Chapter 9

After she leaves, Cavan does not go back to his desk.

He stands at the window with his hands in his pockets and listens to her heels fade down the corridor until the sound is gone. Behind him, leather creaks.

"Well," Theo says. "That went about as badly as I'd hoped."

"Get out of my chair."

"She told you it was none of your business. To your face while on your turf." Theo pops a mint into his mouth, delighted. "Do you know how many people have talked to you like that in ten years? Same number who've told you to say please."

"Theo."

"I'm just saying, I think I'm in love with her. You’ve truly met your match."

Cavan doesn't answer. He is looking at the glass of water on his desk.

Theo follows his eyes and grins. "Graham told me you had them bring that up at seven this morning. You hate drinking water."

"I was thirsty."

"At seven a.m. For a drink you rarely ordered in your life."

"Say another word and you walk home."

Theo mimes zipping his mouth. It lasts about four seconds.

Cavan turns back to the glass. He had ordered it without thinking, somewhere between the first coffee and the first call, and he can't explain why. He only knows that he looked at the empty spot on his desk and saw a hand holding out a glass of water, perfectly steady, and a voice saying “next time, say please.”

He doesn't like that either. He thinks about her hands instead. They didn't shake when he slid the folder across the wood, and her breathing never changed. She didn't glance at the door or the window, or look at the paper any longer than she had to. Most people read the page and the exit in the same look. She read the page and then she read him.

He has spent years listening to people lie, and he knows the sound. A lie is always too smooth or too eager. It shines a little, like something polished too many times. What she gave him didn't shine. It was plain and flat and completely true, the way a closed door is true. Every word was real, and none of them let him in.

“I don't see how that's any of your business.”

No one has said that to him in years. People ask how much, or when, or whether he is angry. They never ask what gives him the right.

He picks up the unsigned internship contract she left behind. A clean line waits at the bottom for a name.

“She'll be back Monday,” he thinks. “She can't afford not to.”

He knows it the way he knows the market opens at nine and yet he isn't entirely sure that daring brat is not easy to predict. That bothers him more than anything she said.

Just then, the doors open without a knock. He looks up to see Graham stepping in with his tablet held to his chest and a look Cavan has seen on him only twice before.

"Sir, I reached the clerk at the post office."

"And?"

"Box 218 was opened this morning at eight forty but not by Miss Collins. She was still at home."

Cavan goes very still. "By whom?"

"They say she is a tall woman with dark hair wearing a white suit." Graham swallows. "She had a key."

Theo stops chewing.

Cavan sees it before Graham finishes. This morning he had looked up from his first call and watched someone walk past his glass wall, sleek and unhurried, in a tailored white suit. She'd nodded to him through the glass and he had nodded back.

"Two keys are issued for every box," Graham adds quietly. "Miss Collins has one. The other was never collected by the renter."

"Then someone collected it for her."

"Yes, sir."

Cavan sets the contract on the desk and squares its edge against the wood. His voice, when it comes, is perfectly level, which is how both men know how angry he is.

"Pull the lobby elevator footage from nine o'clock on. Tell no one you're looking."

"Yes, sir."

"Not even Serena."

Graham's eyes flick up.

"Especially not Serena."