Chapter 14: The CFO

By four o’clock Friday the short ribs had been braising for six hours and Rachel had cut her thumb twice on the same mandoline.

“Ay, give me that.” Mrs. Ruiz took the fennel away from her and pointed at the sink with her chin. “Wash. Band-Aid. You’re bleeding on the rich people’s salad.”

“It’s a good salad.”

“It’s a beautiful salad. Wash.”

Rachel washed. The penthouse kitchen smelled like red wine and rosemary and the orange peel Mrs. Ruiz kept tucking into the braise when she thought nobody was watching. Rain ticked on the glass. Forty-two floors down, Central Park West was a river of brake lights.

The green dress was still lying on her bed.

She’d looked at it at noon, and at two, and again at three when she went in to change her Band-Aid. Then she’d put on the black trousers and the plain black shell from Bergdorf’s, twisted her hair into the low knot she wore every day of her working life, and left the dress exactly where it was.

Wear it or don’t. Fine. She didn’t. He wanted her in the room? She’d be in the room. Carrying the wine.

Julian came into the kitchen at six-forty in a charcoal suit and no tie and stopped dead when he saw her.

He looked at the black shell. At the knot. At the Band-Aid on her thumb. Something went across his face, quick, and she couldn’t read it, and she hated that she couldn’t.

“Ms. Moore,” he said.

“Mr. Cross. The Barolo’s open. It needs another twenty minutes.”

“So do I,” he said, and walked out, and Mrs. Ruiz made a noise into the pot that was definitely a laugh.

* * *

Harold Kemp arrived first, which Rachel would learn was a thing he did on purpose.

Silver hair combed back like a news anchor’s. A navy blazer with gold buttons. Seventy, maybe, and handsome in that way old money stays handsome, like it’s been dry-cleaned. He handed Rachel his overcoat without looking at her, then looked at her after all, a long sweep from the knot to the shoes, and then past her, at the dining room.

She watched his eyes stop on the silverware. The Christofle, the good set. She could actually see him price it.

“Julian keeps a lovely house,” he said to nobody. “He always did have an eye for staff.”

She hung up his coat. It smelled like cigars and Creed.

She was pouring water at the table when she heard the laugh.

It rolled in from the foyer. A big, warm, easy laugh, the one that always came half a second before a punchline, like he couldn’t wait for himself. She’d heard it at parties and in the car, and for eleven years across a pillow in the dark, when he was being sweet, when he wanted something.

The water pitcher kept pouring. It went over the rim of Kemp’s glass and onto the tablecloth and Rachel didn’t stop it until Mrs. Ruiz’s hand closed over hers.

“Mija,” Mrs. Ruiz said, very low. “Look at me.”

Rachel didn’t look at her. She looked at the doorway.

Michael Hayes walked through it in a navy suit she had picked out at Brooks Brothers, the tie she’d bought him for Christmas, his hair a little longer than he used to let it get. He had his hand on the small of a woman’s back.

Red dress, blonde waves, and around her throat, sitting in the hollow where Rachel’s mother used to wear them every Easter, the pearls.

“Julian.” Michael’s voice was all warmth. “Sorry we’re late, the West Side Highway’s a parking lot. You remember my wife. Chloe, honey, you’ve met Julian.”

“Every Christmas party,” Chloe said, sugar-sweet, and kissed the air near Julian’s cheek. “Your view is insane.”

Then Michael turned to take a glass of wine off the tray Rachel was holding.

She watched it happen. The color went out of him from the top down, like someone had pulled a plug in his forehead. His hand stopped an inch from the stem. For one second he was just a man she’d been married to, scared. Then the second ended.

“Hi,” he said, and smiled. The smooth one. The one for waiters. “Have we met?”

Rachel’s mouth opened. Behind Michael, Chloe had gone very still, the pearls rising and falling on her chest.

“Rachel Moore,” Julian said, from the head of the table. His voice was mild. “She runs my house.”

“Pleasure,” Michael said, and took the glass.

* * *

She served the salad. She served the short ribs over polenta. She refilled the Barolo and kept her eyes on the bottles and her hands from shaking by gripping the neck hard enough to hurt her cut thumb, which helped.

The conversation came at her in pieces.

“…best quarter in the company’s history, and that’s Michael’s doing, don’t let him be modest…”

“…six years, Harold. Six years in March. Can you believe he left Halvorsen for us? I still have the champagne cork…”

“…told the banks the margins would hold, and look at that, they held. That’s a CFO…”

Halvorsen. Michael had come home from Halvorsen Partners every night for six years. That’s what he said. Long day at Halvorsen, babe. Board’s on my back, babe. She’d mailed his Christmas cards with the Halvorsen return address he gave her. She’d heard Julian say Hayes on a dozen speakerphone calls these last eight months and never once thought anything of it, because there were a million Hayeses, and her Michael worked in a dull brick building in White Plains.

Her Michael was the chief financial officer of Cross Dynamics. Her husband answered to the man whose shirts she ironed.

Kemp’s hand came down on Michael’s shoulder like a father at a graduation. “Best decision I ever made, bringing this one in.”

Julian said nothing. He cut his short rib into very small pieces and didn’t eat them.

Across the table, Chloe touched the pearls. Then she looked right at Rachel and touched them again.

* * *

The pantry was narrow and smelled like coffee beans and cardboard. Rachel was reaching for the dessert plates when the door clicked shut behind her.

She knew his cologne. She’d bought it.

Michael’s hand closed around her wrist and squeezed until the bones ground together. He wasn’t smiling now. Up close his breath smelled like Julian’s Barolo and his eyes were fast and wet and frantic, and some cold, counting part of Rachel noticed that: he was more scared than she was.

“Are you out of your mind?” he whispered. “You’re cleaning his toilets? Of all the houses in New York?”

“Let go of me.”

“Listen to me. You’re going to quit. Tonight. You’re going to walk out that service door and you’re never going to come back here.”

“Or what, Michael?”

He leaned in until his mouth was at her ear, the way he used to when he told her she looked beautiful.

“Or I tell your boss what you stole from him.”