Empire of Gilded Shadows

Chapter 2

POV: Zara Ellis

She delivered the package to Gerald Osei on the fourteenth floor at 10:43am.

He signed for it without looking up from his computer. She took her slip back, thanked him, and rode the elevator down to the lobby where the security guard was still scanning bags with the same bored precision, unchanged by anything the morning had thrown at him. She envied him that. She walked back out into February and flagged down the crosstown bus and found a seat near the window and stared at the city going past without really seeing any of it.

The card was in her jacket pocket.

She was aware of it the way you are aware of a stone in your shoe, not painful, just consistently, specifically there.

She didn't take it out. She already knew what it said. She had a precise memory, the kind that developed when you spent your formative years in rooms where forgetting something important had real consequences. She could see the card clearly without looking at it, cream stock, minimal print, and in the corner, in handwriting so controlled it barely qualified as handwriting at all, a number that was not the main number. A direct line. Given without being asked for, which told her something. She wasn't sure yet what.

She had three more deliveries before noon. She did them in order, efficiently, the way she did everything. A law firm on Lexington. A photography studio in the West Twenties. A medical supply company in Midtown that always had her wait in a beige corridor for twelve minutes before someone came to sign. She waited in the beige corridor for twelve minutes. She did not think about the card.

She thought about the card constantly.

Her mother called at 12:18.

Zara was eating a sandwich on a bench in Bryant Park, her courier bag at her feet, the pigeons maintaining a respectful but optimistic distance. She answered on the second ring because she always answered on the second ring, the first ring was for composing her face into something that sounded fine.

"How's my girl?"

Lena Ellis had a voice like the bottom of a teacup, warm and round and always faintly surprised to be happy, as though happiness were a pleasant development she hadn't quite banked on. She'd had that voice even through the worst of the diagnosis, through the months when Zara drove to the hospital at midnight and sat in waiting rooms with bad lighting and older magazines. Even then, Lena had sounded like herself.

"Good," Zara said. "Working. How are you feeling?"

"Excellent. The new nurse has opinions about daytime television that I find very refreshing."

"High praise."

"She agrees with me about the talk shows. We've bonded." A pause, the particular pause that meant Lena was shifting into the question she actually wanted to ask. "How's the new job?"

Zara had mentioned it this morning, briefly, the way she mentioned things she wasn't sure about yet. She'd said: big company, executive floor, better money. She had not said: I sat down in the wrong meeting and a man told me to stay and I don't fully understand what happened next.

"Early days," she said.

"Is it the kind of early days where you're being sensible, or the kind where you're talking yourself out of something good?"

"Those aren't the only two options."

"They're my two options for you, yes."

Zara looked at the pigeons. One of them had moved significantly closer during the conversation, emboldened by her stillness. She moved her foot and it retreated with great dignity. "It's a real job, Mum. Real hours, real pay."

"What's the man like?"

"I didn't say it was a man."

"It's always a man at the top of those buildings, sweetheart. What's he like?"

Zara thought about a hand raised and twelve people stopping. She thought about dark, still eyes doing arithmetic. She thought about the way he had slid the card across the table without explaining the handwritten number or drawing attention to it, just placed it in her path and moved on, as though what she did with it was entirely her own business. "A glacier with a briefcase," she said.

Lena laughed, the real one, the deep one that she'd had before the illness and had somehow kept all the way through it. "Oh, those are the interesting ones."

"Or the exhausting ones."

"Both. Always both." Another pause. "Is he handsome?"

"Mum."

"I'm asking for context."

"You're asking because you're nosy."

"I'm asking because I'm your mother and I'm ill and it costs you nothing to tell me." She said with complete cheerfulness, the way Lena weaponised her illness, lightly, occasionally, always with a smile in it. Zara had never been able to argue against the smile.

"He's..." She stopped. She tried to think of something accurate and deflecting. "Precise," she said finally. "Everything about him is very precise."

"Mm." Lena made the sound of someone filing information for later use. "Don't talk yourself out of it."

"I'm not talking myself out of anything. I'm thinking."

"You think the way other people worry. It amounts to the same thing."

Zara ate the last of her sandwich. The pigeon, recognising the end of proceedings, departed. "I'll call you tonight."

"You'll call me when you've decided," Lena said. "Whichever comes first." She said goodbye the way she always said goodbye warmly, completely, like each one was a small gift she was leaving on a doorstep.

