Chapter 7: The Morning After The Truth

Sloane

I didn't sleep.

Not even close.

I lay in the bedroom that had started feeling less like a guest room and more like mine over the past two weeks and I stared at the ceiling and thought about everything Beckett told me at breakfast and tried to find the angle where it made sense in a way I could live with.

I couldn't find it.

Phillip Strand had been in my firm for four years. Four years of sitting three offices down from me. Four years of partner meetings and case reviews and corridor conversations and him looking at me across conference tables with that particular expression I had always read as mild condescension.

It wasn't condescension.

It was management.

He had been managing me. Watching me. Making sure I stayed exactly where he needed me to stay so that when the moment came he could use me the way he had always planned to use me.

I got up at five.

Not because I had somewhere to be. Just because lying down felt wrong. Like my body understood that this was not a situation you processed horizontally.

The kitchen was empty.

I made coffee. Real coffee this time, not the kind I usually made in the morning where I put it on and then forgot about it until it was cold. I stood at the counter and watched it brew and thought about my father.

Gerald Mercer.

I had spent eighteen years being angry at him for leaving. Clean simple anger that I understood and knew how to carry. He left. He chose himself. He did not look back.

That anger was something I had built an entire identity around. The girl whose father left. Who decided that needing people was the fastest way to lose everything. Who made herself so self sufficient and so untouchable that no one could ever do to her what he did to her mother.

And now I find out the story is worse than that.

He did not just leave eighteen years ago. He came back and he let someone use him as a weapon against his own daughter and he knew enough about what he was doing to have said no and he didn't.

I don't have a clean word for what that feels like.

Anger doesn't cover it. Neither does hurt. It is something underneath both of those things. Something older and quieter and more tired than either.

I heard movement from the other end of the penthouse.

Beckett.

A few minutes later he appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was already dressed which told me he hadn't slept either. Dark shirt. No jacket. He looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us said anything for a moment.

He went to the coffee maker. Poured himself a cup. Came and stood at the counter across from me the way he always did. That specific distance we had developed without discussing it. Close enough to be in the same conversation. Far enough to be two separate people.

"How long have you known," I said. "About my father specifically. How long."

He looked at his coffee. "Three weeks before the arrangement."

Three weeks. He had known for three weeks before I ever walked into his boardroom.

"You could have told me then," I said.

"I could have."

"But you didn't."

"No."

I looked at him. "Why."

He set his cup down. Looked at me directly in the way he did when he was about to say something true and had decided not to manage how it landed.

"Because if I had called you three weeks before and told you that someone was using your father to get to you through me you would have handled it alone," he said. "You would have gone after Strand yourself without understanding the full picture and he would have seen you coming and used it against you."

"That was my choice to make."

"I know."

"You took it from me."

"Yes." He didn't flinch from it. "I did."

I stood there for a moment.

The thing about Beckett is that he never tries to make himself sound better than he is. He does not dress things up or soften them or give you the version of events that makes him easier to forgive. He just tells you the true thing and lets you do whatever you need to do with it.

It is one of the most disarming things about him and I was fairly certain he knew that.

"I need to go to the firm today," I said.

"Sloane."

"I am not going to do anything. I just need to sit in that building and look at him and know what I know and figure out what I am going to do with it."

Beckett looked at me for a long moment.

"I'll come with you," he said.

"No."

"Sloane—"

"No." I kept my voice even. "I need to do this part alone. You coming with me changes what it is. It becomes about you and him. I need it to be about me and him first."

He held my gaze.

Then he nodded once.

That was another thing about him. He knew when to stop pushing. Most people didn't know that. Most people kept going past the point where they should have stopped because they were more interested in winning the argument than in actually understanding the other person.

Beckett understood the other person.

That was dangerous for both of us and I was becoming increasingly aware of it.

I got to the firm at eight thirty.

Normal time. Normal routine. I said good morning to the woman at the front desk and took the elevator to the fourteenth floor and walked down the hallway to my office and sat down at my desk and opened my laptop like it was any other Thursday.

At nine fifteen Strand walked past my open door.

He glanced in. The usual glance. The one I had always read as mild interest and now understood as surveillance.

"Morning Sloane," he said.

"Morning Phillip," I said.

He kept walking.

I watched him go down the hallway and turn the corner toward his office and I sat very still at my desk for a moment.

Four years.

He had been doing this for four years and I had never seen it. I who noticed everything. I who read rooms and people and situations for a living. I who had built my entire professional identity around being the person in the room who saw what everyone else missed.

I had missed this completely.

That was the part that sat in my chest like something heavy. Not just the betrayal. The fact that I had been so certain of my own perception and been so wrong.

Dara appeared in my doorway at nine thirty with two cups of coffee and a look on her face that told me she already knew something was wrong.

She came in and closed the door and sat down across from me.

"Talk," she said.

I looked at her.

And for the first time in as long as I could remember I did not organize it first. I did not figure out the clean version or the version that made me sound like I had it handled. I just told her. All of it. From the beginning.

She listened without interrupting.

When I finished she sat there for a moment looking at her coffee cup.

"Your dad," she said quietly.

"Yes."

"Strand."

"Yes."

"And Beckett knew."

"Before the arrangement. Yes."

She was quiet for another moment. Then she looked up.

"How do you feel about him," she said. "Not the situation. Him specifically."

I looked at her.

"Dara."

"I am asking a direct question."

I looked at my desk. At the case files sitting there. At the life I had built in this office over three years.

"I don't know yet," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment.

"Yes you do," she said quietly.

I didn't answer that.

But I didn't argue with it either.

And Dara, who had known me long enough to understand the difference, just picked up her coffee and sat with me in the quiet and let me not say the thing I wasn't ready to say yet.

Outside the office window New York was doing what it always did.

Three offices down Phillip Strand was doing what he had always done.

And somewhere across the city in a penthouse that had started feeling less temporary than I planned Beckett Rowe was waiting.

Not calling. Not checking in. Just waiting.

Like he already knew I would come back when I was ready.

Like he had decided a long time ago that I was worth waiting for.

I picked up my pen and went back to work.

But something had shifted in the way things shift when you finally stop lying to yourself about what you already know.

And I felt it with every breath I took for the rest of that day.