LAST SEEN WITH HIM

PATRICIA

I went back to the office on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, and with each

day the forty-seventh floor became more familiar and less strange — the rhythms of it, the particular tensions between departments, the unspoken hierarchies that existed in

every large organization and which became legible quickly if you paid the right kind

of attention. I was good at the job in the immediate and practical sense. I was fast and

accurate and I anticipated well, which Cole appeared to register not with approval, exactly, but with a kind of recalibration — each day he asked slightly more of me

than the day before, which I understood was a test, and which I understood I was

passing. He was in meetings for most of each day. When he wasn't, he was at his desk or on

calls, the door to his office mostly open, and I was at my desk outside it, close enough

that I caught fragments — a negotiation conducted in a flat, unhurried voice that made

the firmness of his position somehow more absolute than shouting would have, a call

in Mandarin that lasted forty minutes, a brief conversation with Gerald Hast that cut

off when I walked past with a file and resumed, I noticed, after I had moved far

enough away. On Wednesday afternoon, during a twenty-minute window when he had no meetings

and the floor had gone quiet with the particular post-lunch stillness of institutional

spaces, Cole appeared at my desk with a cup of coffee. Not for me — it was his own, held in his right hand — but he stood there and looked at my work screen with the

focused, evaluative quality he brought to most things, and said, without preamble: "What do you think of the Hartwell projections? Your honest read."

I looked up. He was watching me with that particular alertness, the look that I was

beginning to recognize as the look he gave things he was genuinely interested in, which was a narrower category than it might have appeared. "I think they're optimistic," I said. "The Q3 projections assume a rate environment

that the last Fed commentary doesn't support. If rates move twenty-five basis points in

either direction the model breaks down." He regarded me for a moment. "Gerald thinks they're solid."

"Gerald built the model." Something happened at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile — more the

acknowledgment of a point well made, a small involuntary movement that I suspected

he was not entirely aware of. "You're not diplomatic," he said. "You asked for my honest read."

"I did." He straightened, took a sip of his coffee. "Flag anything else you find. Directly to me, not through Gerald." He went back to his office, and I sat with that instruction for a moment, turning it over — the implication of it, the small, particular quality of trust it represented, and also

the other thing it implied, which was that there were dynamics on the forty-seventh

floor that I did not yet fully understand, and that Cole Whitmore, for reasons I could

not identify, had decided I was someone he could use as a set of eyes outside those

dynamics. I filed that away too, in the sealed folder in my mind, alongside Sasha Reeves. On Thursday evening, just after seven, when most of the floor had emptied, I was

finishing a memo at my desk when I became aware of someone standing near the

elevator bank, looking in my direction. I glanced up. It was a woman I had not seen before, fifties, with the kind of face that had once been

striking and had settled into something more than that — a face with history in it. She

was dressed in civilian clothes, not a Whitmore Capital employee, and she was

holding a visitor badge loosely in one hand, the way people hold things they have

been given and already forgotten about. She was looking at my desk. Not at me. At the desk itself. When she realized I had noticed her she straightened and turned toward the elevator

with the abrupt, deliberate movement of someone rerouting, and then she was gone, the elevator doors closing before I had crossed half the distance between my chair and

the lobby. I stood at the elevator bank for a moment. Then I went to the front desk and asked the security guard who had logged in the

visitor badge just after six forty-five. He checked the system. Turned the monitor toward me. The name on the log was Patricia Reeves. I looked at the name for a long time. Then I said thank you and walked back to my desk and sat down and stared at my

screen without reading anything on it, and the sealed folder in my mind came open all

by itself, and the question I had not let myself fully form finally finished forming. Who was Sasha Reeves to the woman who had come to stare at the desk where Sasha

used to sit?

And the answer, the obvious and terrible answer, was the one that made everything

that had come before — the note, the dead phone number, the scrubbed internet

presence, the careful pause in Donna's voice — suddenly, horribly coherent. Patricia Reeves was her mother.