Page 36
Sophia
Aweek after the kiss, Dominic calls me into a meeting about the Pilsen subcontractor accounts.
It’s a legitimate meeting. Patricia is there, and Gregor, and two other people from finance whose names I keep forgetting because they have the collective personality of beige wallpaper. We sit around the conference table on thirty-nine and review cost overruns on a foundation pour that went sideways due to an early frost. The numbers are straightforward. The discussion is routine. There is absolutely no reason for my pulse to be doing what it’s doing.
He’s sitting across from me. Not at the head of the table, where you’d expect the boss to sit. Across from me, directly, so that every time I look up from my laptop I’m looking into gray eyes that haven’t lost the new intensity they’ve been carrying since the night he kissed me.
We haven’t talked about it. We’ve been orbiting each other all week in a careful choreography of avoidance, close enough to feel the pull but far enough to pretend we can’t. He walks past my desk and doesn’t touch me. I ride the elevator and keep my eyes on the numbers above the door. We’re both performing normalcy so aggressively that the performance itself has become a kind of intimacy, a shared secret that everyone in the room can feel but nobody names.
Patricia is explaining the cost variance when I spot the problem.
“The change order on the rebar spec doesn’t match the revised engineering report,” I say. “The report calls for number eight bar at sixteen-inch spacing, but the change order your subcontractor submitted is billing for number six at twelve-inch. That’s less material at a higher line-item cost. He’s either overbilling or he submitted the wrong spec.”
The room goes quiet. Patricia looks at Gregor. Gregor looks at his laptop. Dominic looks at me, and the corner of his mouth moves by approximately one millimeter.
“You caught that in real time?” he says.
“It’s a variance analysis. That’s literally what you hired me to do.”
“I hired you to reconcile accounts.”
“Reconciling accounts is what you told Patricia to keep me busy with. Variance analysis is what I do when I’m actually working.”
Another millimeter. Not quite a smile, but the hint of one, and his eyes are warm in a way that makes my chest tighten.
“So you’ve been doing unauthorized work on company time.”
“I’ve been doing the work that needed doing. Whether or not anyone authorized it is a management problem, not a performance problem.”
Gregor makes a sound like a man who just swallowed his own tongue. Patricia’s pen stops moving. The two beige colleagues are staring at their laptops with the rigid focus of people who wish they were in a different room.
Dominic leans back in his chair. He looks at me the way he looked at me the night he showed up at my apartment, with that dangerous, appraising attention that makes me feel simultaneously seen and hunted.
“You’re suggesting my management is the problem.”
“I’m suggesting that if you’re going to put a financial analyst in your finance department, you should let her analyze. Unless the reconciliation work is serving a purpose I’m not aware of.”
I hold his gaze when I say it. The subtext is deliberate: I know the reconciliation work is busywork designed to keep me occupied. I know the real financial architecture of this company is being kept from me. I know he knows I know, and I’m telling him to his face, in a room full of people, without flinching.
His eyes narrow slightly. Not in anger. In pleasure. The bastard is enjoying this.
“Gregor,” he says, without looking away from me. “Pull the subcontractor’s change order history for the past six months. Run it against the engineering specs Ms. Marchelli identified. If there’s a pattern, I want it on my desk by end of day.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Patricia.” Now he looks away from me, finally, and I feel the release of his attention like stepping out of a spotlight. “Expand Ms. Marchelli’s access to include project-level cost reporting. She’s right. We’re underutilizing her.”
Patricia nods. Her expression says she has opinions about this that she’ll be sharing with no one.
The meeting ends. People file out. I’m closing my laptop when his voice stops me.
“Sophia.”
I look up. We’re the last two in the room. The door is still open, the hallway visible beyond it, people moving past in the normal rhythm of a workday. Nothing private about this moment except the way he’s looking at me.
“That was a good catch,” he says.
“I know.”
