How I Fell For A Stranger

Chapter 6: What Richard Knew

Richard Sallow's office had always smelled like old books and expensive coffee, a smell Elena had once found comforting and now found she couldn't stand without her stomach turning.

"You've been quiet lately," he said, not looking up from his monitor when she knocked on his open door Monday morning. "Task force keeping you busy?"

"Something like that."

"And the CEO? How's he settling in?" The question landed with the same practiced casualness as always, but Elena had spent four nights combing through six years of his signatures, and she was starting to hear things in his voice she'd never noticed before — a held-breath quality underneath the warmth, like a man checking a door he wasn't sure he'd locked.

"He's fine," she said. "Efficient. Asks good questions."

"He would." Richard finally looked up, and for a fraction of a second — so brief she almost convinced herself she'd imagined it — something cold moved behind his eyes. "You've been down in the archive room a fair amount this week. Finance mentioned it. Something for the task force?"

Her pulse spiked. She kept her face still through sheer force of will, six years of client presentations finally paying off in the worst possible context. "Old vendor comparisons. Building historical context for the retention report."

"Ah." He held her gaze a beat too long. "Let me know if you need anything from the Horizon files specifically. I know that campaign better than anyone. Be a shame to have someone reinvent the wheel when I could just tell you what happened."

*I think I already know what happened*, she thought, and said instead, "I'll keep that in mind," before excusing herself with a lightness she didn't feel anywhere in her body.

She texted Julian from the stairwell, hands unsteady. *He knows I've been in the archives. He's fishing.*

*Stop going down there*, came the reply, immediate. *We have enough. I'm meeting the board's audit committee chair Thursday. After that it's out of our hands and into people whose job it is to handle this safely. Two more days. Please.*

*Okay.*

She believed him. She wanted, badly, to believe that two days was a manageable amount of time to hold her breath — and for a day and a half, it almost was.

---

Thursday morning, an hour before Julian's meeting with the audit chair, Elena's phone buzzed with a message from a number she didn't recognize.

*You should ask your new boss why he really hired you. Check the drafts folder on the shared marketing drive, subject line "Task Force — candidate notes." Then decide who's been lying to you.*

Her hands went cold. She told herself it was nothing — a prank, a disgruntled coworker who'd caught wind of the office rumors and wanted to stir something ugly. She told herself that for exactly as long as it took to open the shared drive, navigate to the drafts folder nobody used anymore, and find a file she'd never seen before, timestamped the morning after the rooftop party, six hours before she'd even walked into the lobby.

*Task Force — candidate notes. J. Kade.*

She opened it with a hand that wasn't quite steady.

*Elena Voss. Marketing coordinator, reports to R. Sallow. Present at last night's event — confirmed connection to Sallow's department, six years tenure, described by colleagues as trusted / close working relationship with RS. Recommend bringing onto task force for internal visibility into Sallow's team. Access to historical Horizon files likely useful given ongoing review.*

The floor seemed to tilt underneath her.

It was there in black and white, dated hours after she'd laughed at a bad joke about dental plans, hours before she'd known his last name — a document that read exactly like what she'd accused him of in his office weeks ago and he'd sworn, with his hand practically over his heart, wasn't true. *Access to historical Horizon files likely useful.* Not a rooftop romance. A recruitment plan. A woman selected for her proximity to a target before he'd ever bothered to learn what made her laugh.

She didn't remember walking to Julian's office. She remembered standing in the doorway while his assistant said something about the audit meeting starting in twenty minutes, and she remembered Julian's face changing the second he saw hers.

"Elena, what's—"

She held up her phone, the document still open, and watched him read it over her shoulder in real time — watched the color drain out of his face, watched his mouth open and then close, watched him reach for words and come up with nothing fast enough to matter.

"I can explain that."

"Can you." Her voice came out flat, hollowed out, the voice of someone who had done this exact scene once already and sworn she wouldn't do it twice. "Because it reads pretty clearly, Julian. *Recommend bringing onto task force for internal visibility into Sallow's team.* You knew who I was before the elevator doors even closed that night. You had a plan drafted before I'd finished my coffee the next morning. And every single time I asked you — in your office, at that café, on my couch four nights ago — you told me it wasn't about Richard. You told me it was about me."

"It is about you. Elena, that document is old. I wrote it the morning after the party, before I understood anything, when I was still thinking like a CEO doing damage control on an acquisition, not like—" He stopped, raked a hand through his hair, tried again. "I wrote that before I let myself feel anything real about you. It was contingency planning, the same kind I do for every department. I never acted on it. I never once made a decision about you based on that document. You have to believe—"

"I don't have to believe anything." Her voice cracked, finally, all the careful composure she'd walked in with breaking apart at once. "You told me on my couch four nights ago that you'd stopped falling for the smart choice weeks before we ever discussed Richard. That was a lie, wasn't it? The smart choice and the real one were the same thing the entire time. You needed someone close to Sallow, and you found her, and you were smart enough to let it turn into something that felt like more."

"That's not what happened."

"It's exactly what a document dated hours after we met says happened."

The audit chair's assistant appeared in the doorway, apologetic, reminding Julian the meeting was starting in ten minutes — a meeting that existed, Elena understood now with sick clarity, because of evidence she herself had gathered, evidence that had made her useful in exactly the way that old document had predicted.

"I have to go," Julian said, anguish plain on his face, torn between two things he couldn't hold at once. "Elena, please — give me an hour. Let me explain properly, not like this, not with a meeting starting—"

"Go to your meeting, Julian." She was already turning away, already building the wall back up brick by brick, faster this time because she'd had practice. "Take down Richard. Get justice for your father. You'll do it either way — you don't actually need me in the room for that part anymore, do you? You've already gotten everything out of me that mattered."

She left before he could answer, walking fast through a hallway that suddenly felt too bright and too loud, and didn't let herself fall apart until she reached the stairwell — the same stairwell she'd texted him from two days ago, hands unsteady with fear for him instead of grief over him, a lifetime ago that had somehow only been forty-eight hours.

She didn't see Richard Sallow watching from the far end of the seventh floor, phone in hand, the faintest, satisfied curl at the corner of his mouth as he slipped it back into his pocket and turned toward the elevator — toward the audit meeting he'd just made certain would go very differently than Julian Kade was expecting.