LAST SEEN WITH HIM

The drawer should have been empty. That was the first thing Human Resources had promised me when they walked me through the forty-seventh floor on Friday — everything has been cleared out, Ms. Chen, the space is completely yours — and I had nodded and smiled the way you do when you are new somewhere and still performing the version of yourself you hope people will believe in. I had not checked. There had been no reason to check. People did not lie about empty drawers. But on Monday morning, six minutes before eight o'clock, with Chicago sprawled forty-seven stories below me like something drawn by a steady and ambitious hand, I pulled open the center drawer of my new desk and found that someone had lied. It was a single piece of paper. Folded twice, the creases sharp and deliberate, like the person who made them had pressed down hard with their thumbnail to make sure they held. The paper was ivory, thick, the kind you buy in sets from a boutique stationery shop on Michigan Avenue when you want people to know you have taste. One corner had gone slightly brown, the way paper does when it has been sitting somewhere for months, waiting. I should have closed the drawer. That is what I tell myself now, in the particular way we narrate our own disasters — I should have, I could have, if only I had. I should have closed the drawer, called facilities, asked them to remove whatever former tenant had left behind their forgotten notes and moved on with the morning I had been rehearsing since Thursday. I unfolded the paper instead. Three lines. The handwriting was careful and small, the letters slightly right-leaning, the kind of script that belonged to someone who had been taught to write beautifully and had never unlearned it. If you are reading this, you have my job. My name is Sasha Reeves. Don't trust him. Below the words, a phone number. A 312 area code. Chicago. I read it three times. Then I folded it exactly along its original creases and held it in my lap under the desk, out of sight, while the forty-seventh floor of Whitmore Capital slowly filled with people and noise and the particular performance of Monday morning productivity. My heart was doing something aggressive against my ribs. I kept my face neutral and my posture straight because I had learned years ago that a young woman in a room full of people who have not yet decided whether to respect her cannot afford to look rattled. I was rattled. Let me tell you what I knew about Sasha Reeves before I found that note. I knew almost nothing. The recruiter who had called me six weeks ago — a brisk, pleasant woman named Donna who spoke in the efficient rhythm of someone permanently behind schedule — had described the position as a rare and exceptional opportunity. Personal assistant to Cole Whitmore. Sole point of contact for a man whose time was worth more per minute than most people earned in a month. The role required, in Donna's words, discretion, precision, and an unusually high tolerance for intensity. I had asked, because I was twenty-six and trying very hard to be the kind of person who asks the right questions, why the position was vacant. There had been a pause on the line. Brief, barely half a second, the kind of pause that is not really a pause at all but a decision. The previous assistant moved on, Donna had said. It happens. Mr. Whitmore is a demanding employer. Not everyone is suited to the pace. I had accepted that. I needed to accept that. My mother's medical bills had been sitting on my kitchen counter for three weeks in a stack that I turned face-down every morning so I could get through breakfast. My savings account had a number in it that I did not look at directly anymore, the same way you do not look directly at something that frightens you, as though not seeing it clearly might keep it from being real. The salary Cole Whitmore's company was offering was more than I had made in the previous two years combined. I was not in a position to interrogate a pause. So I had come to the interview on the forty-seventh floor with my best blazer and my Columbia journalism degree and five years of experience that I had shaped carefully into a narrative of someone capable and trustworthy and relentlessly competent. I had answered every question with precision. I had not flinched when Cole Whitmore's head of operations, a silver-haired man named Gerald Hast, told me the hours would be brutal and the privacy expectations were non-negotiable and that Mr. Whitmore did not believe in the concept of unreachable. I had said that sounded fine. It had not occurred to me to Google Sasha Reeves. It occurs to me now. The morning moved around me in its Monday rhythm. People came by my desk to introduce themselves with the careful friendliness of colleagues who are still deciding how much of themselves to give a new person. I smiled and shook hands and committed names to the mental filing system I had been maintaining since college — faces on the left, names on the right, one distinguishing detail in the center to hold them together. There was Marcus from legal, tall and easy-laughing, who brought me a coffee without being asked and told me to come find him if I needed anything, and I thought he meant it. There was Diane from finance, fifties, precise, who welcomed me with a handshake that lasted exactly one second and informed me that the printer on the south wall jammed if you used anything heavier than twenty-four-pound paper. There were others whose names I catalogued and whose faces I filed and whose small, generous introductions I received with gratitude that I hoped did not look as desperate as it was. All the while, the note sat folded in the inside pocket of my blazer, against my ribs, and I could feel it there the way you feel something you should not have touched. Don't trust him. I had not yet met Cole Whitmore. He had been in New York for the final two weeks of my hiring process, apparently, and then in London, and then somewhere that Gerald Hast referred to only as unavoidable, and the entire machinery of the forty- seventh floor seemed to operate in his absence with the practiced ease of a body that had learned to function around a missing organ. Everyone knew what he wanted. Everyone moved accordingly. His presence, I was beginning to understand, was felt most clearly in the way people spoke about him — carefully, with a quality of attention that fell somewhere between reverence and something I could not quite name. Fear was too strong a word. Caution was closer. At nine fifty-three, my desk phone rang. The display showed an internal extension I had not yet mapped. I answered on the second ring. Ms. Chen. The voice was low and unhurried, the kind of voice that had never needed to raise itself to be heard. There was no introduction. He did not need one. I knew, in the way you sometimes know things before you have assembled the evidence, exactly who was on the line. Mr. Whitmore, I said. My own voice came out steady. I was quietly proud of that. I land at O'Hare at eleven-fifteen. I'll need you to meet me in the lobby at twelve- thirty with the Hartwell portfolio and the European market summary from last Thursday. The summary Gerald sent me has a discrepancy on page four that I'd like your read on before the two o'clock. A pause. I've read your file, Ms. Chen. I expect you'll find it quickly. The line went quiet. I realized he had ended the call without waiting for my confirmation. I sat with the receiver still at my ear for one long second, listening to the hum of a dead line, and then I set it down carefully and opened my laptop and pulled up the Hartwell portfolio and the European market summary from last Thursday, and I found the discrepancy on page four in eleven minutes, which I suspected was faster than anyone before me had found it, and I wrote a clean half-page analysis and printed it on twenty-four- pound paper because Diane had warned me about the printer and I was, above everything, a person who listened. And all the while the note was against my ribs. Sasha Reeves. Don't trust him. At twelve-twenty-five I picked up the portfolio and the summary and my clean half- page analysis, and I walked to the elevator, and I descended forty-seven floors toward the lobby of Whitmore Capital's Chicago tower, toward the man whose last assistant had left a warning in a drawer that was supposed to have been emptied, and I told myself what people always tell themselves when they are walking toward something they are not entirely sure is safe. I told myself I was going to be fine. I told myself I was different.