Nothing On Him

Chapter 11

Dani grabbed my wrist before I got the laptop open.

"Don't," she said.

"Let go."

"Mia. It's Sunday night. You've been in my kitchen for six hours. You haven't eaten. You're wearing my sweatpants—"

"Your sweatpants are comfortable."

"You're wearing my sweatpants and you're about to look a man up on the internet and there is no version of this that ends with you feeling good."

I opened the laptop.

The café was the one on the corner with the bad espresso and the good chairs, and we had the table by the window, and the barista had already come over twice to ask if we wanted anything else and both times I'd said not yet in a voice that meant never.

"Adrian Voss," I typed.

The results came back in a second and a half.

"Okay," Dani said, leaning over. "Okay. Voss Group. That's real. That's a real thing, that's — Mia, that's the building. That's the building on Weller with the whole block."

"Keep scrolling."

"Voss Capital. Voss Foundation. There's a hospital wing—"

"Scroll."

"Adrian Voss, chairman, appointed at twenty-eight after the death of his father—"

"Stop." I put my hand out and she stopped. "Read that again."

"Chairman at twenty-eight after the death of his father. That's — that's eleven years ago."

I sat back. The café hummed. The barista steamed something. A woman at the next table was on her phone with her chin in her hand, and the light was going orange outside, and I sat there with my hand flat on the table and did math I did not like.

"He's thirty-nine," I said.

"So?"

"So nothing. So he's thirty-nine and he's been chairman for eleven years and there's nothing." I scrolled. "No interviews. No profile. No — Dani, there's no photos. There's a headshot from a corporate page, one picture, and it's terrible, and then there's — there's articles about him. About the company. About the foundation. Every single one of them is about the company."

"Everybody's like that. Rich guys are private."

"Rich guys are never private," I said. "Rich guys put their whole lives on a boat and post it. Show me a rich man who isn't posting his boat."

"Morgan posts his boat."

"Morgan posts his boat," I said, and scrolled, and scrolled, and stopped.

"There."

"What."

"Charity gala. Three years ago. Voss Foundation thing, the one on the harbor." I turned the laptop. "Look."

It was a wide shot of a ballroom. A hundred people in black tie, a string quartet in the corner, a long table of auction items. And in the bottom left of the frame, at the edge of everything, half cut off by the photographer's crop, was Adrian Voss, in a tuxedo, standing alone with a glass in his hand.

"Three years ago," I said. "There's a whole event. There's a hundred people. And there's one picture of him and he's at the edge of it."

Dani leaned in. "What's that by the piano?"

I zoomed in.

It was a dress.

White. On a display mannequin, on a platform, under a light. A wedding dress, with a little card at its feet, and the card was too small to read.

"It's an auction," Dani said. "They auction off a dress. Rich people do that."

"Mm."

"Mia, don't zoom in on the dress."

"I'm not zooming in on the dress, I'm looking at the caption." I scrolled past it, because Dani was right and I did not want to hear it. "Here. Read the caption under the gala photo."

She read it out loud.

"Adrian Voss, chairman of the Voss Foundation, attended alone." She stopped. "Alone. They wrote alone."

"Keep going."

"Mr. Voss declined to comment on the foundation's new partnership." She looked up. "That's it? That's the whole caption?"

"That's the whole caption."

"Who writes attended alone?"

"Somebody who's been told to write attended alone," I said, and then I did the thing. I did the thing I had told myself I wasn't going to do.

I went to the comment section.

There were eleven comments.

The first one said who is he.

The second one said I saw him at the harbor club once. He was nice.

The third one said does he have a wife??

The fourth one said no wife. no kids. never married. my cousin works at Voss. says nobody has ever seen him with a woman. not once in eleven years.

The fifth one said that's a lie. my friend's sister's roommate said he had a girlfriend for years. very serious. wouldn't marry her. story goes she showed up at his office and security walked her out.

The sixth one said sounds fake.

And the seventh one, from an account with no picture and a name like harborgirl1987, said:

She's real. I was at the harbor club dinner in 2019 and she was there. Face like a movie star. Blonde. He never sat down the whole night. He stood behind her chair like he was guarding a door.

I sat back in my chair.

"Mia," Dani said.

"Mm."

"Mia, you've got the face."

"What face."

"The face you get when you're about to do something stupid."

And that was when the woman at the next table put her phone down and turned around in her chair and said, "You're her."

The café went quiet in that particular way where nobody moves but nobody's talking either.

"Excuse me?"

"You're her," the woman said. "From City Lights. The dress. The hotel." She had her phone up now and she turned it around, and there I was, in a photo on a Sunday evening, on a stranger's phone in a café on the corner. "Twenty-two thousand people saw you scream at a hotel clerk."

The barista came around the counter and stood by the pastry case and did not do anything.

"I didn't scream at anybody," I said.

"You screamed at a hotel clerk," the woman said, and she said it loud, to the room. "There's a video. Some girl in pink posted it. You're all over it. You're yelling about a check and a shirt—"

"Ma'am—" Dani started.

"—and everybody's saying you got paid to go to a dinner with a man," the woman said. "Is that true? Did you get paid?"

The whole café was listening. The guy by the door with his coffee had stopped walking. The barista had both hands flat on the pastry case.

"Ma'am," I said, "I don't know you."

"You don't have to know me. I know you." She held her phone up higher. "I'm just saying. Twenty-two thousand people are watching a woman chase a man through a hotel lobby and now you're in a café in my neighborhood with a laptop doing — what? Looking him up?"

"Put the phone down."

"Or what?"

I stood up.

Dani stood up with me and put her hand flat on my stomach.

"Mia."

"Put the phone down," I said. "You're not going to put me on the internet twice in one weekend."

"Then tell me who he is," the woman said. "Because nobody knows. That's the whole thing everybody's saying — there's a girl screaming in a hotel lobby about a man and nobody knows who he is, and now she's sitting in my café looking him up like she doesn't know either."

The café was completely silent.

And my phone — my phone, in my hand — buzzed.

I looked down.

Unknown number. Three lines.

You're in a café on Weller telling a room you don't know my name.

You're right. You don't.

Sit down and let it go.

I stared at it. The woman was still holding her phone up. The barista said, "Ma'am—" and the woman turned her screen around and said, "Look, she's texting him, she's texting him right now—"

I put the laptop in my bag.

"That's it?" the woman said. "You're just going to walk out?"

"I'm going to walk out," I said, "because I'm not going to stand in a café and be somebody's Sunday video."

"You are somebody's Sunday video," she said, loud, to the room, to the barista, to the guy by the door. "She's the paid date. She's the one from the hotel. Look at her—"

"Ma'am," the barista said, and got between us, which was brave, and about six seconds too late.

Dani had my arm. We went past the pastry case and the guy by the door and out into the cold, and the café door — which is heavy, and swings, and has a brass bar across the middle — came around and slammed shut behind us so hard the whole window shook.

I got three steps down the sidewalk before I stopped.

"Who texted you," Dani said.

"I don't know."

"Mia. Who texted you."

I turned the phone around.

She read it. She read it twice. Then she looked up, and her face had gone somewhere new.

"He's watching you," Dani said. "Right now. He's watching you in a café on Weller and he's texting you like he's standing behind you."

I turned around.

The street was empty. The café window was full of faces, and the woman with the phone was still in the front of them, and the guy by the door had come out and was standing on the sidewalk pretending to look at his phone.

There was nobody in a black coat.

But across the street, parked under the streetlamp with the engine off and the lights off and the wipers going against nothing, there was a car.

"Ask him," Dani said. "Ask him who the blonde is."

---

Chapter 11 Ends