Four

Minnie's POV

I spend the rest of the morning in a fog so thick that Rachel from the cubicle next to mine has to repeat my name twice.

I finally realize she's asking if I want to join the group heading out for a coffee run. I shake my head. I give her a smile that probably looks as hollow as it feels.

I have seventeen unread emails. I have an orientation checklist that's supposed to be completed by end of day.

On my monitor, a video is playing silently about Excel Properties' core values. They include words like vision, integrity, and community impact.

I watch the CEO of the company—the man who selected me for a solo project—mouth the word *integrity* on screen. I think: sure.

The fog has a shape to it. The shape is Brad Landry's eyes finding mine across Conference Room B. It felt like he had been looking for them specifically.

I know what it looks like when someone recognizes a person they forgot existed.

I have been that forgettable person before. I've been her at parties and in waiting rooms.

I was her once, very memorably, at a Thanksgiving dinner where a man asked me three separate times what my name was. He kept losing interest before it could stick.

That look—the blink, the polite uptick of the brows, the fleeting *oh yes, you*—I know that look very well. What Brad gave me in that conference room this morning was its absolute opposite.

When he found my face, something in his expression went still. It was focused and certain. There was nothing casual in it.

The certainty is what I can't shake. Men who are merely surprised don't look certain. They look startled. He didn't look startled at all.

I eat my sandwich at my desk at noon. I am not ready to sit in the cafeteria and make first-week small talk with the other interns. Eating alone gives me something to do with my hands while my brain continues its unhelpful replay.

I am stuck on a thirty-second moment I cannot seem to move past. I keep rearranging the sequence. I look for the innocent interpretation. He saw me and recognized me. His expression did whatever it did because the situation is genuinely strange.

Your ex-wife's daughter shows up as your intern; that's objectively a loaded moment. His face just reflected the weight of it. I tell myself I read something into a look that was really just the reflex of a man absorbing an awkward surprise. 

I chew my sandwich and run this version through twice. It almost works. However, I keep snagging on the part where he stood at the head of the room and gave a speech about opportunities and professional growth. His eyes came back to me three times while he was talking. I counted.

At three o'clock I need air and a voice I trust. I take my phone to the women's bathroom on the fourth floor. I call Lila from the second stall. I speak in the kind of low, rapid whisper that means I'm either in trouble or about to be.

"He looked at me, Lils," I say. 

She immediately says, "Good morning to you too, Minnie. I'm fine, thanks for asking." 

I say, "Sorry. Hi. I love you. He looked at me." 

She sighs the sigh of a woman who has been receiving emergency phone calls from me since the seventh grade. "Who looked at you?" she says, though her tone tells me she already knows.

"Brad. In the welcome meeting. He was there, Lila. I told you there was a chance he'd be there for the welcome thing. You said I was catastrophizing, but he was there. And he looked at me. It was *a look*."

There's a brief pause on the other end. Then she speaks in the careful voice she uses when she's trying to talk me down from something. "Mins. He's your ex-stepfather. He saw a familiar face in a room full of strangers and he registered it. That's a normal human reaction."

"It wasn't a normal human reaction," I say. "It was a very specific kind of reaction. I have been thinking about it for four hours. It wasn't surprise, Lila. It was—it was like he had already decided something, and seeing me just confirmed it."

"You're projecting," she says. "You walked in already nervous about seeing him. Therefore, everything he did got filtered through that. A normal expression became loaded because you were primed to read it that way."

I want to tell her she's right. It would be easier. Lila is usually right about things. Also, the alternative explanation for Brad Landry's expression is one that I am not fully prepared to sit with yet. So I say, "Yeah, you're probably right." 

She says, "Go drink some water and finish your orientation checklist. Call me tonight." 

I say I will. I hang up. I stare at the tile wall of the bathroom stall for about thirty seconds. Then I wash my hands and go back to my desk.

The orientation video is still playing when I sit down. I skip to the end and check the box marked *completed*. I open my email to get through the remaining sixteen messages before five o'clock. I answer two. I flag three. I delete the rest. I'm reaching for my water bottle when a new email lands at the top of the queue. The sender name makes my hand stop in midair.

