Chapter Fifteen: The Canary

NORA

I woke at six to the smell of coffee and the sound of my brother arguing with an espresso machine, and for eleven whole seconds, the world was normal.

Then I saw the sealed document tube on my nightstand, and the burner phone beside it, and remembered that I had slept, actually slept, six hours, dead to the world, in an apartment a stranger could walk into, carrying a dead man's secrets, while my own secrets stacked up in the dark like kindling.

Trust's back in your hands now. Greer had cried when I called him at midnight, actual tears in his voice. Originals. Do you understand what that means? You can stand in front of the board tomorrow, you can...

No, I'd said. Not tomorrow. Not until I know who forged that signature, and who drugged you, and who is paying ghosts.

Now, in daylight, the tube sat on my nightstand like a sleeping animal, and the burner phone sat next to it like its loaded gun.

"Theo," I said, shuffling out. "You have a ten a.m. class."

"I have a ten a.m. class and a sister who now owns hot chocolate futures," he said, sliding a mug at me with a look that was too sharp for nineteen. "You were out till one. Again. With him again." He held up a hand before I could reach for the old lie. "I'm not asking. You asked me to stop asking. I'm just saying..." and his voice went soft in the way that had gotten him everything he'd ever wanted from me since he was six, "whatever this is, Nora, you look like it's eating you. You used to look tired. Now you look haunted. There's a difference. Clara called, by the way. Twice. She says, and I quote, tell your sister her fancy new job hasn't made her too good for tacos, and if she ghosts me again I'm telling her work husband she's a fraud."

I laughed despite everything, and it came out rusted.

Clara Reyes had been my shift partner for four years, my emergency contact, the only person alive who could tell from the sound of my hello whether I'd eaten. If anyone was going to notice the lie, it would be her.

Which is why, at one o'clock, when my phone buzzed with a photo of two tacos and a napkin that said ROOF. NOW. I KNOW WHERE YOU PARK, I looked at the tube on my desk and the schedule Julian had given me and the man in the glass office six feet away who had started saying my name differently, and I went.

DOMINIC

Nora left the floor at 12:52 with her jacket over her arm and her phone in her hand, and I told myself I was watching her go for security reasons.

At 1:05, Julian came in with the afternoon folder, and I gave him the only thing that mattered.

"The final page of the letter," I said, not looking up. "It's too dangerous to keep in the building. As of this morning it sits in a safe-deposit box. Williamsburg Savings Bank, box 1147." I turned a page of the folder with great calm. "No one knows but you. It stays that way."

"Understood, sir." No flicker. No swallow. Julian Park had four years of spotless loyalty and a face like a well-organized drawer. He wrote nothing down, which was either professionalism or the correct amount of caution, and I had reached the stage of this week where I could no longer tell the difference between the two.

At 1:20, Nora came back smelling faintly of tacos and worry, and I gave her the identical sentence in the identical tone, and watched her go very still.

"Box 1147," she repeated. "You're telling me the box number."

"I'm telling you because if anything happens to me tonight, you may need it," I said, which was true, and also not the reason, and we both knew it, and we both let it stand, because that was apparently what we did now, we handed each other knives handle-first and called it trust.

She nodded slowly. "And who else knows?"

"No one. It's the only copy." I went back to my folder. "There's a board audit committee at three. I need you in the room taking minutes. Whatever's going on with you and your friend on the roof, park it at the door."

She smiled at that, small and crooked, and for one second the whole impossible week fell off her face and she was just, her. The woman from the elevator. The one who had looked me in the eye and let me fire her.

"Clara knows something's wrong," she said, at the door. "She's the only person who ever has. Four years of mopping floors next to someone at 3 a.m., you learn the sound of their breathing, Dominic. She's going to keep digging until she hits the truth."

"Then give her a shallower truth to find," I said. "Everyone in this building is lying about something, Nora. The trick is lying small enough that the people you love stop digging."

She held my gaze a moment too long, and left, and I sat in my glass office with the words people you love sitting on my desk between us like an unexploded thing, and I did not examine them. I had a trap to set.

NORA

The board audit committee was three hours of men in suits explaining numbers that all meant we are fine, please stop looking, and I took minutes with half my mind while the other half turned the box number over and over.

Why tell me? Why tell Julian? Why only us two?

