Chapter 10: The Guest Suite

Rachel didn’t take the hand.

She got up on her own, one knee and then the other, using the edge of his desk, because she’d just cried snot onto her boss’s rug and she was going to stand up by herself if it killed her.

“No,” she said.

Julian lowered his hand. He didn’t look offended. If anything, he’d expected the first offer to get turned down and had a second one ready.

“No,” she said again, getting her voice back. “I work for you. I’m staff. I clean your toilet, Mr. Cross. I can’t sleep down the hall from the toilet I clean. It’s weird, the agency would have a stroke, and I’m not a charity case.”

“You slept on a ledge last night.”

“That’s a different issue.”

“It’s the only issue.” He leaned against the desk and folded his arms. “Here’s how it goes. Three things. You eat. Real food, three times a day, Mrs. Ruiz will be watching and she’s worse than me. You sleep. In a bed. And you let me find you a lawyer.”

“And I keep working.”

He paused. “You don’t have to…”

“I keep working. Full hours. That’s my thing.” She pointed at him like he was a contractor who’d tried to overcharge her. “And I pay rent. Out of my paycheck. I’m not having anybody say I moved into some billionaire’s apartment to get a free ride.”

“Who would say that?”

“Everybody, Mr. Cross. Literally everybody.”

His mouth almost went there again. “Where does your paycheck go right now?”

She opened her mouth. Shut it. The joint account. The agency would deposit Tuesday into the account Michael controlled, and Michael would empty it by Tuesday lunch.

“We’ll talk about rent,” Julian said, “when you have a bank account he can’t get into.”

He said he like he’d already decided something about her husband. She didn’t ask what.

* * *

She did go get her things. One trash bag was already in the laundry room with Sal’s sweatshirt. The other was still behind Sal’s counter. And there was Dottie.

Julian’s driver, a guy named Teddy with a gray goatee, a black Audi, and not much to say, drove her up to the Bronx at noon. She made him park on the service road. She walked under the trestle alone in her damp flats. The water had gone down and left a gray line of slime on everything, and Dottie was sitting on her milk crate on the ledge, wringing out a sock.

“Where you going?” Dottie said, before Rachel opened her mouth. “You got a look.”

“My boss. He’s got a room.”

Dottie’s good eye narrowed. “He a creep?”

“No. I don’t think so.” Rachel thought about him crouched on the rug, not touching her. “No.”

“Then go.” Dottie flapped the sock at her. “What are you standing here for? Go before he changes his mind.”

Rachel gave her the eight dollars and seventy-one cents, all of it, and her phone number written on the inside cover of the composition notebook, which she tore off. Dottie took the money and pretended not to take the number. Rachel saw her tuck it inside her bra.

Sal was working a double because the day guy’s kid had strep, which Rachel decided to count as luck. She gave him his sweatshirt back, washed and folded, and he handed her the second bag across the counter. He looked at the Audi idling at the pump.

“Huh,” Sal said, and filled in a square. “Good for you, Rachel.”

* * *

The guest suite was at the end of the east hallway. She’d cleaned it maybe twenty times. She’d never once sat on the bed.

The shower was the kind with a ceiling head the size of a dinner plate, and the floor was heated, and the towels were stacked on a teak bench like a hotel. Rachel stood under it for thirty-five minutes. She washed her hair three times with shampoo that smelled like fig and something expensive, and the water ran off her gray at first, then clear. She scrubbed the bubblegum out, and the river, and kept scrubbing till her skin was pink and squeaky and stung a little, and then she put her forehead on the cool marble wall and let the water beat on her neck.

First hot shower in eight days.

Dottie said if you have to cry, cry in a bathroom in daylight. It was dark out by then. She did it anyway, under the noise of the water, and nobody heard.

When she came out, wrapped in a white robe that went to her ankles, there was a tray on the window seat.

Soup. Chicken and rice, the broth gold, a lime wedge on the side of the bowl, a sleeve of saltines, a glass of milk like she was nine. A folded flannel nightgown on the bed, the tags snipped off.

Mrs. Ruiz was in the doorway with her apron still on. She didn’t say anything. She looked at Rachel’s wet hair, and her clean face, and she came over and tucked one wet strand behind Rachel’s ear, very quick, like she was fixing a crooked picture. Then she left.

Rachel ate the whole bowl standing up, saltines and all.

The window seat had a cushion and three pillows, and the window went floor to ceiling. Rachel curled up on it in the nightgown with her knees under her chin. It was raining again. Big drops ran down the glass, and the park was a black hole forty-two floors down with the lights of Fifth Avenue on the far side, and for once the rain was on the outside. For once she was looking at it, not in it.

She didn’t sleep. She thought she would, but her body had gotten used to listening for footsteps.

At three she gave up and padded down the hallway toward the kitchen for water, barefoot on the cold stone, the apartment dark except for the blue glow of the oven clock.

She was almost to the kitchen when she heard his voice.

Julian. Low. Around the corner in the dark hallway by his study, where she couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see her. No lights on. Just the voice, flat and very awake.

She stopped with her hand on the wall.

“I know what time it is,” he said. “I don’t care.”

A pause, then: “Owen. Find out who her husband is.” Another pause, and when he spoke again, his voice dropped into something she’d never heard from him, not even on the bad calls. “Everything. Tonight.”