Chapter 4: The Fifty-Eighth Floor

By Thursday afternoon, I had applied for thirty-one jobs and been rejected by nineteen of them.

The other twelve hadn’t bothered to reply. Two recruiters I’d worked with for years let my calls go to voicemail. One of them, a man I’d once covered for when he missed a client deadline, finally texted me back on Wednesday night: Word is the Brennan & Cole layoffs on your floor were flagged as performance cuts. Sorry, Ivy. Nobody wants to touch it right now.

Performance cuts. I’d been the top analyst on my floor two years running.

On Wednesday I sold my grandmother’s gold bracelet to a pawnbroker who offered me a third of what it was worth and smirked when I took it. That got me to eleven hundred dollars. I still needed eight hundred more by Friday, and I’d have sold a kidney if Mrs. Delgado had accepted organs.

She didn’t accept excuses either. On Thursday morning I found a printed notice taped to my door, right at eye level where every neighbor walking past could read it: Rent due in full Friday 5 p.m. No exceptions. Failure to pay will result in immediate eviction proceedings. Someone had underlined immediate twice in red pen. The woman across the hall, who’d borrowed my vacuum cleaner a dozen times and never once returned it clean, opened her door while I was peeling it off, took a long look, and closed it again without a word.

I stood in the hallway holding that piece of paper and did the math I’d been avoiding all week. If I lost this apartment, I had nowhere to go. My mother would take me in only after she’d made me beg, and then she’d make me call Jordan.

Then, at four o’clock on Thursday, my phone rang with a number I didn’t know.

“Miss Monroe? This is Ashcroft Holdings, Human Resources. We’d like you to come in for an interview tomorrow morning at nine. Executive analyst position, fifty-eighth floor.”

I laughed out loud. “Is this a joke?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Your company laid me off on Monday.”

“I’m aware. Nine o’clock. Please bring identification.” She hung up before I could ask a single question.

I lay on my mattress for an hour, staring at the ceiling. It had to be him. Either he wanted to humiliate me for the money on his nightstand, or he wanted to make sure I’d keep my mouth shut about the night his daughter’s new boyfriend’s ex ended up in his bed. Neither option ended well for me.

But the position was real, and so was the rent.

I ironed my best blouse, the cream one with the small pearl buttons, and squeezed into the navy pencil skirt that hugged my hips and made me stand up straighter. I pinned my curls back, put on the red lipstick my mother hated, and stayed in front of the bathroom mirror until I looked like someone who hadn’t cried in the shower that morning.

Ashcroft Tower rose out of the financial district in glass and steel, so tall I had to tilt my head back on the sidewalk to see the top of it. The lobby was white marble, with a waterfall running down one wall. I walked up to the front desk with my ID in my hand and my heart in my throat.

“Ivy Monroe. I have a nine o’clock interview on the fifty-eighth floor.”

The receptionist was a girl with perfect brows and a headset. She typed my name, frowned, and typed it again. “I don’t have you.”

“HR called me yesterday. Executive analyst.”

“I don’t have you,” she repeated, louder, as though I were hard of hearing.

“Ivy?”

I knew the voice before I turned. Jordan was crossing the lobby in a navy suit that fit him better than anything he’d ever owned, with a lanyard around his neck that said Ashcroft Holdings in gold letters. Sienna walked beside him with her arm through his, dressed in white, her sunglasses pushed up into her blonde hair.

Jordan’s face went pale, then red. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I have an interview.”

“An interview.” Sienna laughed, and the sound carried across the whole lobby. Two men by the elevators turned to look. “Babe, your ex is stalking you. At your job. In your first month.” She turned to the receptionist. “Call security. She’s not supposed to be here.”

“I have an appointment,” I said. “Check with HR.”

“She doesn’t,” the receptionist said quickly. “I already checked.” She picked up her phone. “Security to the front desk, please.”

Jordan stepped closer and lowered his voice so only I could hear him. “This is pathetic, Ivy. Even for you. If you want to embarrass yourself, do it somewhere that isn’t my office.”

“Your office?” I looked at him, at the gold lanyard and the new suit. “You’ve worked here six weeks?”

“And you’ve been unemployed for four days. Funny how that works.” He smiled, the same smile he used to give waiters when he sent his food back. “Go home and pay your rent. Oh, wait.”

Sienna snorted.

Two guards were already walking toward me, big men in black jackets with earpieces. One of them reached for my elbow. Everyone in the lobby was watching: the men by the elevators, a woman behind a coffee cart, a cluster of interns who’d already pulled out their phones. My face burned, and I felt the old urge to make myself small and quiet and apologize my way out the door.

I pulled my elbow free. “Don’t touch me. I’m leaving.”

“Miss Monroe.”

The voice came from behind the guards. A thin man in a three-piece suit had stepped out of a private elevator at the far end of the lobby, and everyone seemed to know him, because the guards backed away at once and the receptionist half rose from her chair.

“Mr. Graves,” she said. “I’m so sorry, this woman doesn’t have an appointment, and Miss Ashcroft asked…”

“She has an appointment.” He didn’t look at the receptionist, and he didn’t look at Sienna or Jordan either. He looked at me. “Mr. Ashcroft has been waiting for eleven minutes, Miss Monroe. He doesn’t usually wait. This way, please.”

Sienna’s mouth fell open. “Dad’s seeing her? Why would my dad see her?”

Mr. Graves walked past her as if she were a potted plant.

The private elevator was all brushed steel and smoked glass, and it climbed so fast my ears popped. Mr. Graves stood with his hands folded and said nothing at all. The numbers kept rising. Forty. Fifty. Fifty-six. My palms were damp, and I wiped them on my skirt and immediately regretted it, because now there were marks.

The doors opened onto a corner office with windows on two sides and the whole of South Valley spread out below.

He was standing at the window with his back to me, jacket off and sleeves rolled to the elbow over forearms I remembered far too well. He turned around when the doors closed behind me.

On the black desk between us, pinned under a glass paperweight, lay two twenties, a ten, and a torn scrap of notepaper in my handwriting.

“Miss Monroe,” Lucien Ashcroft said. “Sit down. You left before I could give you your change.”