At 4:30, my phone buzzed. Unknown number, and my whole body flinched the way it always did now, the way you flinch from a stair you know is loose.

A quiet day. Enjoy it. Quiet compounds, Miss Vance, like interest, like favors. P

I stared at it until the letters burned. Preston. Still holding the leash, still smiling somewhere in the building, still confident enough to text me from a number I'd recognize as his handwriting in any form. Whatever had spooked him off the stage last night, he had metabolized it by breakfast. Men like Preston didn't retreat. They consolidated.

I typed back one word: Favors cut both ways.

His reply took eleven seconds. Everything does. That's why scissors were invented.

At 6:15, Dominic's office door opened and Julian came out carrying his coat, and something in the set of his shoulders made me look up from my desk. He stopped by my chair, and for a moment the calm, organized Julian was gone, and what was left was just a tired young man with ink on his cuff.

"He's been in there since five," Julian said quietly. "He told me to go home. He has never once told me to go home in four years." A pause. "Miss Vance. Whatever this week has been, has he eaten?"

"Not since the tacos," I admitted, "and those were mine."

Julian almost smiled. Then he was gone, and the floor was empty, and the glass office glowed like a lantern with Dominic Blackwood motionless inside it, staring at something on his desk that he wasn't touching, the way you stare at a photograph of someone you used to be.

I knocked. He said "come in" in a voice I hadn't heard from him before, flat, sanded down, the voice of a man out at the far edge of his own control.

On his desk sat a slim folder. On the folder, in Julian's precise hand: Follow-up, Williamsburg Savings Bank.

"Tell me," I said.

"A private investigator was photographed at the Williamsburg Savings Bank at 4:50 this afternoon," Dominic said. "He didn't get in. He didn't need to, he was confirming the box exists, which it does not, because there is no box, because I invented it at 1:05 this morning as a canary." He turned the folder around so I could see the photograph. A bland man in a bland coat, standing in front of a bank, being watched by Dominic's camera. "By 6 p.m., the investigator had reported to his employer. By 6:04, the report sat on a desk I can name." He paused. "My uncle's."

The floor hummed. The tower creaked gently in the wind, four hundred feet of glass and money, and I stood in the middle of it suddenly very cold.

"The box number was a lie I told exactly twice," Dominic said. "Once to Julian, at 1:20. Once to you, at 1:21." He did not look at me as he said it. He looked at the photograph, at the skyline, at every fixed point in the room that wasn't me. "Within four hours it reached the one man in New York who would pay to know it. Which means that somewhere between my mouth and Preston Blackwood's desk, there is a wire with one of two names on it."

"Julian," I said. "Or me."

"Julian," he agreed, quietly, "or you."

He finally looked up then, and I want to be honest about what was in his eyes, because I have spent six years being invisible and three days learning to read him the way he reads everyone: it wasn't suspicion. It was worse. It was a man standing in front of two doors, knowing that one of them opened onto a bomb, and discovering, with visible, dawning, unwelcome horror, that he could not bring himself to believe it was mine.

"Dominic." My voice came out steadier than I had any right to. "The night of the estate. The message on my phone, now you both have something to hide. He knew about the canary before you did. That stranger has been reading my messages since the stairwell." I held up my phone like the compromised thing it was. "If you want a wire, stop looking at your employees and start looking at the ghost in my pocket."

He went very still.

Then he stood, came around the desk, and held out his hand, palm up, patient, the way you approach something that might spook, and I put my phone in it, and watched the CEO of Blackwood Global hold four days of my whole secret life in one hand, and open it.

"There's one way to find out if your pocket has a ghost," he said. "We stop running from him." And he started scrolling.

He got eleven seconds in before his face changed.

"Nora." His voice dropped to almost nothing. "Your drafts folder."

"What about it?"

He turned the screen toward me. In my messages app, in the drafts no one ever checks, sat a text addressed to Preston Blackwood's number. Four words. Sent time: 4:58 p.m., eleven minutes after he'd texted me about quiet compounding like interest.

I had never written it. I had never seen it. It said:

The box is 1147. She's careless. Move now.

And below it, queued and ready, timestamped for 6:30, twelve minutes from now, a second draft I had also never written, addressed to the same number.

She's on the forty-second floor. Alone. Come up.