Chapter 2 — The Woman Who Smiled Like That

I was halfway through the Calloway file when my phone buzzed against the desk.

Selena. 10:14 AM. "I'm downstairs. Let me up, I want to see where you work."

I stared at the message for a second longer than it deserved. Selena did not "want to see where I worked." Selena wanted to see Damien Hart's name on the door and decide what to do with that information. But refusing her would require an explanation I did not have the energy to give on a Tuesday morning, so I texted security to let her through and went back to the file with the particular tightness in my shoulders that Selena's name always produced.

She arrived eleven minutes later, trailing the faint, expensive scent she always wore, in a coat that cost more than my monthly rent.

"This is nice," she said, looking around. "Very expensive. Very powerful."

"It's an office, Selena."

"Everything is something, Nadia." She wandered toward the window, trailing one finger along the back of a chair that belonged to a junior analyst who was thankfully at lunch. "I was in the area. I thought I would come see the famous job you never talk about."

"I talk about it."

"You talk around it." She picked up a framed photo from someone else's desk, studied it without real interest, and put it back slightly crooked. "Is this the floor he's on?"

"Whose floor?"

"Nadia." She smiled. "Don't."

I did not answer that, which was its own kind of answer, and went back to my screen while she drifted around the open floor with the unhurried confidence of someone who had never once in her life worried about being asked to leave. She looked at the framed company values on the wall. She looked at the view. She asked one of the junior associates where the bathroom was in a voice pitched exactly loud enough for me to hear how friendly she was being.

She was still there ten minutes later when the lift opened, and Eleanor Hart stepped out.

I felt my stomach drop in the specific way it always did when Eleanor appeared unannounced, not because she was unkind, but because she noticed everything, and Selena, standing in the middle of the office in a coat that did not belong there, was exactly the kind of thing Eleanor noticed.

"Oh," Eleanor said, delighted, crossing toward us before I could intercept her. "A guest. How lovely."

"Selena," I said. "My stepsister."

"Eleanor Hart." She extended a hand, warm and immediate, the kind of warmth that made strangers like her within ten seconds. Her eyes moved over Selena's coat, her bag, her shoes, with the quick assessing glance of a woman who had spent forty years in fashion rooms and missed nothing. Then her gaze landed on me — on the blouse I was wearing, specifically, the navy one with the hand-finished collar I'd stitched myself over three nights the previous month.

"Nadia," Eleanor said slowly, "did you make that?"

"It's nothing. A pattern I adjusted"

"It is nothing. That collar." She touched the seam at my shoulder with two fingers, the way you'd touch something in a museum. "Where did you learn to finish a collar like this?"

"I taught myself. Mostly."

Eleanor looked at me for a long moment, the kind of look that made me distinctly uncomfortable, like she'd just found something she intended to keep.

"We are going to talk," she said. "Properly. Soon." She squeezed my arm once and swept off toward the executive floor, already reaching for her phone.

Selena watched her go.

"She likes you," she said.

Her smile stayed in place, but something flickered behind her eyes. Envy, quick and unmistakable, gone almost before I could name it. Selena had spent her whole life chasing rooms like this and people like Eleanor Hart, the right introductions, the right warmth, the right kind of attention. Somehow, without trying, without even wanting to, I already belonged here.

I don't think she forgave me for that as quickly as she pretended to.

Richard Hall found us about twenty minutes after that, Damien's father, semi-retired but still in the building three days a week, out of what Damien called an inability to stay away from his own company.

"So you're the famous Selena," he said, shaking her hand with his easy charm. "Your work wife has been talking about you all morning." He nodded toward the lifts. "Eleanor gets like this when she finds hidden talent. Fair warning, she will not let it go."

"Hidden talent," Selena repeated, looking at me with new interest, the kind I liked considerably less than her earlier disinterest.

"Apparently, why I'm the last person on this floor to find out my own assistant can sew," Richard said, delighted, and excused himself toward his office.

Selena waited until he was gone before turning back to me, her smile shifting into something quieter, something with a little more edge underneath it.

"You never mentioned any of that," she said lightly. "It's interesting, that's all. You've been here three years,s and I'm only finding out now."

I did not have a response for that which would not start a longer conversation, so I said nothing, which Selena correctly read as the closest thing to a victory she was going to get.

It was Damien's office door opening that ended the conversation entirely.

He stepped out with his phone in one hand, already mid-sentence before he'd fully cleared the doorway. "Nadia the Calloway contract, the indemnity clause in section four—"

He looked up.

He looked at Selena.

A brief, polite nod. "Nadia's sister?"

"Stepsister," I said.

"A pleasure, Mr. Hart." Selena's voice had dropped half a register, warmer, the version of herself she kept for rooms she wanted to matter in.

He nodded once.

Then his eyes moved to me. Completely.

"The Calloway contract," he said. "Do you have the revised copy?"

I blinked. "Almost finished."

"Good."

And that was it. No second glance at Selena. No interest. Nothing. He was already turning, already three steps back toward his office, already somewhere else entirely.

I didn't think anything of it in the moment. I would think about it a great deal later.

But beside me, I felt Selena go very still. Just for a second. The particular stillness of someone who is not used to being looked through.

She left not long after that, kissing my cheek at the lift, telling me she'd had a wonderful time and that we should do this more often.

At the doors, she paused.

"Wear something pretty, Nadia," she said, smiling. "Friday is going to be interesting." She held my eyes a second longer than the sentence required. "You never know whose attention you might catch."

The lift doors closed before I could decide whether that had been a warning or an invitation, and I stood there for a moment with the particular cold feeling I always got after a conversation with Selena, the sense of having lost a game I hadn't known I was playing.

I went back to my desk. I finished the red line. I told myself, the way I always did, that I was imagining things, that Selena said dramatic things for sport, and none of it ever meant anything.

I didn't know it then, but the moment Selena stepped onto this floor, my life had already begun to change.

And by the end of Friday night, she would take the first thing that had ever truly been mine.