HIS WIFE HIRED ME TO BE INVISIBLE

CHAPTER 2: THE PASSENGER

She did not ask where I had been. Eight months of driving her around in this car. Eight months of her asking numerous questions. A traffic delay. A wrong turn. A visit to the dry cleaner’s ten minutes late. She tracked everything and saved it all. Nothing got past her.

I was surprised that she had not asked any questions.

I had the lie ready in case. I developed it while going from the elevator to the garage. The forty-third floor. Poor signal in the lobby. The tablet she might need. The words stacked up in my mouth, ready to fire.

The lie resting in my chest with no escape.

The car pulled into traffic. The windows were moving past the city." She sat at the back, holding her tablet. That forward posture of someone who has made her decision and is now working on the details.

I looked in the mirror, then the road, and I switched to the mirror again. Her eyes stayed down, reading something, or pretending to read.

My hands were at ten and two. My heart pounded against the inside of my ribs. Something I would not name. Something like fear, but not fear. That had the sting of desire but could not be.

Not asking spoke louder than asking.

"Cautious and smart drivers last longer in corporate edifice," Camilla said. She didn't look up.

"I try to be, ma'am."

She put the tablet down. She stared through the window at the street outside. At the people passing who did not know whose car this was. Who did not know what went down in the office today?

"Drivers are in the house," she said. "They hear things. They watch things that aren't theirs to see."

When I am working, "I'm deaf and blind, I face my business squarely, ma’am," I said. "That had always been my sustained rule."

"Is it?" she replied.

She glanced at the tablet. She did not ask for a reply.

That was even worse coming from her.

My phone vibrated in my coat pocket. Once. Twice.

I did not move. My hands remained where they rested. My breath was steady. The buzz sounded like a heartbeat against my hip.

She looked up from the tablet. Her gaze landed on my pocket and lingered for two seconds.

"Someone needs you," she said.

"Building services, probably. I submitted a request for repairs yesterday."

"Check it."

"No, ma'am, I must not use my phone while driving."

"Pull over." She signaled.

I pulled over to the kerb and put the car in park. Smooth. Unhurried. The gait of an innocent woman, who had nothing to hide. The performance I had practiced for eight months.

I took out the phone. It was Alex's name. The message read, “Check the glove compartment now.”

I locked the screen.

"Anything urgent?" Camilla asked.

"My sister," I said. "She has not been well. The clinic keeps attempting to call me." I looked up and returned her gaze in the mirror. "I will call her after you’ve alighted. It is nothing serious."

Camilla stared at my face for about three or four seconds.

I was putting on the face I had built for eight months. Calm. Nothing inside was showing. The mask that had sustained my employment. That had kept me safe. That kept me invisible.

"Family matters," she said.

"Yes."

"Put it away. Drive," she said.

I tucked the phone into my pocket and moved back into traffic.

Alex's message sank into my chest. I left it there. I did not open it. Didn't think about it. I just drove the way I had been trained.

The glove compartment. He placed something inside the glove compartment. I could not reach for it. Not with her watching through the mirror. Not with her tablet tilted to see the front of the car. She set it that way when she entered the car. Purposeful. Practiced. Just like she did with everything.

So, I drove.

We arrived at the Grill. I stopped at the entrance. The valet came forward. Young. Eager. Not having any idea who was in the back seat of this car.

Camilla did not move immediately. She held her hand over the door handle. Thinking. Calculating.

"Maya," she said.

"Ma'am?"

Which wall has the outlet in my office?" She looked at me in the mirror.

A small question that was softly asked. The kind that takes forty minutes of thought. Of testing.

"Behind the credenza," I said. "Left side."

Something tightened in my throat. I never allowed it to show on my face. The credenza had no outlet. I had seen it a hundred times.

She held my eyes in the mirror.

"There is no plug behind the credenza," she said.

"I banged into the wrong wall," I said, while roaming the building when I was waiting for you. I can show you the real one.

She watched me. I watched her.

The valet opened her door. She stepped out and rearranged her jacket with one hand. Like a woman preparing for battle, she turned on her heel and walked towards the door. She did not look back.

I breathed out with a sigh of relief.

The valet went back to his post. The entrance swallowed Camilla. I was alone on the curb.

I opened the glove compartment. I saw a black prepaid phone without a case. The phone was already on. It had one contact saved. Just a single letter.

A.

I held it in my palm and placed it under the spare jacket. Under the first-aid kit. Under what fit there.

I pressed two fingers on the side of my bag. The edge of the phone pressed against the cloth. A secret with weight.

And my chest knew of something else, not just about the phone.

He left it there before the board meeting. Before Camilla went downstairs. Before I entered that office. Until I followed him in.

He had been thinking of me before I even got here. I sat with that thought.

Looking at the door of the Grill, I did not open the phone. Didn't check the contact. I left it there, laden with possibilities.

I knew the postcode of the storage unit. I had memorized the second address. Vance Holdings. The number “seven”. The call history I had found and hidden under a fake name.

The clues I had gathered for some reason.

All pointing the same way.

Eight months of watching her run a company, marriage, and a plan she had chased even before I was hired. Eight months of Alex in the rearview. Eight months of learning his room face and his real face. What he looked like when he thought no one was watching.

She was noticing before knowing why.

There was a contact on the phone in my bag. I had added one word and was waiting for more to come. I maintained the thread without breaking it.

I held onto it all. Not because it had a use, but because it was his. Because it touched something I could not name.

The buzz came back to me. She had told me to pull over. She wanted to see my face. Do not read the message. Just watch the reaction, not the content.

She had accepted the sick sister story. But she had not asked who the text was from, nor where I was. Instead, she asked about an outlet that does not exist.

She was not asking what she truly wanted to ask. She was testing me. Asking questions that would break me open?

The lies I had constructed weren't the ones she expected.

I also thought of the phone in my bag and the man who left it there. He had planned for my arrival before I stepped inside the building. He had left it in the car for me to find. He had thought of the office. He had planned for Camilla.

He remained three moves ahead of his wife.

A man who is three moves ahead of Camilla Vance is not careless. He is a man who does not make mistakes and has never been caught."

I had been reading him wrongly.

She stepped out of The Grill at twelve forty-one. I had the engine running. She entered the car without making eye contact. Without a word. As if I had become part of the car. Part of the machinery.

"Office," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

I pulled into traffic and watched the mirror. Her head was down. Her thumb moved on her phone. I looked in the rearview at the second light. Her thumb wasn't moving. She was not reading. Her eyes were not focused on anything. She was thinking. Planning. Deciding.

I kept watching the road. I kept watching her in the mirror.

"How is your sister?" she asked.

"Better," I said. "Thank you."

She nodded. She looked at her screen again.

I looked out at the long road ahead.

She had waited forty-five minutes to ask.

She had not forgotten. She never forgets. She had chosen the moment. Like, it just popped up.

It had not merely come to her mind.

I was not a woman to watch. I was a puzzle she was solving.

The mirror reflected that her thumb was frozen again. She was not typing.

The phone inside my pocket was weighing me down. The glove box phone added more weight to it.

Two devices. Two men. A woman stuck in the middle. Just realizing that I was what they both wanted.

And I didn’t know which one got me first.

END