Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
I turn my hand over under hers. I grip her fingers. I hold on a moment because I need a moment of someone’s hand in mine before I can say what I’m about to say.
“I’m going to tell him the truth.”
Blythe’s face does two things at once. The first is admiration, bright and fierce, the face of a woman who respects a move even when she thinks it’s suicidal. The second is pity. Deep and real and stripped of the hard shell she wears at the office. The two expressions layer over each other and neither wins.
“He’s not going to believe you,” she tells me.
“I know.”
“He’s been reading people his entire life. He’s built a career on it. An empire. He’s never been wrong.”
“He’s wrong about me.”
Blythe holds my eyes. Then she nods. She squeezes my hand once and lets go and picks up her espresso and drinks it cold and I pick up mine and do the same and it’s bitter and it’s perfect and we sit in the coffee shop a moment longer, two women who started this morning as colleagues and are ending it as something closer, and then I stand up and I leave.
BLYTHE
She let her go.
Through the coffee shop window, past the grey light and the scarred tables and the ceramic cups, Blythe could see Daisy Fletcher walking up the street toward the main road. Small. Straight-backed. Her cardigan pulled tight around her shoulders and her bag gripped in one hand and her chin up, and the chin was the thing that got her, because it was the chin of a girl who had just learned that her aunt sold her and her employer was a front and the man she kissed on a balcony thought she was a transaction, and instead of collapsing she was walking toward his door to tell him he was wrong.
She was going to walk into a lion’s den and tell the lion he’d been reading the menu wrong.
Blythe picked up her phone. The screen lit. She scrolled past the firm’s group chat and the client notifications and the calendar reminders and found a number she hadn’t called in years. She’d kept it. Always kept it, like keeping a fire exit marked even when you’ve convinced yourself you’ll never need to leave the building.
She pressed call.
It rang twice.
“Mum,” Blythe said, and her voice cracked on the single syllable, and the crack surprised her because Blythe didn’t crack. “It’s me.”
DAISY
His building is on the coast road. I know this because Kaye mentioned it once, casually, dropping it into conversation like something she wanted me to file away for later, and I filed it, and I hate that I filed it, and I’m grateful that I filed it, and both of those things are true at the same time.
The lobby is marble and glass and a concierge in a suit who asks my name and speaks into a phone and nods and gestures toward a private lift, and the lift requires a code that the concierge enters for me, and the doors close and I rise through the building and I can see Monaco falling away beneath me through the glass walls, the harbour shrinking, the yachts becoming toys, and I am rising toward the penthouse of a man who thinks I’m a liar and I’m going to tell him the truth and he’s not going to believe me and I’m going anyway.
The doors open.
He’s there. Standing in the hallway. He knew I was coming. The concierge called ahead, or the lift announced me, or he simply knew, because a man who reads people can feel them approaching before they arrive.
He’s in shirtsleeves. The jacket is gone. The tie is gone. His collar is open and his sleeves are rolled to the forearm and he is holding a glass of something amber and his face, when he sees me, does something I’ve never seen.
It opens.
For one second, before the performance slides back, his face opens. Relief and hunger and something frightened all at once, a flash so brief it could be imagined, and then the grey eyes are calm and the half-lift is in place and he is Anton Almazov, the man who reads everyone, standing in his hallway with a drink in his hand.
“Daisy.”
“We need to talk.”
Chapter 7
DAISY
He lets me in.
The penthouse is enormous and dark. Not unlit: there are lamps, low and amber, casting pools of warmth across a space that could hold my entire Idaho apartment many times over, but it carries the darkness of a man who lives alone and prefers it. Leather furniture. A wall of glass overlooking the harbour. A bar cart with a bottle of something expensive and a single glass, recently used.
He walks ahead of me and doesn’t sit. He stands at the window with his back to the view and his drink in his hand and he waits, and the waiting is a performance in itself, because Anton Almazov is a man who controls rooms by standing still in them.