The call ended. Zara sat in the February cold with her phone in her hand and the card still in her pocket and her mother's voice still in her ear saying don't talk yourself out of it.

She took out the card.

She looked at it for a long time.

The diner was called Santos and it occupied the ground floor of a building on a street in Woodside, Queens, that had been meaning to gentrify for fifteen years and kept getting distracted. It had nine booths, a counter with six stools, a specials board that hadn't been fully updated since October, and a kitchen that operated at a volume suggesting the cook had personal grievances he was working through via the medium of pans.

Zara had worked there for two years. She knew every booth, every regular, every particular way the espresso machine protested on cold mornings. She knew that table four always needed a folded menu under one leg to stop it rocking, and that the couple in booth seven on Thursday evenings always ordered the same thing and never needed menus, and that the cook's name was Reuben and his grievances were real and occasionally valid.

She liked it here. She knew exactly who she was here, which was a thing she had come to understand was rarer than it sounded.

Her shift started at eight. By nine she had served fourteen covers and settled a minor territorial dispute between two regulars over the last slice of a particular pie. By ten the room had thinned to the late-evening stragglers, a man with a laptop nursing his third coffee, a group of nurses from the nearby hospital on the back end of a long shift, a teenager doing homework in booth two who had been there since seven and ordered nothing but water.

She brought the teenager a piece of pie. On the house. He looked up, startled. She said: "You're here for the WiFi. It's fine. But eat something." She went back to the counter.

During a slow stretch between ten and eleven she found herself doing what she always did when something was unresolved, she reached under the counter for a paper napkin and a pen and she did the maths.

Current combined income: three jobs, added together, month by month. The diner. The courier shifts. The three mornings a week at a dry cleaner's on Northern Boulevard where her job was to check garments against order slips and she found the repetition, inexplicably, soothing.

She wrote it all down. Column by column. Rent. Bills. Groceries. And then the other column, the one she maintained with the same discipline she applied to everything, the one that had a single heading she had not written in her mother's handwriting but might as well have: Treatment.

She drew a line. She wrote down what Damien Kroft had said. Better job. She wrote down the figure she'd briefly seen on the contract summary his assistant had mentioned before the morning unravelled, she had a precise memory, for numbers especially.

She looked at the two columns.

She looked at the napkin for a long time.

Then she put down the pen and served table three their check and cleared booth six and brought the nurses another round of coffee, and at 11:52pm, during the quietest stretch of the evening, she took her phone from her apron pocket and typed a message to the number written in the corner of the card.

She typed it quickly, before the sensible part of her brain fully convened.

Fine. But I have conditions.

She put her phone face-down on the counter. She served the man with the laptop his fourth coffee. She cleared two tables. She did not look at her phone for six minutes, which was the longest six minutes she had spent not looking at something since her mother's last scan results.

At 11:58 she looked.

Three dots. Then:

Floor 40. 7:55.

She stared at the screen. 7:55. Not eight. Seven fifty-five, which meant he had already decided she was going to be there and had adjusted the time to suit the preference of a man who was presumably always five minutes early to everything and expected the same of others.

She should find this irritating. She noted that she did not find it as irritating as she should.

She tucked her phone back into her apron. She finished her shift. She counted her tips, forty-one dollars, a reasonable Thursday. She took the night bus home and sat in the back with her head against the window and the city dark and streaked with rain outside.

In her studio apartment she moved quietly so she didn't wake the woman upstairs. She stood at the kitchen table and looked at her mother's medication schedule on the corkboard, the new dosage, the appointment on the fourteenth, the name of the specialist written in Lena's handwriting with a small star beside it because Lena put small stars next to things she wanted Zara to pay attention to.

She looked at the second column on her budget sheet. The treatment column.

She set an alarm for 6:15.

She told herself it wasn't a decision yet. It was an interview. She was allowed to have an interview. She could go and hear the conditions discussed and come home and decide then, properly, with full information. That was the sensible approach. That was what a careful person did.

She brushed her teeth. She turned off the kitchen light. She lay down in the dark and looked at the ceiling, which was the same ceiling she had been looking at for three years and had never once given her any useful answers.

The business card was on her nightstand.

She had put it there without thinking, taken it from her jacket pocket and set it on the nightstand the way you set something down that you want to be able to see in the morning.

She stared at the ceiling.

She thought about a voice that left no space for alternatives.

She thought about her mother's laugh, the deep one, the one she'd kept through everything.

She thought about the second column.

She did not sleep for a very long time.