The Tell

He noticed.

Not in the room. He was too good for that, and so was she. But after, in the hallway, when she was walking him to the elevator and the elevator was slow and they stood there together in the recessed light, he turned his head, just a fraction, and looked at her the way a man looks at a column of numbers that doesn't add up.

"You're not what I expected," he said.

"Most people say that."

"I bet they do." The elevator pinged. He didn't move toward it. "Most people mean it as a compliment, though, and I don't, exactly."

"Then what do you mean."

He took his time. The doors opened. He held them with his hand on the rubber.

"I came in here ready to hate you," he said. "I was ready. I'd practiced. I had a whole interior monologue prepared about the kind of person who does what you do, and I sat in that grey room this morning ready to deploy it the second you asked me a question that confirmed it. And you didn't ask me that question. You asked me something else. Now I have to go home and reorganize my entire opinion of you, and I resent you for it, and I'm telling you because I owe it to my own self-respect to tell you, and because in the eighteen months I am about to spend with you I do not intend to have a single secret from you. I'd like to ask the same of you, but I know better."

He stepped into the elevator. He didn't take his hand off the door yet.

"I see you," he said. "Whatever it is. I see you doing it."

She did not answer. The doors started to close on his hand and he let them. The last thing she saw of his face was the small, thoughtful furrow between his eyebrows, the look of a man cataloguing a thing for later study.

She walked back into the grey room and closed the door behind her and put her forehead against the cool wall and stood like that for what she would later try to convince herself was not a full minute.

Then she went to her office and shut the door and pulled up the firm's secure intake system and typed in Dana Reeve and routed any incoming call from any number associated with her, ever, to her own direct line, bypassing reception entirely. She set the same routing on Theo's number, which she pretended to herself was a precaution and not a tell.

She was halfway through deleting an analyst's draft memo on a state senator's mistress when her direct line rang.

It was an outside number. Westchester area code.

She picked up on the second ring.

"This is Vass," she said.

There was a pause on the other end. The pause of a woman who had not, until this exact second, decided whether to actually speak.

"My name is Dana Reeve," the woman said. "I think you might be the person I'm looking for."