Out Of Tune

CHAPTER 2

DANIEL

I was not supposed to be in that alley. I was supposed to be upstairs in the Marlowe's private dining room, at a table set for six, smiling at people I had never met. My father's office sent the instructions at seven that morning. Lunch at noon. Gray suit. Be charming.

I wore white out of spite.

I lasted twenty-five minutes.

The Langfords were already seated when I walked in. He owned half the shipping on the east coast. Between them sat their daughter Victoria, who stood the moment she saw me and held out her hand like we had done this before.

She was beautiful the way a lit photograph is beautiful. Every angle decided in advance.

"Daniel. I've heard so much about you."

"I haven't heard anything about you."

Her smile didn't move. "That's all right. I sing. I model. Your father is helping with my album." She said it the way you read what's included in the price.

I looked around for my father. He is always the last to arrive at his own ambushes. He wasn't there. My phone buzzed. Three words from his office. Don't embarrass me.

Mrs. Langford folded her hands. "We were just saying. Spring would be lovely for the wedding."

I waited for someone to laugh.

"Whose wedding?"

Nobody laughed. Mr. Langford studied his water glass. Victoria's hand was still out, steady as furniture. "Ours," she said gently. "Your father didn't tell you?"

My father had not told me. My father tells me things after they can no longer be changed.

"Excuse me. I need a minute."

Her voice followed me to the door, pleasant and quiet. "You don't have to want it, Daniel. I don't need you to want it."

Caleb was waiting in the corridor, because Caleb is always already there. He has been my assistant for three years and my only reliable human being.

"The car is in the alley," he said, before I could ask. "Service door, past the kitchen. I thought you might want to leave without the lobby."

"Did you know about this?"

"I found out in the elevator, sir. Same as you. Almost."

At the steel door at the end of the kitchen, I turned to give my last order of the morning and pushed it open with my back.

Five minutes later I was in the back seat with one bare foot, and the word clown was going around my head like a song I hated.

"You paid her," I said.

"You told me to make her go away. I had to do something."

"I never said you could pay her."

"I know, sir. I'm sorry."

Crab with no sense of direction. Lamp post. Clown. The strange part wasn't the words. People insult me behind my back for a living, and they do it well. What I couldn't stop hearing was the way she said them, looking at me like I was nothing special. Like the suit, the car, the name, weren't even a language she spoke. She counted the money twice before she put it away. I have handed people ten times that amount and never once seen them count. She looked at three hundred dollars like it was the difference between something and nothing, and then she checked the time and ran.

My phone started up again on the seat. Father. I turned it over. "Find her."

"Sir?"

"The box had a name on it. Dobbs Delivery. Remind them that Friday is Friday."

"The shoes were thirty-six hundred, sir."

"The rest is an inconvenience fee. And I want an apology."

"She was owed one first, sir. You called her dirt."

I didn't answer. Caleb has been right about me for three years. I have never once told him so, and I wasn't going to start in the back of a car with cake on the floor mat.

At the penthouse, Ryan and Marcus were stretched across my couch, eating food I had paid for. Ryan had one of my watches on. He has never once asked to borrow one.

"Home early," Ryan said. "I thought you were meeting the future Mrs. Hughes."

"How do you know about that?"

"My mother has a group chat." He held up his phone. "Victoria Langford, Daniel. She did a toothpaste billboard. You're marrying toothpaste."

"I'm not marrying anyone."

"Then why do you look like that?" Marcus asked. He had not looked up from his plate.

I told them about the alley. Ryan put his hand over his mouth and laughed until he had to sit up. Marcus laughed a little, quietly, the way he does. Then he asked the only question that mattered.

"Did she know who you were?"

"No."

"That's why you can't let it go."

I didn't have an answer, so I told them to get out of my kitchen.

When they were gone, I played my father's voicemail once. His voice was low and even, which is how it sounds when he is angriest. A man does not leave a table of guests without a word. Be home at eight. We will discuss it. I deleted it before it finished.

My father has never once asked me what I want. He has only ever asked what I am worth, and then arranged to have it collected.

Caleb came back at three. I was alone on the couch in a fresh shirt I had been wearing for exactly forty minutes.

"The owner says he's never heard of her," Caleb said. "But he looked like a man doing arithmetic when I said the word Friday. He'll pass it on, or he won't. Also, the Marlowe pastry cook says a girl came back with another cake from across town, out of breath, pink down the front of her shirt. She paid for it herself."

"With the money you gave her."

"As far as the cook could tell, she didn't keep any of it."

I said nothing, which Caleb noticed.

"Where is the shop?"

"A neighborhood called Eastgate."

I knew that name. It had been on my calendar for weeks. A community center my father's company was funding, one afternoon of me smiling next to poor people for the cameras. Tuesday. I had been dreading it. Now, for some reason, I kept thinking about a girl in a pink shirt running down a sidewalk with a cake box, and the dread had company.

At eight, I stood in my father's study with the lights of the estate spread out beyond the glass, a small city he owned privately. Thomas Hughes has never raised his voice in my hearing. He has never needed to.

"Mrs. Langford asked whether my son was ill," he said, without turning around. "I told her you were nervous."

"I wasn't nervous. I was ambushed."

He turned. "Victoria is intelligent, she is ambitious, and she wants this. Do you know how rare it is to be wanted by someone honest about why?"

"She wants the name. Can't you see that?"

"Everyone wants the name, Daniel. She at least says so."

"You could have asked me first. Does what I want matter at all?"

"I could have. You would have said no, and I would have spent a month talking you into a decision I had already made." He straightened a pen on his desk that did not need straightening. "We will revisit the Langfords after Tuesday. Tuesday you are in Eastgate. There will be press. You will shake hands, you will smile, and you will not insult a single person."

"Eastgate," I said. "Tuesday."

"Is that a problem?"

"No, sir."

It was the first time in my life I had said it without sarcasm. He looked at me for a long moment, the way you check a child for a fever.

"Why are you smiling?"

I didn't know I was.