Chapter 5

The elevator ride to the thirty-first floor took forty-three seconds.

Alison knew because she counted. It was a habit she'd never been able to break, the counting, filling silences with numbers when her brain needed somewhere to go that wasn't the thing directly in front of her. Steps between the subway and the office. Seconds before a difficult call connected. The number of times she'd told herself in the past two weeks that she was making the right decision.

She'd lost count on that last one.

The elevator opened directly into the penthouse. No hallway, no numbered door. Just her and her suitcase and Eric standing slightly to the side with the extra key fob he'd had cut, and then the space itself — enormous and quiet and full of evening light coming through windows that ran the entire length of the east wall.

She hadn't expected it to feel like something. She'd expected glass and steel and the particular coldness of expensive spaces that had been decorated by someone paid to make them look lived in. What she got instead was books on actual shelves, and a worn patch on the arm of the reading chair nearest the window, and a single photograph on the bookshelf half-hidden behind a taller book, and plants that were clearly being watered by someone who cared whether they lived.

It looked like a home. That was the part she hadn't prepared for.

"East wing is yours," Eric said, setting her heavier bag down near the hallway. "I had the closet cleared. Bathroom is fully stocked but if there's anything specific you need, send me a list and I'll have it handled."

"I can buy my own things."

"I know you can." He said it without any edge at all. "The offer stands regardless."

She followed him down the hall. The bedroom was larger than her entire old apartment, which was quietly embarrassing to realize. Its own bathroom, a small sitting room off to the side with a desk that caught the last of the afternoon light. The closet was empty and waiting, which felt both practical and strangely intimate, like a space that had been holding its breath.

"It's good," she said. Because it was, and because she'd been raised not to waste words on things that didn't need decorating. "Thank you."

He nodded. Showed her the rest. Kitchen, well stocked. She opened the cabinet above the coffee maker without thinking and found her exact brand of coffee sitting on the shelf. She stood there with the cabinet door open for a moment longer than necessary.

"Your employee file had your order," he said, from behind her. "I assumed the preference extended to home."

He'd assumed correctly. She closed the cabinet. "You're going to be very difficult to argue with," she said.

"You'll manage."

She turned. He was leaning against the kitchen doorframe with his jacket over one arm, watching her take the space in, and there was something in his expression she couldn't immediately name. Not warm, exactly. But something that was paying attention.

"One rule," he said, when she'd finished the tour and they were back in the kitchen.

"We have forty pages of rules."

"One more." He set his jacket over the back of a chair. "At the office, keep calling me Mr. Harrison. I understand why it matters and I'm not asking you to change it. But here—" He paused. "Here you should call me Eric. It will seem strange to anyone who visits if you don't."

It was framed as practical. She recognized the framing.

"Alright," she said. "Eric."

His name in her mouth had a different texture than it did in her head. She'd been saying it silently for four years, sometimes in frustration, sometimes in something she'd never let herself examine closely. Out loud in his kitchen with the city spreading out behind him it was something else entirely.

He didn't react. Just nodded, once, the way he did when something was settled.

"I'll cook," he said. "Unless you'd rather—"

"Go ahead." She picked up her bag. "I'll unpack."

She unpacked slowly, taking more time than she needed, listening to sounds she was going to have to learn as background. The particular way the kitchen echoed. The low sound of something on the stove. A city forty-three floors below making its evening noise, reduced by distance to something almost like white noise.

She hung her clothes. Arranged her books on the small shelf in the sitting room. Put her photographs on the nightstand, the only two she owned, her parents before everything went wrong and a small one of her and Mrs. Mary taken last spring in the park. She stood them up and looked at them for a moment.

Then she went to eat dinner with her husband.

He'd made pasta. Simple, good, the kind of thing that required actual cooking rather than assembly. She sat at the kitchen island rather than the dining table, which was too formal for two people pretending to be casual, and he sat across from her, and they ate.

It should have been awkward. It wasn't, particularly, which was almost more unsettling. The quiet between them had the quality she recognized from long work days when neither of them needed to fill silence to feel comfortable in it. She'd always thought that was a professional thing, something about two people who understood efficiency. Sitting in his kitchen she was less sure.

"The food is good," she said.

"It's pasta."

"It's good pasta."

He looked at her briefly over his wine glass. "My grandfather taught me. He believed cooking was a necessary skill regardless of circumstances. He was very certain about what constituted necessary skills."

"What were the others?"

"A proper handshake. And knowing when someone was lying to you." He set the glass down. "He said those three things were all a man needed."

She thought about that. "He sounds like he had opinions."

"He had opinions about everything." A pause. "Most of them turned out to be right, which made him difficult to argue with."

"Where did he learn them?"

"From his own father, mostly. And from losing everything twice and having to rebuild." He looked at his plate. "He said the second time was easier because he knew which things were actually worth keeping."

She filed that away. Not for the estate interview, though it was exactly the kind of thing Marcus Webb would want to know. Just because it was the first real thing Eric had told her, offered without prompting, and it felt like something worth holding carefully.

They cleaned up together after, falling into a side-by-side rhythm at the kitchen sink that neither of them planned. He washed, she dried. It was so ordinary it almost made her laugh. A billionaire CEO and his fake wife doing dishes in a penthouse kitchen like any two people sharing a space.

"Goodnight," she said, at ten o'clock.

"Goodnight." He was already moving toward his wing, loosening his tie. "If the bed's uncomfortable there's another set of pillows in the hall closet."

"I'll be fine."

She went to her room. Lay in the unfamiliar dark listening to a city that was never fully quiet. She counted the steps she'd taken from the kitchen to her bedroom door, then counted them back, a route she was going to have to learn by feel.

Forty-three seconds in the elevator. Forty-one steps from the kitchen to her door.

She was going to have to stop counting things.

She didn't sleep for a long time.