All Chapters of THE RELUCTANT MRS. ROWE: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

SloaneMy alarm goes off at five. Not that I need it. My body wakes up at 4:58 every single morning like something is wrong. Nothing is wrong. I just forgot how to sleep like a normal person somewhere between my second year of law school and now and I don't think I'm getting it back.By six I'm at my desk. Coffee sitting there getting cold like always. I make it every morning and I forget it every morning and then I drink it cold because I'm not stopping to heat it up. Three case files open. The Alderman deposition is at nine and I've read the prep notes so many times I basically wrote them from memory at this point but I'm reading them again anyway. That's just how I am. That's always been how I am.My phone went off at 6:43.Unknown number. No area code I recognized. I get those sometimes and I almost never pick up. I don't know what made me pick up that one. I wish I hadn't. I really wish I hadn't."Sloane."Just my name. One word.And my whole chest locked up.Eighteen years. Eigh

SloaneI almost cancelled three times.Not because I was scared. I want to be clear about that. I don't scare easily and I wasn't about to start over a meeting with a man in a suit no matter how expensive the building he worked in was. I almost cancelled because every time I looked at my calendar and saw Rowe Industries pencilled in for Thursday at two I felt this thing in my chest that I didn't have a clean name for and I didn't like feeling things I couldn't name.I went anyway.The building was on Fifth. Of course it was. Forty something floors of dark glass and clean lines that didn't try to impress you because it didn't have to. The kind of building that just existed with complete confidence in itself. I stood outside it for about four seconds longer than I needed to and then I walked in.The lobby was marble and quiet. The woman at the front desk knew my name before I said it. That bothered me more than it probably should have. I gave her my ID. She gave me a visitor badge. An a

SloaneThe dress arrived on Wednesday.No note with it. Just a black box with a card that said Calloway dinner, Friday, 7PM and inside the box a dress that was somehow exactly the right thing without anyone having asked me what the right thing was.I stood in my new bedroom in my new temporary life and held it up and thought about the fact that Beckett Rowe knew my size without asking and decided that was a thing I was going to file away and deal with later.I had a lot of things in that file at this point.Friday came fast.The car arrived at 6:40. Beckett was already in the lobby when I came down. Dark suit. No tie again. He looked at me when the elevator opened and something moved across his face so quickly I almost missed it.Almost."You look good," he said. Flat and factual like he was reading from a document."You knew my size," I said."I told you. I make it my business to understand the situations of people I work with.""There's a line between thorough and unsettling.""I'll

SloaneI didn't sleep.Not even close.I lay in the bedroom that had started feeling less like a guest room and more like mine over the past two weeks and I stared at the ceiling and thought about everything Beckett told me at breakfast and tried to find the angle where it made sense in a way I could live with.I couldn't find it.Phillip Strand had been in my firm for four years. Four years of sitting three offices down from me. Four years of partner meetings and case reviews and corridor conversations and him looking at me across conference tables with that particular expression I had always read as mild condescension.It wasn't condescension.It was management.He had been managing me. Watching me. Making sure I stayed exactly where he needed me to stay so that when the moment came he could use me the way he had always planned to use me.I got up at five.Not because I had somewhere to be. Just because lying down felt wrong. Like my body understood that this was not a situation you

SloaneI noticed things about him.I had been noticing things about him since the first night and I had been filing them away in the part of my brain that I used for information I was not ready to do anything with yet. The part where I put things that complicated the clean version of a situation I needed to stay clean.The file was getting full.He drank his coffee black and too hot. Always. The kind of hot that should be uncomfortable but he never seemed to notice. He worked until at least midnight every night but he was always up before me in the morning which meant he was sleeping maybe five hours and doing it consistently enough that it was clearly just how he operated.He read physical books. Not many people did that anymore. He had three going at any one time, all of them left open face down in different rooms of the penthouse the way you do when you are reading in fragments between other things. I had looked at the spines without meaning to. History mostly. One biography. Nothi