Strangers

Jade

I told myself I had forgotten about it by Monday.

I told myself that on Saturday morning when I woke up earlier than my alarm and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling. I told myself that on Sunday when I worked through the spring collection notes I had used as an excuse to leave the dinner and found I could not concentrate on a single line of them. By Monday I had told myself enough times that the telling had started to feel like a full-time job.

I got up at six, made coffee, and was at the Ellis Noir showroom on West 14th by seven fifteen. The space was mine in a way that nothing else was. I had signed the lease on it two years ago with hands that shook slightly from the weight of the number, and I had filled it slowly and with every version of the work I believed in. Fabric samples and mood boards and the particular organized chaos of a creative space that was actually being used. Walking into it in the early morning before anyone else arrived was the closest thing I had to a reset.

I spread the spring collection samples across the center table and got to work.

By nine the rest of the team had filtered in. By ten I had worked my way through most of what needed my attention, and the events of Friday night had receded to a manageable distance. Not gone. But manageable.

Then my phone rang.

It was my agent, Dana. “I heard back from the Calloway Group this morning,” she said. “They want to schedule a follow-up meeting. Apparently someone on the panel was impressed.”

I set down the fabric swatch in my hand. “When?”

“They’re proposing Wednesday. Eleven o’clock. Their offices.”

I stood at my worktable and looked at nothing specific for a moment. The Calloway Group. Forty-two floors above Midtown. A follow-up meeting that, before Friday, would have been considered the single most important professional development of the year.

“Confirm it,” I said.

I went to the Calloway building Tuesday afternoon to drop off the supplementary materials. Dana had suggested I bring in advance of the Wednesday meeting. A portfolio addendum. Fabric swatches. The kind of physical materials that did not translate well over email and that I wanted the panel to have time to review before I sat across from them again.

The lobby of the Meridian Tower was the kind of space designed to communicate one thing very clearly. That whatever you had come here to ask for, the people upstairs already had more of it than you could imagine. Marble floors. Ceilings that went up four stories. A reception desk that ran the length of a tennis court staffed by people who looked like they had been selected for their ability to appear both welcoming and quietly intimidating at the same time.

I crossed to the reception desk and gave my name and the name of the assistant I had been corresponding with. The receptionist made a call. I waited, my portfolio case in one hand, my coat folded over my arm.

The elevator bank was to my left. I heard the soft chime of one opening.

I glanced over out of habit, and Hayes walked out.

He was mid-conversation, his phone at his ear, his stride the same unhurried and purposeful thing it always was. He had his jacket on and his sleeves were down, and he looked like someone who had been in important rooms all day and would be in important rooms for the rest of it.

He was walking directly toward the lobby exit. Directly toward me.

I turned back to the reception desk and kept my face forward and my expression neutral, and I breathed through it the way I had been breathing through things for three years.

He was going to walk past me. He was going to walk past me the way he had walked past me at the dinner table at Ardsley, with the same level of awareness he gave furniture, and I was going to stand here and let him and then go upstairs and drop off my materials and leave.

His footsteps were close now.

I kept my eyes on the receptionist who was still on her call.

Then Hayes stopped.

Not because of me. His phone conversation had shifted, something in his voice changing register, and he had stopped two feet away from me to deal with it. I felt the proximity of him the way you feel a change in temperature. I did not turn my head.

“Push it to four,” he said into the phone. A pause. “No. Four. Tell Marcus I’ll call him after.”

He was standing close enough that if I had extended my arm, I could have touched his sleeve. Standing close enough that I was completely within his peripheral vision with nothing between us.

I kept my eyes forward.

The receptionist finished her call and looked up at me with a professional smile. “Ms. Ellis, I can take those materials up for you if you’d like.”

“Thank you.” I set the portfolio case on the desk and slid it toward her.

The sound of my voice was apparently enough. Hayes turned his head.

His eyes moved to my face with the same mild, assessing look he gave everything in his environment that required brief acknowledgment. I looked back at him because I had no other option available to me.

For two full seconds we looked at each other.

His expression did not change. Not a flicker of recognition. Not a single adjustment in his face that suggested the woman standing two feet from him meant anything beyond a stranger in the lobby of his building.

“Ms. Ellis,” he said. His voice carried the faint recognition of someone placing a name they had heard recently on a face. The designer. The Ellis Noir follow-up. Nothing more than that.

“Mr. Calloway,” I said.

My voice came out clean and even, and I was proud of it in the small private way you are proud of things nobody else can see.

He nodded once and walked past me toward the exit.

I turned back to the receptionist and finished the handoff of my materials with complete composure. I signed the receipt she slid across the desk. I thanked her. I picked up my coat.

I walked to the elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor and stepped in and let the doors close.

Then I pressed my back against the elevator wall and stared at the ceiling and breathed out slowly.

Ms. Ellis.

Not Jade. Not the girl from the gala. Not someone he had followed into a corridor and offered a number on a phone screen to make disappear.

Just Ms. Ellis. A name connected to a file on his desk.

That was all I was to him.

I had known that. I had known it since the corridor three years ago and confirmed it every moment since. But standing two feet from Hayes Calloway and watching him look at my face with the pleasant, empty recognition he would give any stranger was its own specific kind of education.

The elevator doors opened.

I walked out into the afternoon and did not stop walking until I reached the end of the block.