Chapter Seven

Isolde's POV

I thought the hardest part of my new job would be learning how to work. I was wrong. The hardest part was learning how not to be sick in front of people.

By my third morning, I had figured out the schedule of my own stomach. Eight twenty, when the smell of coffee drifted from the pantry down the hall. Nine thirty, after I'd eaten a dry cracker I kept in my handbag. Eleven, when the elevator filled with perfume and I had to count the floor numbers to stay calm. I had found the fourth floor ladies' room, which was never busy, and I had a small bottle of mouthwash in my drawer and a smile I could put on in ten seconds.

Nobody knew. That was the plan.

The rest of the floor made it clear what they thought of me. I heard it in the way conversations dropped when I walked past the break room. I heard it in the voice of a woman named Celeste from accounting, who looked at my second hand sandals and said, "Oh, you're the new girl. The boss's charity case."

"I'm the new secretary," I said.

"Mm. Of course you are."

She walked off, and I stood at the copy machine with a stack of pages and felt my chin start to shake. I thought about Saffron's mother. I thought about the dining room, the long polished table, her voice saying, Isolde, dear, do you always hold your fork like that? I thought, I survived five years of that. I can survive a copy machine.

I made fourteen mistakes in my first week. I sent a contract to the wrong department. I booked a car for Mr. Knight at the wrong airport terminal, and Marcus Hale came to my desk and said, very pleasantly, that if I did it again, I would be reassigned to the mailroom. I learned the phone system by pressing every button until it stopped screaming. I stayed until nine at night, then ten, then past ten, printing the diagrams that Marcus had given me and tracing the names of the departments with my finger until I knew them by heart.

Dacre Knight said almost nothing.

That was the strange part. He stood in his glass office with his hands in his pockets and watched the floor, and I would feel his eyes on me from across the room, steady, unhurried. He never corrected me. He never criticized. The only way I knew he'd noticed anything was by what changed.

My lunch hour moved from one o'clock to eleven thirty, with a note on my calendar that said Mr. Knight requires the conference room at one. A box of plain crackers appeared in my desk drawer, the exact kind I had been buying. The heavy meeting with the investors, which Marcus had scheduled for ten in the morning, was moved to the afternoon without explanation. On Thursday, the air conditioning on our floor dropped by three degrees, and when a man from facilities came to apologize for the noise, he said he was only following instructions from the top.

"Mr. Knight thinks it's too warm," he explained.

It was not too warm. I was the only one wearing a cardigan.

On the sixth evening, I was the last one on the floor. Everyone else had gone home. I had a pile of letters to file and a headache that pulsed behind my eyes, and I was so tired that I did not hear him come out of his office until his shadow fell across my desk.

"Miss Laurent."

I jumped. A folder slid off my lap and hit the floor, and a hundred loose pages fanned out across the carpet. "Sorry. I'm so sorry."

"Don't." He bent and began picking them up. I knelt too, and for a moment we were reaching for the same page. His hand was warm and large and settled over the paper first. When I looked up he was already looking at me, a little too close, and I saw something in his eyes that was not what I had expected. It wasn't pity. It was recognition.

I took the paper and stood.

"You're here late," he said.

"I wanted to finish the filing."

"It's seven o'clock on a Friday."

"I know."

"Why?"

I looked at him. The question was ordinary. His voice was ordinary. But I had the feeling that he was not really asking about the filing.

"Because I made so many mistakes this week," I said. "I want to be better than the person who made them."

He said nothing. A long, quiet moment passed, and the whole floor hummed with the soft electric noise of an empty office.

"May I ask you something?" I said. I had not planned to. The words came out on their own, the way words do when you're too tired to hold them back.

"Yes."

"The day I interviewed. You said you knew whose wife I was."

"Yes."

"How?"

He straightened. For the first time since I had met him, he looked away from me, to the window, where the city was turning orange and gold. "Five years ago," he said, "I attended a charity dinner. A young woman was working the event. She was carrying a tray of champagne and trying not to spill any. She looked frightened. A man walked past her, tall, very well dressed, and stopped to steady the tray with one hand. He did not say a word. He just looked at her."

My throat tightened.

"I thought it was the best looking thing I'd seen all evening," Dacre said. "And I was not talking about the man."

I couldn't speak.

"I did not know her name. I did not think about her again. Then three weeks ago, a girl in a cream dress with red eyes stood in the lobby of my building, and I knew her at once." He turned back to me. "That is all, Miss Laurent. I did not hire you for the past. I hired you because you looked like someone who needed a door to be open."

I stood there with the file pressed to my chest, my heart hammering in a way that had nothing to do with my stomach.

"Thank you," I said finally.

"Do not thank me. Work. Be better, if you must." There was a trace of something at the corner of his mouth that was almost a smile. "I have a feeling you will be."

He turned to go. I sat down, and a wave of dizziness rolled over me so suddenly that I gripped the desk. The smell of the cleaning solution rose up and hit me and my stomach lurched.

I made it to the ladies' room with a hand clamped over my mouth. I was sick in the stall, quietly, hands shaking against the cold tile. When I came out and washed my face, the girl in the mirror had gray lips and wet lashes.

When I walked back to my desk, there was a bottle of water on it. Beside it, a small paper bag. Inside was a packet of ginger tea and one clean white handkerchief.

Dacre was standing at the elevator with his back to me.

"Eat something, Miss Laurent," he said, without turning. "You do not have to hide from me."

The elevator opened. He stepped inside, and the doors slid shut, and I stood in the empty office with the ginger tea in my hands, realizing that he knew.