Chapter 6: The Hospital Letterhead

"No. Not Thursday. Thursday is gone," Lucan says into the phone. "Tell Dalton he has until Monday. If he wants the Cavendish terms, he gets them from me, not through his lawyer."

Two soft knocks on the study door.

He lifts one finger without looking up. The door opens anyway. Celine Arden stands there with a folder pressed against her chest, Mrs. Calloway's handwriting on the tab. Contracts. Day eight.

He points at the chair by the window.

She mouths I can come back.

He shakes his head. "Sit."

She sits.

The call drags. Dalton wants more time, then more money, then more time again. Lucan answers him in short sentences and flips the document on his desk to the last page, the signature page, where he always starts. When he glances up, she's looking at the garden.

She wasn't a second ago.

He goes back to Dalton. A minute later he catches her reflection in the dark screen of his second monitor. She's watching his hands. Not his face. His hands.

He turns another page. Her eyes follow.

What are you counting?

He doesn't ask. Dalton starts a new sentence, and Lucan ends the call twenty-three minutes after it began. He knows the number because he's looked at the clock twice. So has she. He saw her do it.

"Sorry," he says. "Contracts."

She gets up. One hand rests on the windowsill for a second longer than she needs it, then she crosses the room and sets the folder on his desk.

"Mrs. Calloway says these need your initials on the yellow tabs."

"Thank you."

"You read the last page first."

He stops with the pen over the first tab. "What?"

"The signature page. Then the numbers. The actual words come last, if at all." She says it plainly, like reading off a shopping list. "You do it with every document. You flipped Dalton's before he'd finished his first sentence."

"Dalton's sentences don't need reading."

"You also drink your coffee after it's gone cold. Mrs. Calloway pours it at six-forty and you don't touch it until seven-ten. You hold the phone in your left hand, you write with your right, and when someone walks into a room you turn the phone face down. Even if it's me."

He leans back. "Even if it's you."

"Especially if it's me." She tilts her head, not quite a smile. "I thought you might want to know someone's keeping score."

"What else?"

"That's all I've got."

"Eight days."

"Eight days."

He studies her. She holds it. Behind her the window is white with early afternoon, and for a moment he can't remember if he's ever been looked at this carefully by anyone who wasn't deciding whether to sue him.

"You count the days," he says.

"I count everything."

"So do I."

Neither of them says anything. She picks a thread off her sleeve, drops it, and says "Initials on the yellow tabs," and leaves. The door clicks behind her.

He sits there longer than he meant to. The folder is open. The pen is still in his hand. He hasn't initialed a single page.

He's crossing the main hall twenty minutes later when something on the marble catches his eye.

A notebook. Black cover, soft corners, the kind that's been carried everywhere. It lies on the floor next to the entry table where it must have slid from her bag when she came through.

He picks it up to set it on the table.

It falls open in his palm.

He isn't going to read it. He tells himself that clearly, the way he tells himself things in meetings. He's already closing it when the handwriting does what handwriting does and goes into his eye before his judgment can stop it.

Things I keep saying I'll do later.

Underlined twice.

Below it, the first line. Short. Pressed hard into the page, like she meant it.

1. Meet Lucan Mercer.

He closes the notebook.

He puts it on the table, square to the edge, the way you leave something that isn't yours. Then he walks back to his study, shuts the door, and stands with his hand still on the handle.

He sits at his desk. He doesn't open the folder.

Meet Lucan Mercer.

He starts with what he knows. The application arrived forty-eight hours after the listing went up. The interview: she hadn't recognized him. He's sure of that. Nobody fakes the way her face went when she said the salary. She hadn't known who she was talking to.

But she had known who she was applying to.

Forty-three minutes, from the first handshake to the offer in her inbox. He'd called it instinct. He'd told Adrian it was the first honest answer in eleven interviews.

He lays the pieces out differently now. A woman puts a man's name at the top of a list she wrote before she knew he was hiring. Then a listing appears. Then she is in his house, in his corridors, noticing which hand he holds his phone in.

He doesn't know what the list is. He doesn't know what item one means. It could be anything. A wish, a bet, a dare from a friend.

But he knows one thing with total certainty, and it sits in his chest like a stone.

She did not come here by accident.

He picks up his phone. Adrian answers on the second ring.

"I need everything available on Celine Arden. Not a background check. Everything."

A pause. He can hear Adrian choosing.

"Lucan—"

"Tomorrow."

He hangs up.