CHAPTER3:LILY
604 Words
Clara expected to be reassigned, or quietly let go with a generous severance and an ironclad nondisclosure agreement. Instead, three days later, Damian called her into his office and told her — in the clipped, businesslike tone he used for board memos — that her responsibilities were expanding.
"Rosa has family matters in Queens this month. I need someone I can trust on the ninth floor two afternoons a week. You already know it exists. That makes you a liability I might as well use." He said it like an insult, but Clara heard something else underneath it, something that sounded almost like relief at not having to guard the secret entirely alone.
"You could have just told me to forget what I saw."
"I did consider that." He didn't look up from his screen. "You hadn't run to a tabloid in three days. That's more restraint than I've gotten from grown executives."
It wasn't graceful, but it was, Clara understood, the closest thing to trust Damian Blackwood knew how to offer.
The ninth floor became, over the following weeks, the only part of Blackwood Tower that felt like it had a pulse. Lily was fierce and funny and asked questions with the relentless logic of someone who hadn't yet learned that some questions made adults' faces go carefully. She wanted the dragon book read in different voices for every character. She insisted that her stuffed rabbit, Mr. Buttons, be belted into his own chair at snack time. She called Clara "the puzzle lady" for two weeks before finally, gravely, promoting her to "Clara."
What surprised Clara most wasn't the girl. It was the father.
She watched Damian Blackwood — a man who, according to Forbes, had once ended a merger negotiation by standing up and walking out without a word — get down on the playroom floor in a three-thousand-dollar suit to build a block tower exactly as tall as Lily specified, then let her knock it down with unrestrained, gleeful violence, laughing in a way Clara suspected his board of directors had never once heard. She watched him check the temperature of Lily's milk twice. She watched him sit outside her door, motionless, for forty minutes after a nightmare, not going in, just making sure he'd hear if she called for him again.
"You're different up here," Clara said one evening, when Lily had finally fallen asleep, and they stood in the hallway outside her room, the tower's endless lights glittering through the window behind them.
"Down there, I run a company that employs eleven thousand people. If I make a mistake, someone loses a quarter's bonus." His voice was low, careful, like he was handling something breakable. "Up here, if I make a mistake, I lose her. There's no version of that math where I get to be relaxed about it."
"Who is she afraid of, that you have to hide her at all?"
Damian's jaw tightened, and for a moment Clara thought he wouldn't answer. Then, quietly: "Her mother's grandfather. A man who has decided that Lily belongs to his bloodline more than she belongs to herself. I am not going to lose my daughter to a legal argument about blood, Ms. Hayes. So she stays where he can't find her. That's the whole plan. It isn't a good plan. It's the only one I have."
Clara didn't have an answer for that. But she understood, standing there, that she had stopped seeing Damian Blackwood as a client, and started seeing him as something far more dangerous to her own careful, guarded heart: a man worth working for.
rying about.
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