Wrong sister, Right man

chapter 10

**Mia**

The phone went at 4:12 in the morning, and I knew before I picked it up that it was Eastgate. Nobody calls at that hour to say good news.

"Miss Mia." Hector's voice was thin and strange. "You'd better come down."

"What happened?"

"The Halloran lot." A pause. I heard him breathing. "It's all ruined. Every vat."

I was out of bed before he finished the sentence.

The Halloran order was the biggest job we had. Four thousand yards of deep green hotel drapery, due Friday, the one contract that was going to keep the payroll honest until the retool money came through. I'd scheduled it myself, down to the minute. Three days of dye time, and the first batch had been sitting in the vats since midnight.

I threw on jeans and the first sweater I found, and I made it as far as the landing before I heard footsteps behind me.

"Where are you going?"

Damian was at the top of the stairs. Shirt half buttoned, hair flattened on one side. He looked like he'd come straight up out of a nightmare, and he'd obviously heard every word through two walls.

"The plant. Something's wrong."

"I'll drive."

"No."

"Mia."

"I'm going in my own car, I'm texting you when I get there, and you are not coming." I was already on the stairs. "It's my plant."

I didn't hear him follow. I didn't hear anything until I was at the front door with my keys in my hand, and then I heard him say, very quietly, from the top of the stairs:

"It's my plant too. As of Saturday."

I didn't turn around. But I drove too fast the whole way there, and I knew, without looking in the mirror, that a pair of headlights had pulled out of the garage behind me.

---

I'd smelled Eastgate every day of my life. I knew the sweet chemical edge of the dye house like I knew my own name. That morning it smelled wrong. Sharp, acid, a smell that made the back of my throat close.

Hector was standing at the main vat with a flashlight. Bernie was beside him, her braid half undone, her arms wrapped around herself. A few night-shift men hung back by the wall. Nobody was talking.

I walked up to the edge and looked down.

The green was gone. What was left was a murky, blotchy mess the color of old dishwater, with streaks of rust-brown through it, and cloth floating on top like something drowned. Four thousand yards of drapery. I'd watched it go in.

"Bleach," Hector said. "Or something like it. Somebody dumped it in the supply line."

"When?"

"Between one and three, I'd say. The night crew was on break." His voice cracked. "I've run this dye house for nineteen years, Mia. Nobody's ever touched my vats."

"Who had access?"

"Nobody. That's the thing. The back door was locked. The gate log's clean." He swallowed. "It has to be somebody inside."

I felt the whole room shift at once, the way a crowd leans. A man by the wall said it first, low, almost a mutter. "It's the new people. It's *her people.*"

"Dale," Bernie said sharply.

"I'm just saying. First week the Blackwoods are in the building—"

"I'm not one of his people," I said.

"You married him."

"I married him to save your jobs."

"Funny way of saving them." Dale pushed off the wall. He was a big, tired man in his fifties, with a bad knee and three kids, and I'd known him since I was a girl. He wasn't being cruel. He was frightened. That's the worst kind of angry, because you can't argue it down. "A hundred and forty of us. And the first thing that happens is this."

"Dale—"

"Don't tell me it's going to be fine."

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. I had no answer. I'd promised these people their jobs were safe, and the first week of my promise, someone had poured poison into the one order that was holding the plant together.

"It wasn't her."

The voice came from the doorway.

I didn't have to turn around. I knew that voice now, the flat, even, quiet one that carried without ever being raised. Every head in the room turned.

Damian was standing at the end of the dye house, in a dark coat over his half-buttoned shirt, with his hands in his pockets. He looked like a man in the wrong place. He also looked like the only calm thing in the building.

"Who the hell are you to say?" Dale said.

"Damian Blackwood." He walked in, past the wall of staring men, and stopped beside me. Not touching. Just there. "I'm the one with the most to lose if this plant fails. I just spent forty million dollars buying into it. I don't pour bleach on my own investment."

Nobody said a word.

"Somebody got into this building last night," he said. "That means somebody wants Eastgate to fail. I want to know who, and so does my wife." *My wife.* He said it in the same flat voice, as if it were a fact about the weather. It went through me like a nail. "You're angry. You should be. But aim it at the right person."

"And who's that?" Dale said.

"I'll find out." He looked around the room, slowly, one face at a time. "And when I do, you'll know first."

It was such a small, dry, absurd promise. Nobody in that room should have believed it. But Dale's shoulders dropped an inch, and Bernie let out a long breath, and somewhere in the back of the room a man said, "All right."

Damian turned to me. "Does the order have a backup?"

"No. That's the problem. It's a special green. Hector mixes it by hand, and it takes three days to cure. We're due Friday, and today is Tuesday."

"What if the dye came from somewhere else?"

"There *is* nowhere else. Not in time."

"There is," he said, "if you know who to call."

He took out his phone and walked a few steps away. I couldn't hear all of it. I heard "Rotterdam," and "tonight," and then something I didn't catch that made the voice on the other end go silent. Then he said, in a tone I'd never heard from him, colder than frost, "I understand the cost. I'm asking you to do it anyway."

