Distance between us

The charity Gala

The firm's fiftieth-anniversary gala arrived at the end of April, held in a ballroom two floors below the archive room where Elena had found the folder she still hadn't mentioned to anyone, a fact that struck her, standing in the doorway that evening, as a particularly cruel piece of architecture, the celebration stacked directly above the evidence of what it was celebrating. Junior staff were invited as a rule and expected to attend for no more than an hour as a matter of practice long enough to be photographed for the internal newsletter, not long enough to require real conversation with partners who wouldn't remember their names by the following Monday.

Elena wore the one formal dress she owned, altered twice since she'd bought it secondhand three years ago from a consignment shop that specialized in dresses worn once to weddings by women who never intended to wear them again, and stood near the edge of the room nursing a glass of sparkling water she hadn't paid for, watching Julian across the crowd in a tuxedo that fit him the way expensive things always fit him like they'd been made with his exact dimensions in mind, because they had been, tailored by someone who'd measured him personally rather than pulled a rack size off a department store shelf.

Vivian Cole stood beside him for most of the evening, a hand occasionally at his elbow, the picture of a couple who belonged together in every photograph the newsletter would run, laughing at something someone said with a practiced ease that Elena, watching, found herself unable to read as either genuine or performed, and hating slightly that she cared enough to try. Elena watched them and told herself, firmly, that this was exactly the reminder she needed, that this was precisely the tableau she'd been describing to him in the break room, made of flesh and expensive fabric right in front of her.

It was Richard Ashford, of all people, who approached her, a fact that unsettled her more than anything Julian himself might have said. He moved through the room the way water moves through a channel it has cut for itself over decades, unhurried, certain of its path, and introduced himself with the easy, practiced warmth of a man who'd shaken ten thousand hands and remembered which ones mattered, his handshake firm and brief and entirely without warmth despite the smile that accompanied it.

"You're the young woman from the residential team. Reyes, is it?" He said her surname the way you'd handle something you were checking for a flaw, turning it over, examining its edges. "Marcus tells me you did excellent work on the Delgado renderings."

"Thank you, Mr. Ashford." Her voice came out steadier than she felt, years of diner work having taught her, at least, how to keep her hands from shaking in front of difficult customers.

"Reyes." He said it again, slower, something working behind his eyes that made the hair on Elena's arms rise before she understood why, a calculation happening somewhere behind his composed expression that she couldn't quite follow but could feel the weight of regardless. "There was a Reyes firm, once. Small residential practice, downtown. Before your time, I'd imagine."

Her pulse spiked, the sparkling water suddenly heavy in her hand. "I wouldn't know."

"No," Richard agreed, easily, watching her with an attention that felt suddenly, uncomfortably clinical, the particular attention of a man accustomed to reading people the way he read contracts, for the clause that mattered buried among the ones that didn't, "I don't suppose you would." He smiled, the transaction apparently complete, whatever he'd been testing for either confirmed or dismissed, though Elena couldn't have said which, and moved on to the next junior employee without waiting for her to recover, already extending the same practiced handshake to someone else entirely.

She spent the rest of the gala with her heart in her throat, certain, in a way she couldn't fully justify, that he knew exactly who she was knew the name, knew the block, knew the folder she'd found in his own archive room and had simply chosen, for reasons she didn't yet understand, not to say so out loud, filing the knowledge away for some future use she couldn't yet predict and didn't like imagining.