The sender is listed as **HR — Excel Properties**. However, the subject line reads: **Special Project Assignment — M. Moreland**. The first line of the preview says: *Mr. Landry has selected you for a specialized one-on-one marketing project.*

I click it open and read it in full. It's four sentences long. Mr. Landry has selected me for a dedicated marketing project tied to an upcoming development called *The Meridian*. This will last for the duration of my internship.

The project will involve direct collaboration with him and a small executive team. I am to report to the executive conference room on the fortieth floor tomorrow at nine a.m. I should come prepared to discuss marketing strategy and brand development at the introductory level.

I read it three times. Each time is slower than the last. Then I put my phone in my lap under my desk. I open my messages to Lila and type: *I told you so.*

She replies in forty seconds with a string of red flag emojis. It is followed by: *please find another job.* I type back: *absolutely not, I need the money.* She sends back: *MINNIE.* I put the phone face-down on my desk. I look at my monitor and breathe. Okay, I think. Okay.

The rational part of my brain is smaller than I'd like today. It lines up the facts. I am a journalism major with a rhetoric minor. I listed marketing as a professional interest in my internship application.

Excel is a development company that runs large marketing campaigns for its properties. Selecting one intern for a specialized project is probably a normal thing that Excel does every summer.

The fact that the intern they selected happens to be their CEO's ex-stepdaughter is either a coincidence or something Brad didn't register until I walked into that welcome meeting.

Maybe now that it's been arranged, he doesn't want to make it strange by reassigning me to someone else. That is a coherent and plausible explanation. I turn it over and examine it from every angle.

The other part of my brain replays the look from this morning. The part that counted three glances during a speech says: *you know better.*

I gather my things at five o'clock with the particular careful energy of someone trying to appear normal. I take the elevator down to the lobby.

I push through the revolving doors into the late afternoon heat. I walk two blocks before I stop on the sidewalk. I let myself actually think about it without the filter of trying to be reasonable. 

Brad Landry is forty-four years old and a billionaire. According to every business profile I've ever read about him, he is the kind of man who does nothing without intention. He runs a company of several thousand people.

Yet, he personally selected me for a private project. I am a twenty-one-year-old junior from a mid-tier college who has been on the premises for approximately six hours. And he did it after seeing me in a room this morning. He gave me a look that I watched land on him like a conclusion.

I think about my mother. I think about Joelle's voice on the phone last month. She was hot with anger as she described what she called Brad's "calculated coldness" during their divorce proceedings. She described the way he moved through the world like everything in it was a resource to be assessed and allocated. 

I have spent the last few years keeping a careful emotional distance from everything to do with Brad Landry. He is my mother's ex-husband. Their split was ugly. He is not someone I need in my life in any form. I have been good at the distance. It has been easy. Until six hours ago, he was a name in Joelle's court documents. He was a vague memory of a too-large man in an expensive suit at a garden party.

He is not vague anymore. The distance is already harder than it should be after a single thirty-second look. That is a problem I don't know what to do with yet. So I start walking again. I call Lila. She picks up on the first ring and says, "Tell me you emailed HR and asked to be reassigned."

"I did not do that," I say. 

"Minnie," she says in the voice that means she's genuinely worried. 

"I know, I know. But Lila—he looked at me like a man who had just made a decision."

She is quiet for a moment. Then she says, "What kind of decision?" 

"I don't know yet." 

I don't know, and that's the truth. Somehow the not-knowing is the part I can't stop turning over in my hands. It’s like the way you turn over something that might be dangerous and hasn't shown its edge yet.

I walk the rest of the way home with the phone to my ear. Lila talks steadily about reasonable things. She talks about alternate jobs and the library volunteer position.

She mentions the ice cream place on Brentwood Street that's hiring. I let her voice run over me like water. Meanwhile, I think about tomorrow morning. I think about the fortieth floor.

I think about the particular pair of laser-blue eyes. They found mine like they'd been looking.