THE DEVIL’S DEVOTION

Astoria

Priya showed up at seven with a bottle of prosecco she'd clearly bought at the bodega on the corner, because the label had the specific, aggressive cheerfulness of something priced under twelve dollars, and a paper bag of dumplings from the place on 30th that only took cash.

"Okay," she said, toeing off her shoes in Evelyn's doorway, "I need the whole thing, start to finish, and I need you to not undersell it, because I already know you're going to undersell it."

"I'm not going to"

"You texted me 'got the job, will explain,' like you'd been assigned a library book," Priya said, pushing past her into the apartment's single main room, setting the dumplings on the counter that separated the kitchen from everything else, which in Evelyn's apartment was most of the square footage.

"That is not the energy of a person who just got hired by the ninth richest man in the country."

"Eleventh, actually. I looked it up on the subway."

"Even worse. Sit down. Pour. Talk."

Evelyn's apartment was small in the specific way that Astoria apartments were small — a single window over the radiator that rattled in winter and did nothing useful in summer, a couch she'd gotten off a stoop three years ago and reupholstered herself with a sewing kit and a YouTube tutorial, a shelf of paperbacks organized by color because alphabetizing had felt, at some point, like more effort than the apartment deserved. It was not glamorous. It had never once, in three years, made her feel like less than herself, which she understood, without being able to fully explain it, was the entire point.

She poured two glasses of prosecco into mismatched jars, because she owned four wine glasses and two of them had chipped, and told Priya everything — the coffee, the stain pen, Renata Cole's blazer, the elevator doors holding open on donors touring the building, and the interview itself, which she'd been turning over in her head all afternoon like a coin she couldn't stop checking was real.

"Wait, wait, back up," Priya said, holding up a hand, chopsticks still in it.

"He just — sat there. The whole time. Didn't say anything."

"For twenty minutes. I counted."

"And then he asked you *one* question."

"One question."

"And it wasn't about your résumé, or your salary expectations, or literally anything a normal interviewer asks."

"He asked why I helped a stranger clean coffee off her blouse when it was costing me interview time."

Priya set her chopsticks down entirely, which for Priya was the equivalent of a standing ovation. "That's insane. That's — Evelyn, that's not a normal interview question, that's a man trying to figure something out about you that has nothing to do with whether you can manage his calendar." "It's a value question. Companies do that now. Behavioral interviewing."

"Behavioral interviewing doesn't usually end with the CEO personally instructing HR to send the offer before you leave the building." Priya said it lightly, but there was something underneath it, the particular sharpness she'd built a whole career on — the instinct that made her good at her job and occasionally exhausting as a friend, the refusal to let anything slide past her without turning it over first. "I read the profile piece on him last year, for the paper, back when we were doing that series on family dynasties.

You know what stuck with me? Every single person quoted in that piece used the word *controlled.* Everyone. Employees, board members, one ex-girlfriend who very clearly wasn't supposed to be talking to us. Controlled, precise, contained. Nobody said warm. Nobody said generous, even though apparently he gives away obscene amounts of money. They all used words you'd use for a very expensive, very well-maintained machine."

"He's not a machine. He's a person who's spent his whole life being watched and decided the safest thing was to stop giving people anything to watch." Priya raised an eyebrow over her jar of prosecco. "You've known him for twenty-three minutes and you're already writing his character study."

"I read people for a living, Priya. It's the one thing I'm actually good at."

"You're good at a lot of things. You're just only willing to admit to the ones that make you useful to somebody else." Priya said it gently, in the tone she reserved for the handful of true things she allowed herself to say to Evelyn without softening them first, and Evelyn felt it land somewhere she didn't especially want it to. "I'm happy for you. I am. This is a real job, real money, the kind of line on a résumé that opens doors for the rest of your life.

I just want you walking into that building with your eyes open, because billionaires do not get to be billionaires by being simple, and men who watch a room for twenty minutes before they say one carefully chosen sentence are not doing that because they're shy."

"Noted," Evelyn said, and meant it, even as some contrary, private part of her filed the whole conversation under *Priya being Priya*, protective to the point of suspicion, the same instinct that made her a good journalist and occasionally made her treat every new person in Evelyn's life like a potential source who hadn't yet revealed their angle.

