tell you he saw you leaving Soho House with that woman from the Levinson launch?"

Bianca laughed, not bothering to lower her voice. "Marcus should mind his own engagement instead of mine."

Lucinda didn't glance up from her champagne. If I'd so much as had coffee with a man who wasn't Damian, it would have made every gossip column in the city by morning, with Lucinda personally supplying the quote.

Damian said nothing through any of it. He stood there, between his mother and the fiancée carrying a pregnancy nobody could explain, and let the silence stretch and I understood, watching him, that this was the truest answer to the question he'd asked me in his study. Did you ever resent it. I resented the version of myself I'd become to avoid moments exactly like this one. He'd never once noticed, because I'd done it so well he mistook it for who I actually was.

"I should go," I said, reaching for my coat. "Congratulations, all of you."

"Amara." Low, at my elbow as I passed. "Thank you. For tonight. I don't know what I would've done without you, honestly you always make it look so easy, I forget sometimes that it's actually hard for me too."

For one absurd half-second, some old reflex in me almost reached back to reassure him anyway, the way I'd done a hundred times before without ever once being asked to. I let it die in my throat instead.

"Of course." I didn't stop walking. "It's what I'm good for."

Three years ago I would have meant it as a compliment. Tonight it sounded like a job description.

I let the elevator doors close before I let my face do anything at all. Somewhere between the fortieth floor and the lobby, I stopped being sorry for what tomorrow was going to cost the people standing in that penthouse.

They wanted to know how useful I could be.

For three years, I'd been useful. Tomorrow, I was going to become dangerous.