Page 87 of Boardroom Mask

On the screen, Jillian shifts in her sleep and pulls the blanket tighter. I clean myself up with a handful of tissues from the box on my desk and drop them in the wastebasket. Then I buckle my belt, straighten my shirt, and settle back in the chair.

I watch her sleep until morning. The whole time I sit there, one thought goes round and round in my head like an airplane with nowhere to land.

I’m supposed to be the one in control.

… But I’m not in control of a single fucking thing anymore.

Sheis.

34

JILLIAN

“Smile like you mean it / Oh, no, oh, no, no, no”

— “Smile Like You Mean It” by The Killers

Two mornings later, I’m at my desk pretending to read a zoning filing from the Newark site and retaining absolutely none of it. My phone sits next to my keyboard, silent as Elena Lazareva’s grave.

I keep waiting, but nothing comes in. I’m not sure what I expected. Text? Call? Signal message? If not that, then what about a cryptic emoji, a threatening endearment, a handwrittenHello, little foxappearing on my bedside table?

But I’ve gotten none of that. Ever since whatever we’re agreeing to call (or better yet,notcall) the impromptu web-cam show I performed on Wednesday night, it’s been dead air and radio silence.

Did I do something wrong? Did I misunderstand the rules of the game? I feel red-faced and nervous. It was dumb, what I did. Maybe he didn’t watch after all. I’ve just gotten a big head, andembarrassment is what I deserve for stepping over such a stupid and obvious line.

Or maybe he watched every second of it and laughed the whole time. He probably thinks I’m pathetic, like when you see a little kid wearing Mommy’s high heels and pretending she’s the woman of the house now. In his eyes, I was just a desperate girl putting on a mortifying show for a man who couldn’t care less. God, that’s so much worse than him not watching at all.

I flip my phone over. No notifications. I flip it back down and swear to myself that I won’t check again until after lunch.

The thing that’s eating me alive isn’t the silence itself; it’s what the silence is doing to my brain. What a turnaround from Wednesday night. Less than forty-eight hours ago, I felt free and wild and uncaged and in charge. Cut to now, when I’m sitting at my desk, spiraling about whether my masked stalker liked my little striptease enough to text me about it.

“Get it together, Pierce,” I mutter.

Weston glances over the cubicle wall. “You say something?”

“Nope.”

I drag my eyes back to the zoning filing. The words continue to together. I read the same paragraph for the fourth, fourteenth, and fortieth time, but I still couldn’t tell you what it says.

Then, with no warning at all, the energy on the floor changes.

I don’t know how else to describe it. One second, it’s the usual hum of keyboards, low conversation, and someone’s Spotify leaking from shoddy earbuds. Then heads start turning. People sit up straighter and peer over the edges of their cubicles.

I follow the gazes—and my stomach drops through the floor.

Because Kir Lazarev is walking through the newsroom.

He’s in a tan suit with a sky-blue tie, clean-shaven and beautiful. In the corner of my eye, I can see half the women in the office start primping their hair and tugging their outfits into place. Worse yet, Kir is strolling alongside Richard Thornton. As intheRichard Thornton. As in the editor-in-chief of thewhole goddamn paper. My boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. The name at the top of the masthead. Big Kahuna. If we ever crossed paths, I’d be obliged to call himMr. Thorntonand keep my eyes rooted firmly on the floor.

Kir, though, seems perfectly at ease to clap him on the shoulder and say, “Rick, if anyone knew your jokes were half as filthy as they are, you’d be run out of polite society with torches and pitchforks.” Then they both guffaw like old frat bros.

It’s official: I’m spiraling.

The reasons are plenty, each more valid than the last. The subject of my investigation is twenty feet from my desk, a stone’s throw away from the corkboard in the conference room where I’ve pinned a printed photo of Elena Lazareva’s dental chart with a red circle around it. Hell, there’s a notebook sitting open next to my keyboard with his father’s name written in block letters across the top of the page.

But not only is hehere,he always appears to bewelcomehere.

Kir and Thornton make a slow loop through the floor, pausing at desks, shaking hands. Thornton is doing the introducing—“This is Kir Lazarev, CEO of Lazarev Global, one of our most valued advertising partners”—and Kir is doing everything else. He remembers names after hearing them once. He asks follow-up questions. When Thornton introduces him to Cheryl from the culture desk, Kir somehow already knows she wrote a piece on the Met’s new contemporary wing last month. “I read it twice,” he tells her with a solemn look of gratitude. “You made me care about Brutalist architecture, which I didn’t think was possible.” Cheryl turns the color of a ripe tomato and laughs so hard she sneezes.