They ate the dumplings cold by the third round, and Priya made her recount the elevator ride down at least twice, and by nine o'clock the bodega prosecco had done its cheerful, low-grade work, and Evelyn felt, for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, something close to weightless.

She called her mother after Priya left, sitting cross-legged on the reupholstered couch with the window cracked and the city making its usual nighttime noise below — a bus, someone's music from two floors down, the specific hum of a neighborhood that never fully went quiet.

"Say it again," Marianne said, when Evelyn told her, "say the salary again, I want to make sure I heard you right the first time," and Evelyn said it again, and heard her mother go quiet in the particular way she went quiet when she was doing math in her head, the math she'd been doing Evelyn's entire life — rent against income, income against what was owed, what was owed against what was left over for anything that wasn't strictly necessary.

"That's not a salary, Evie, that's a — that's a house. That's Sam's tuition without the loans. That's—" Marianne stopped herself, and Evelyn could picture her exactly, sitting at the kitchen table in Poughkeepsie with the ledger book she still kept by hand even though Evelyn had bought her software for it years ago, the same table she'd done bookkeeping at for other people's businesses for two decades so that Evelyn and Sam could have things she'd never had. "I'm proud of you. You know that. You worked for this."

"I know, Mom."

"I mean it. Don't do the thing where you deflect it into a joke."

"I'm not deflecting." She was, a little. It was a reflex older than she could remember installing.

"I'm just — I don't want to jinx it. It feels too good to be real yet."

"Well, it's real. Renata Cole doesn't send offer letters to things that aren't real." Marianne laughed, soft, and then the sound of her shifting in her chair, the creak Evelyn knew from three thousand phone calls exactly like this one. "You know, it's funny — Moretti. That name's been rattling around in my head all evening since you said it, and I couldn't figure out why, and then it hit me.

I did the books for a little logistics outfit, oh, this must be twenty-six, twenty-seven years ago now, right after your father left, before I built up my own client list. Small operation, a handful of trucks, nothing glamorous. I think there was a connection to some bigger shipping concern — one of those companies that gets bought and folded into something else and you never hear the original name again. I want to say Moretti was somewhere in that paperwork, but it's been so long, I could be wrong."

"You kept records from twenty-six years ago?"

"I keep everything, you know that. There's a box in the hall closet with your father's old business papers — the ones from before he left, when he was still trying to make that contracting thing work. I never threw it out. Never had the heart, I suppose, or never had a reason to go through it properly.

I should, honestly. Half of it's probably ruined from the damp anyway." Marianne said it the way she said most things about Evelyn's father — lightly, deliberately weightless, the tone of someone who had decided a long time ago that the alternative to lightness was a conversation she didn't want to have twice a year on the phone. "Anyway. It's probably nothing. Common enough name, I'm sure there's a hundred Morettis in shipping up and down the coast."

"Probably," Evelyn agreed, and let it go the way you let go of most things your mother says in passing at the end of a long, happy phone call — filed somewhere loose and unimportant, a coincidence with no weight attached to it yet, the kind of detail that only becomes a thread once you already know it's the one you're supposed to pull.

They talked another twenty minutes — Sam's classes, the leak in Marianne's kitchen ceiling that the landlord kept promising to fix, whether Evelyn should break her lease early now that she could theoretically afford somewhere nicer, a question Evelyn deflected without quite meaning to, because some part of her understood, even now, that this apartment was the one place in her life that had never once made her feel like she was performing for anyone.

"I love you," Marianne said, at the end, the way she always said it, like it cost her nothing and meant everything at once. "Go celebrate properly. Don't just sit there running numbers in your head, I know you're doing it."

"I'm not."

"Evelyn Grace."

"I'm doing it a little."

Her mother laughed, and they hung up, and Evelyn sat for a while in the quiet after, the jar of prosecco gone flat on the counter, the box of dumplings empty, the whole apartment smelling faintly of soy sauce and other people's cigarette smoke drifting up from the street. She thought about Monday. She thought, despite herself, about a locked door on the sixty-third floor and a man who watched a room like weather.

She thought, briefly and without any real reason to, about a box in a hall closet in Poughkeepsie that no one had opened in twenty-six years, and then let that thought go too, the way you let go of things that don't yet know they're going to matter.

She went to bed early, for once, and slept better than she had in weeks.