Serena's POV
Seventeen steps from the revolving door to the elevators.
I know because I counted them three years ago, in a different life, in a different pair of shoes.
Today there are still seventeen.
Some things don't change. Marble doesn't change. Hale Tower doesn't change, with its gold letters over the lobby and its security desk like an altar.
Only I have changed.
I tug the silk scarf higher on my neck and walk.
One.
Two.
Three.
My heels sound like someone else's. They should. Everything about me belongs to someone else now. The red hair. The cheekbone Dr Pelletier rebuilt from a CT scan and a stubborn prayer. The voice, a smoky rasp I still flinch at when I hear it.
Vera Lowell, thirty-four, born in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Vera Lowell has never been to this building.
Vera Lowell has never loved anyone who lives on the sixty-first floor.
Eleven.
Twelve.
I breathe in. Polish and cold air-conditioning and money. It smells exactly the same.
Fifteen.
Sixteen.
"Watch out!"
A man comes through the side door at speed, head down, phone at his ear, and the world hits me from the left.
Paper cups. Both of them. The lid of mine pops and a wave of hot coffee goes straight down his shirt.
"Damn it."
A hand closes around my arm to steady me.
And I stop breathing.
I know that hand.
I know the long fingers and the scar on the knuckle where he caught it on a boat cleat the summer we met. I know the heat that comes through cotton. I know it the way you know your own front door in the dark.
Three years.
I don't look up.
I can't.
"I'm so sorry," says a voice above me. Low. Dry. A little rough at the edges, like it hasn't been used for anything kind in a long time. "That was entirely my fault. Are you hurt?"
My husband.
My husband is asking if I am hurt.
"No," I say, and my own rasp is the best thing that has ever happened to me. "No, I'm fine."
"Your coffee."
"Your shirt."
A pause.
I make myself raise my eyes.
Dominic Hale looks down at me from a foot away.
He has lost weight. There are two lines beside his mouth that were never there. His hair is cut shorter and there's grey at the temples, which is ridiculous, he's thirty-eight. His eyes are the same grey as the sea at six in the morning.
They rest on my face.
One second.
Two.
Three.
I have rehearsed this for eleven hundred nights. I have imagined every version, in hospital beds, in a rented fisherman's cottage, in front of a mirror that showed a stranger.
In none of them did he stop moving like this.
"You're bleeding," he says.
I look down. A smear of red on my hand where the broken lid has nicked my thumb. Nothing.
"It's a scratch."
"Marcus." He doesn't turn his head. A man in a dark suit materialises from the security desk like he was poured there. "A first-aid kit, please. And someone to bring Ms..."
"Lowell."
"Ms Lowell," he repeats.
He says my false name slowly. As if he's testing the weight of it.
I smile the smile of a woman with nothing to hide.
"Really, it's nothing. I have an appointment on sixty-one. Nine fifteen."
"With whom?"
"Mr Hale. For the chief of staff position."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. Something that wants to be one.
"You're early," he says.
"You're wet."
"I am." He looks at his ruined shirt with something like wonder. "Marcus, cancel my nine o'clock. Have my spare shirt brought up. Ms Lowell, you'll ride with me."
"Mr Hale, I don't want to..."
"I'm Dominic Hale," he says. "You're the third candidate who has turned up and the first who didn't look at my face for a reaction." The grey eyes don't leave mine. "I'd like to know why."
Because I'm afraid, I think.
Because if I look for too long, I will say your name.
"I looked at the coffee," I say. "I was mourning it."
This time the smile arrives.
It's small. It's crooked. It's the one I fell in love with at a charity auction in Newport, when he outbid himself for a painting of mine because he couldn't bear to lose.
It's gone almost at once.
"Seventeen," he says to nobody.
"I'm sorry?"
"Nothing. The steps to the elevator." He shakes his head. "Stupid habit. Come."
I follow him.
The elevator doors open and I step in beside my husband.
Beside the man who was never charged.
Beside the man whose name was in every newspaper for a month. THE WIDOWER. THE BILLIONAIRE WHO LET HIS WIFE BURN.
I was drifting on a hatch cover somewhere off Vinalhaven when the first of those headlines was printed.
I have never been sure what I believe.
That's the truth I don't tell anyone. Not Odile, not Ruth. Not the mirror.
Somebody put a bomb under my feet on the fourteenth of October. Four people knew where I'd be sitting.
My husband was one of them.
The doors close.
The silence is thick as wool.
"Sixty-one," he says to the panel, and presses it with his thumb.
I watch his reflection in the brushed steel.
He watches mine.
***
"Tell me about yourself, Ms Lowell."
His office hasn't changed, either. Glass on three sides. A glass desk. The model of the Halcyon, the first Hale ship, on a plinth. The photograph of his father on the credenza.
The photograph of me is gone.
There used to be one by the lamp. Me at Windward in an old cardigan with paint on my cheek, laughing at whoever held the camera.
There's a pen holder there now.
I tell him the story Odile and I built in a London hotel room. Eight years at a Toronto shipping finance firm. An MBA at McGill. A restructuring in Rotterdam. Two managing directors who will swear I'm the best chief of staff they ever had.
He listens without writing a word.
He has changed his shirt and his tie is slightly crooked. Dominic is never crooked.
"You left Toronto abruptly," he says.
"My mother was ill."
"I'm sorry. How is she now?"
"She died in March."
He nods once. Slowly.
"I lost someone, too," he says.
My heart does something stupid.
"I know," I say. "I read about it."
"Everyone read about it." He looks at the window. "Do you believe what you read, Ms Lowell?"
It's a trap. It's the gentlest trap in the world.
"I believe the first headline is usually wrong," I say. "And the second is usually worse."
He turns his head.
His eyes are very still.
"The previous chief of staff left me with a mess," he says. "Lisbon. The port bonds. Half the board wants me gone. Someone is buying my debt very quietly and I can't find out who."
I don't blink.
Someone is me.
"I can find out," I say.
"Can you?"
"I'm very good at finding things people want hidden."
It's out before I can stop it.
His fingers go still on the desk.
For one second he looks at me not like a boss, not like a stranger.
He looks at me like a man standing at the edge of a cliff, listening.
Then it's gone.
"Start tomorrow," he says. "Seven o'clock."
"That's all? No references? No second interview?"
"I've had enough interviews." He stands. He offers his hand. "Welcome to Hale Meridian, Ms Lowell."
I take it.
Warm. Dry. Familiar enough to hurt.
I let go first.
"Thank you, Mr Hale."
"Dominic."
"Thank you, Dominic."
I walk to the door. Eight steps. I don't count them aloud.
In the elevator, alone at last, my knees give out. I lean against the steel and press the heel of my hand against my mouth.
My phone buzzes. Odile.
Well?
I type with a shaking thumb.
He hired me. He didn't even blink.
The lobby floor lights up.
The doors open on gold letters and marble and security guards.
Across the lobby, past the security desk, I see him.
Dominic Hale hasn't gone back to his meeting. He has come down the private stair and he is standing at the foot of the elevator bank, one hand flat against his chest.
Not on his heart.
Lower. On something under the shirt.
A chain.
A thin silver chain, and the weight of a ring I gave him in a church in Camden.
Three years.
He never took it off.
I planned for everything.
I did not plan for that.