The Man I Should Have Hated

The dress was the wrong color.

I knew it that morning but wore it anyway. Elliot had bought it — pale cream, buttons down the back I couldn't reach without contorting myself — and I wore it because that was the kind of thing I did without examining why.

The Aldenmere was the sort of hotel that made you feel underdressed in the lobby just standing still. I'd come early. His text said seven; it was six-fifteen. I had a card in my purse — plain gold border, nothing printed inside, bought three weeks ago because I'd been saving the blank space for the right words. I knew his usual table. Knew he'd want the Oban, neat, no ice. Knew he'd be tired from the Thursday meetings and would rub the bridge of his nose before he even sat down.

I thought I knew him. That was the whole problem.

I turned the corner on the fourth floor and stopped.

Elliot was outside Room 408 with a key card in his hand and a woman at his side whose laugh I could hear from twelve feet away — low, unhurried, the laugh of someone already inside a story she'd written the ending of. His hand was at the back of his neck. I recognized the gesture the way you recognize a word in a language you didn't know you'd learned.

He looked up.

He didn't look shocked. That was the part that stayed with me later, in the cab home with my shoes off and the window cracked. His face simply moved through its options — I watched it happen, quick and almost imperceptible — and what he selected was a kind of measured sorrow. Gentle. As if he were the injured party and was being very reasonable about it.

"Nora," he said.

Just that. My name, flat, like a door closing.

I walked back to the elevator. The lobby marble was very cold-looking. Someone at the concierge desk was laughing at something on the phone and the sound came to me strangely, like noise through a wall.

Outside, the wind off the river cut straight through the cream dress. I was standing in front of a closed pharmacy before I realized I still had the card. I opened it. Looked at the blank inside — all that space I'd been saving.

I dropped it in the bin on the corner and sat on the low wall and pressed my palms flat against the cold stone and breathed.

My phone rang.

Not Elliot.

I didn't recognize the number. For a moment I just watched it ring, the screen lighting up against the dark, and then I answered because I had nothing left to protect.

"Miss Nora Voss?" The voice was measured. Clipped. The kind of voice that belonged to a person who read documents for a living.

"Yes."

"My name is Mr. Harlan. I represent the Ashford Group." A pause — brief, deliberate. "I'm calling because you've been selected."

The pharmacy sign buzzed once behind me. The wind moved.

"Selected," I said. "For what?"

The pause this time was shorter. As if he'd been waiting for exactly that question.

"To care for our heir."