Somewhere Between Us

The espresso machine hissed like it resented her, same as it had every morning for the past two years. Zoey Adams didn't blame it. Some mornings she resented it right back. "Order up, one flat white, oat milk, extra shot," she called, sliding the cup across the counter to a man who didn't look up from his phone long enough to say thank you. That was fine. Nobody said thank you before eight a.m. in Midtown. The café sat two blocks from the building where she worked her second job, which meant she had exactly nineteen minutes between shifts if the subway cooperated and considerably fewer if it didn't. Today it hasn't cooperated. She'd sprinted the last four blocks in ballet flats that were not built for sprinting, and her feet were letting her know about it now, in a language of blisters. "You're doing the same thing again," said Priya, wiping down the counter beside her. "The math thing. Your face does this—" she mimed, a kind of squinting calculation,"when you're adding up how much you're behind." "I'm not behind. I'm precisely on schedule for being slightly underwater." "That's not better." "It's not worse, either." Her father used to say pride was the most expensive thing a person could own. He'd said it fondly, like it was a family trait he was proud to have passed down. It had been more than a decade since the fire that took him, an accident, the official word, though the insurance settlement had never quite matched what they'd been promised. Grief eventually stopped being sharp and became more like a low hum in a room she'd learned to live in. She noticed it now, mid-espresso shift, for no particular reason, and pushed it back down where it belonged. Her shift ended at eleven. Her second job, transcription work for a law firm, done from a laptop balanced on her knees on the 6 train, in waiting rooms, anywhere with Wi-Fi and a flat surface, started whenever she could squeeze it in. Today that meant a coffee shop three blocks south, which was how she ended up, an hour later, sitting one table away from the loudest phone call in Manhattan. "No, no, tell Whitfield if he wants the Singapore numbers by Friday, he can wait for the Tokyo numbers like everyone else." A pause. A laugh, low and unbothered, the laugh of a man who had never once in his life worried about a phone bill. "Tell him, I said that. Word for word. I want to see his face." Zoey typed faster, trying to drown him out, and lost the thread of her transcript twice. She glanced up, mostly to glare, and found the man already looking at her, amused, unrepentant, phone still pressed to his ear like he had all the time in the world, which, judging by the suit, he probably did. "Hold on," he said into the phone, and then, to her, without lowering his voice at all: "Am I bothering you?" "Extraordinarily." "Good." He went back to his call. She stared at him for a second too long before catching herself. He was infuriatingly good-looking in the specific way of men who'd never had to try, dark hair that fell into place without effort, an expensive watch he wore like it was an afterthought, a mouth that curved like it was perpetually one word away from a smirk. She hated him a little on principle. He hung up two minutes later and turned his chair toward her table with the easy confidence of someone who'd never been told no often enough for it to stick. "You're very committed to that glare," he said. "I respect it." "I'm working." "On what?" "Not talking to strangers, apparently, since I'm failing spectacularly." That got a real laugh out of him, surprised, like she'd landed a punch he hadn't seen coming. "Dylan," he said, offering a hand she didn't take. "I don't need your name. I need you to lower your voice by approximately sixty percent." "That's oddly specific." "I'm an oddly specific person." "I'm starting to notice." He glanced at her screen, the wall of transcribed legal jargon scrolling past. "Court reporter?" "Transcriptionist. Different thing. