ONE NIGHT ONE BOSS

Chapter seven

Then she opened a blank document and typed the date at the top and wrote down everything. The file. The pages. The timeline. The fact that Marcus had commented before she’d said a word. She saved it somewhere he couldn’t reach and went back to work. This was the thing about growing up with Lily: you learned to recognize the shape of trouble by wearing a pleasant face. You learned that the people who caused the most damage were rarely the ones who looked like they were causing damage. They looked fine. They looked easy. They smiled.

Sophie had grown up learning to watch for that smile.

She was watching now.

That evening she took the long way home without particularly deciding to. The city was doing its evening thing, people moving in streams, the light going golden and then grey, a man playing something on a saxophone outside the station that was better than it had any right to be. She stood and listened for a moment before she realized she was doing it.

Her phone rang. Her mother.

“Lily isn’t home.” No hello, no preamble, just that, tight and direct, which was how Grace Henry communicated anything she was frightened about.

Sophie stopped walking. “When did she leave?”

“This morning. She said six. It’s past nine.”

“Have you called her?”

“She’s not picking up for me.”

“I’ll try.”

She tried four times walking the rest of the way home. On the fourth, Lily answered with background noise behind her, voice light and unbothered, the particular brightness of someone who had been having a better evening than she was supposed to.

“Soph—”

“Where are you?”

“I’m with people, it’s fine—”

“Lily. Mum’s been waiting since six. Come home.”

A pause. The background shifted. “You’re not actually my—”

“I’m not asking you to answer me. Come home for Mum. Now.”

Silence. Then: “Fine.” And the call ended.

Sophie let herself into the apartment. Her mother was in the kitchen with the television on and a cup of tea that had clearly gone cold, not quite managing to look like she hadn’t been watching the door since six o’clock.

Sophie made fresh tea. Sat down. The city pressed against the windows the way it always did present and massive and not particularly interesting.

Forty minutes later, the door opened and Lily came in trailing noise and energy, jacket half off her shoulders, eyes bright in the way that meant she’d had a very good time and knew someone was going to have opinions about it.

She looked at Sophie.

Something crossed her face, not quite guilt, something younger than that. Something that knew it was being noticed.

“I was fine,” Lily said.

“I know,” Sophie said.

Lily held her gaze for a moment. Then she disappeared into the bedroom without another word and, thirty seconds later music started through the wall, too loud, which was its own kind of statement.

Grace sat down across from Sophie.

“How was work?” she asked.

Sophie thought about missing pages and a man with a perfect smile who commented without being asked and a woman in an expensive coat who said names like they were property and a CEO who looked at her for two seconds at a time and didn’t know why.

“Fine,” she said. “Work was fine.”

She drank her tea. The music came through the wall. Her mother picked up the cold cup and held it without drinking it.

And Sophie sat in the kitchen of her too-small apartment with a document saved where no one could find it and a secret she was carrying entirely alone, and told herself what she had been telling herself every day since she walked into that office and shook his hand.

That this was manageable.

That she was good at this.

That she had been managing things her whole life and this was no different.

Her phone lit up on the table.

Not Dara this time. Not her mother. A Thomas & Co. company email notification was late, which was unusual. She picked it up.

It was from Aiden.

Not a work instruction. Not a calendar update. Just one line, timestamped 9:47pm:

The cross-referencing on the Henderson file saved forty minutes in the partner review today. Good work.

Sophie stared at her phone.

He had said, in her first week, that he would not tell her when she’d done something right.

She read the message again.

Then she put her phone face down on the table and sat very still for a moment and thought about what it meant that he had s

“Sorry,” Sophie said. “What?”

“I said you seem distracted.”

“I’m fine.” She stood up and took both cups to the sink. “I’m going to bed.”

She lay in the dark for a long time.

Through the wall, Lily’s music played on. Outside the city, it did what it always did.

And in the drawer of her bedside table, underneath the book she hadn’t read in three weeks, a hotel notepad card sat in the dark and said nothing and meant everything.