He hung up. He came back.

"A mill in Rotterdam can ship you enough finished green by Thursday. Air freight. They'll match your swatch." He said it without any fuss, like he'd arranged a taxi. "You'll lose money on this order. I'll cover it."

"You can't—"

"Can't I?"

"It'll take your money. And everybody will think—"

"What?" he said, lower, so only I could hear. "That I'm trying to buy your plant? I already bought it. Everyone knows that. What I'd like is for them to know you kept the order."

I stared at him.

"Let them think it was your idea," he said. "It's your schedule. Your plan. Your name on the contract. I'll sign the check and nobody needs to know."

I don't know what my face did. But something in his changed, a tiny flicker, a man who'd said more than he'd meant to.

"Why?" I whispered.

"Because you'd do the same for them," he said, and turned to Hector. "Can you salvage anything from the cloth?"

I stood there, with my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth, and watched my husband, the cold, cruel, toxic man I'd sworn to hate, walk across a ruined dye house and crouch down by a vat to look at it properly. Like he cared. Like it mattered. In a coat that cost more than Hector's car.

*He's performing,* I told myself. *It's for the crowd.*

Except that nobody in that crowd was the kind of person he'd ever want to impress. And he hadn't looked at them once.

---

The sun came up around seven. By eight, a tired crew was hauling the ruined cloth out to a dumpster, and Hector had a long list of things to check. I stood alone on the mezzanine with a cup of terrible coffee, watching the floor and trying not to think.

I should have been thinking about the order. The schedule. The insurance claim. Instead, my brain had gone back to one thing, the way a tongue goes back to a missing tooth.

*Ask your husband where the Harlow Street money went.*

Whoever sent that note had been *in* the car lot. Whoever had poured the bleach had been in the dye house. I didn't believe those were two different people. And the note had come *first*.

Someone had warned me. Then someone had hit us.

I took the folded paper out of my bag, under the hole punch, and read it again. And I thought: *Either the person who wrote this is the enemy, or they're trying to tell me who is.*

"Mia."

I jumped. Damian was standing at the top of the stairs. He'd taken his coat off. His sleeves were rolled up, and there was a smear of green dye across one forearm, and he looked, for a moment, like a person.

I shoved the note into my pocket so fast I nearly tore it.

He saw. Of course he saw. He didn't say anything. His eyes went to my pocket and back to my face, and something shuttered behind them, quick and quiet, like a window closing.

"I wanted to say," he said, "I'm sorry about the order."

"It's not your fault."

"It's in my building. It's my fault if I don't fix it." He glanced at the floor below. "I've asked Ms. Adler to look into the gate logs. She'll have a list by tonight."

"Okay."

"I also want a guard on the night shift. Two. You can pick them."

"Damian."

"I know. It's a leash. I'm sorry." His voice was tight. "I'd rather you hated me than found out the other way."

"The other way for what?"

He didn't answer. He stood there, with the green on his arm and the sun coming through the glass, and I understood in a rush that he was holding something enormous behind his teeth. He wanted to tell me. It was written all over him. And something was stopping him that was stronger than he was.

"I'll take the guards," I said finally.

"Thank you."

"And I'll pay you back for the dye."

"No."

"Damian—"

"Mia." Gently. "Let me do one thing right."

I didn't have an answer for that. So I did the only thing I could think of. I picked up the second coffee, the one I'd poured for Hector and forgotten to give him, and held it out.

He took it. Our fingers touched on the cup.

He drank it standing there in the sun, a man who'd paid for Dutch dye and bought night guards and lied to my face, and who still, somehow, drank a stranger's burnt coffee as if it were a gift.

"Four," he said, after a moment.

I almost laughed. "That's mine."

"I'm borrowing it."

"It's a *three,* actually."

His mouth curved. Just a little. Just for a second.

It was the best thing that had happened all day.

---

I found out what he'd been hiding at 11:40 that night, and I wasn't looking for it.

I'd gone down to the study for a stapler. That's all. A stapler. The one in my room had run out, and the study was dark, and his tablet was lying open on the desk with the screen still lit, the way he sometimes left it when he was called away mid-sentence.

I wasn't snooping. I want that clear. I turned toward the shelf, and the screen was just *there,* in the corner of my eye, and one line of it caught like a hook.

A payment schedule. Monthly, for what looked like years. And the account name on every row, in plain black type:

*HARLOW STREET / W. REYES.*

I stood there with the stapler in my hand.

Walter Reyes. The old man in the wheelchair, who'd rolled into my wedding and made my husband go white at the altar. The father of the woman who'd fallen on the floor of Damian's office.

Walter Reyes had been paid, every month, for years, out of the money that was supposed to be Harlow Street's.

I read the number twice, and I felt the floor go out from under me.

Then I heard the front door open, and a footstep in the hall, and Damian's voice, tired and low, calling my name.