Chapter Four: She Was Never Random
1202 Words
I go back to my desk.
I sit down. I open my laptop. I type in my password and stare at the cursor blinking on a blank screen and I think about exactly nothing for sixty seconds, which is the most dangerous thing I ever allow myself because nothing has a way of filling itself with everything.
The file.
My photo.
Three years ago.
I close the document I had open and I start a new one. A list, because that's how I think when I'm scared, I make lists, I organize, I give chaos a structure it didn't ask for.
What I know: He had a file on me before I applied here.
What I don't know: Why. Who compiled it. Whether it matters.
What I can do: Nothing. Not yet. Not until I understand what I'm standing in the middle of.
I close the document without saving it.
I pull up Brooklyn's travel schedule for the weekend.
I start to pack my own bag in my head, methodically, efficiently, the way I do everything, because if I stop moving I will start thinking and if I start thinking I will fall apart and falling apart is not something I have the luxury of doing right now.
Izzy needs me to hold it together.
So I hold it together.
~~~
The town car picks me up at 5 PM.
Brooklyn is already inside.
He doesn't look up when I get in, he's reading something on his phone, one ankle crossed over his knee, completely at ease in the way that only people who have never had to worry about anything are completely at ease. The partition is up. The city slides past the windows.
We don't speak for eleven minutes. I count them.
At minute twelve he puts his phone away and looks out the window and says, without turning toward me, "Did you pack for three nights?"
"Yes."
"Good."
That's all.
I look out my own window.
Two years of sitting near this man, breathing the same air, navigating the same silences, and I still don't know what goes on behind those eyes. I used to think that was one of the things I loved about him. The mystery of him. The locked door quality.
Now I think it might be the thing that gets me killed. Professionally speaking.
~~~
The airstrip is private, tucked off a road I've booked cars to a dozen times but never traveled myself. The jet sits on the tarmac under a grey afternoon sky, small and white and expensive, exactly as I imagined it.
Brooklyn gets out first.
He walks around to my door before the driver can and opens it himself.
I look up at him.
He holds out his hand.
It's for show. There are two ground crew members watching from near the jet. This is the role starting already, here on a private tarmac with an audience of two people I will never see again. He is thorough, I'll give him that.
I put my hand in his.
His grip is warm and easy, like he's done it a hundred times, like my hand fits there naturally, and I keep my face soft and my eyes light and I smile up at him the way a woman smiles at a man she chose.
He looks at my face.
Too long. A beat past what the moment needs.
He is checking for cracks.
I don't give him any.
I smile wider. He looks away first.
Good.
~~~
The jet is exactly as I imagined. Cream leather. Low lighting. A small table between two seats wide enough to sleep in. Gerald greets me by name, which means Brooklyn told him I was coming, which means this was planned far enough in advance that staff were briefed.
I file that detail away with the rest of them.
We're in the air by 5:45.
Brooklyn waits until Gerald disappears behind the cockpit partition before he opens the folder on the table between us.
"Cover story," he says.
I uncap my pen.
His eyes drop to it briefly. Something moves in his expression. He doesn't comment.
"We met eighteen months ago at the Meridian fundraiser," he begins. "You were there as a guest, not as my employee. We kept it quiet because of the professional overlap. Six months ago I asked you to stay in the EA role through the transition period while I found a replacement." He pauses. "The family believes you are simply the woman I've been seeing. That's all they need to believe."
I write as he talks.
"Your background. Queens, postgrad in corporate finance, mother passed, younger sister. All accurate, all fine. Don't volunteer details about your sister's situation."
Of course he would say that.
"Your family's finances," he continues. "If asked, comfortable but independent. Don't be specific."
"Your father will push," I say.
"He will. When he does, look at me. I'll redirect."
I write: (look at him, don't fill the silence, let him redirect.)
"My Aunt Beatrice," he says, and his voice changes almost imperceptibly, a fraction warmer, "won't care about any of it. She'll want to know if you're real. Talk to her honestly where you can."
"And Elena Vance," I say.
The air in the cabin changes.
He looks at me.
I look back.
I keep my face open and professional and completely empty behind the eyes.
"Elena will be cordial," he says, after a moment. "Keep your interactions brief."
I nod. I write it down.
But what I'm actually writing, in the margin where he can't see, in the shorthand I developed in graduate school that nobody else can read, is this:
Cover story prepared eighteen months ago.
File on me dated three years ago.
Every detail too clean. Too ready.
This was never about one weekend.
~~~
He tests me for forty minutes. Runs scenarios, asks questions, plays his father, plays his aunt. I answer every single one cleanly, warmly, with exactly the right amount of detail. At one point I add something he didn't give me, a small joke about the Meridian fundraiser's terrible canapés, something that makes the story feel lived-in and real.
He pauses.
"I didn't tell you that," he says.
"I know," I say. "That's why it'll work."
He looks at me for a long moment.
Then he says, "Good," and closes the folder.
~~~
An hour into the flight, his breathing slows.
I watch him from across the aisle. Brooklyn asleep looks younger than Brooklyn awake, the line between his brows smooths out, his jaw unclenches, and for one unguarded moment he looks like a person instead of a chess player.
I look at him for my four seconds.
Then I turn to the window.
The clouds are flat and dark below us, and in the glass my own reflection stares back at me, pale and steady and decided.
I lean close so only I can hear it.
"You built this trap," I whisper.
"I'm going to learn every inch of it."
A beat of silence.
And then, from across the aisle, without opening his eyes, Brooklyn says quietly, "Get some sleep, Natalia."
My blood runs cold.
He heard every word.
- Writer
