Page 39

The staff door opens at 12:40 a.m. and my heart stops.

I've been sitting at table four in the dark for forty minutes. The cleaning crew finished at midnight. Matteo left at 12:15 and on his way out he looked at me, looked at the staff door, and said "Good luck, boss," which is the first time in four years he's called me boss without sarcasm. Then it was just me, a whiskey I stopped drinking at the first sip, and a room full of empty chairs and candle smoke.

Forty minutes of running the conversation in my head. What I'd say. How I'd explain Hargrove, the journalist, Aries, the thing I set in motion this morning. Forty minutes of drafts.

Then Anna walks out of the staff door in jeans and that gray sweater with the hole in the cuff, and every draft I wrote dies on the spot.

She crosses the floor. The amber security lights are the only thing on, and they catch her the way the candles caught her at the Gala — warm, gold at the edges. She stops on the other side of my table and pulls out the chair across from me.

"Hi," she says.

"Hi."

“You’ve been lurking in the dark like a gargoyle, I hear.”

"Ahh, Evie talked to you."

"Of course she did." She folds her hands on the table. "You said we need to talk about the journalist. So talk."

So much for drafts. Fine. Direct. She deserves direct.

"The journalist got your name and address from a private investigator. The investigator was hired by Philip Hargrove." I watch her wince at the name. "He couldn't touch you in person, so he decided to reach you another way. Feed a reporter the story. Make you the headline. Hurt you, hurt me, hurt the club. Three birds."

"That's insane. I'm a waitress. He grabbed my wrist and got banned, that's — people don't burn money on revenge over that."

"People like Hargrove don't process being told no. He's spent sixty years buying his way out of consequences. I gave him one he couldn't buy back, so he went looking for a way to return it." I turn my glass a quarter turn. Stop myself. Put my hands flat on the table. "Yesterday morning I called a man named Aries Pierce."

"The one Matteo calls 'the scary but hot lawyer?'"

I stifle a laugh. "That's him. I told him to take Hargrove apart. Boards, investments, club memberships, social standing. Everything. It's already done. Aries finished at noon today. The man is figuratively dead. No door in this city will open for him again."

She's quiet. he club hums around us—the fridges under the bar, the building settling.

"And the journalist?"

“Has no story anymore. Aries made the calls. It’s dead.”

"You destroyed a man's life today. While I was eating cereal over my sink."

"I did."

"For me?"

"I’d do anything for you, so yeah I did this for you."

She looks at me for a long moment. I can't read her face and it's killing me. I built a fortune on reading people, yet this woman in a holey sweater is a locked door.

"I need you to hear something," she says, slowly.

I shut up.

"I'm not upset that you protected me. I'm — honestly, some prehistoric part of my brain thinks it's hot, we can unpack it later... probably naked." She takes a breath. "What scares me is that you did it before breakfast and didn't tell me until midnight. You decided. Alone. The way you decide everything alone. And I can't — Danny, I can't be another thing you manage. Another system. I can't find out about my own life secondhand."

"Aries said the same thing."

"Then Aries is smarter than he is scary, and Matteo says that's very scary." She leans forward. "Here's my offer. You don't handle things for me. You handle them with me. You call me before you call the scary guys. Even if I can't do anything. Even if all I do is say 'okay, go.' I get to be in the room. That's the deal."

"Done. Easiest deal I’ve ever taken.”