CHAPTER FIVE

Simon — Sleeping in Enemy Silk

She made no sound.

That was the first thing he noticed about her in the residential wing — not her face, which he had already assessed, not her manner, which was contained in the way of someone who had decided exactly how much space they would occupy and then occupied precisely that much. It was the sound. Or the absence of it. She moved through the shared spaces of the residential corridor like something the house had always contained, quiet in the specific way of a person who had learned that quietness was useful.

He did not know what to make of her.

He had made the decision about Mara Cole with the same process he applied to acquisitions — identified the need, identified the most efficient means of meeting it, executed. He had not anticipated that efficiency would produce a person this difficult to read, and Simon Brown was not accustomed to people he could not read.

The first morning, he came into the shared sitting room at six forty-five to find that she was already awake. She was at the window with a cup of something and a book she closed when he entered, and she said good morning the way people say it when they are genuinely not sure whether the morning is good but have decided to be civil about it regardless.

He had said good morning. He had gone to his desk. He had worked.

At nine he had come out for coffee and found that there was already coffee, made the way he took it, which he had not told her and which meant she had asked someone or paid attention to something, and both possibilities told him something about her.

He did not mention it.

By the third day he had identified the pattern: she was up before him, she was quiet, she did not ask for anything, and she watched things. Not the way of a person who was nosy. The way of a person who considered information important. He watched things too, and so he recognized it, and filed it away beside the other things he had filed about her and not yet found the full use for.

On the fourth evening Frederick came to dinner.

This was not unusual. Frederick came to dinner at the estate two or three times a week, the gravitational pull of the family table stronger on him than on Simon, who could go weeks without sitting at it. What was unusual was Frederick sitting across from Mara and turning the full warmth of his attention on her — the questions, the laughing, the particular energy of a man who found every new person a potential audience.

Simon watched her answer Frederick's questions. Politely, briefly, deflecting with the light skill of someone who had practice at revealing nothing while appearing to reveal enough. She asked Frederick one question in return, something about the company's presence in New York, and Frederick answered at length and she listened with an expression of interest that Simon could not quite determine was genuine.

After dinner, in his study, he sat with his scotch and the Hartwell files and found himself thinking not about Hartwell but about the way she had watched Frederick when Frederick wasn't looking. Not with warmth. Not with coldness. With something that he did not have a word for yet.

He put it aside. It was not relevant.

On the fifth morning he brought her breakfast.

He could not have explained why, afterward, in the privacy of his own assessment. He had been in the kitchen early, the cook not yet arrived, and he had made himself eggs the way he had made them in the years before he had staff, and he had made enough for two, and he had left a plate outside her door with a knock and was back at his desk by the time she opened it.

She did not mention it.

Neither did he.

But that evening she appeared in the doorway of his study at nine o'clock with two cups of tea — not coffee, tea, which was what he drank in the evenings and which, again, he had not told her — and set one on his desk without comment and turned to leave.

"You can sit," he said, before he had decided to say it.

She turned back. A pause. Then she sat in the chair across from his desk, the chair that was there for this purpose, and she held her cup and looked at his bookshelves with the attention of someone who read.

"You can take anything from the shelves," he said. "If you want."

She looked at him. "I'll replace what I take."

"You don't need to."

Another pause. Then: "I know I don't need to."

He looked at her. She looked at him. And there was something in the room that had not been in the room before — not a problem, not a complication, just a presence, the particular atmospheric shift of two people who are in the same room and have both, for a moment, stopped pretending the other isn't there.

His phone buzzed. He looked at it. She stood, took her tea, and left, and the room returned to its previous state.

He looked at the bookshelves for a moment after she was gone.

Two floors below, Frederick was in his office making calls at an hour when calls should not be made, the particular sound of his voice traveling up through the house's bones in that way it always had — present, loud, unconscious of its own reach.

Simon turned back to his files.

He worked until midnight. He did not think about her again, which required, he noted distantly, a small but measurable amount of effort.

He noted that too. He filed it away. He did not lo ok at what he had filed.

Not yet.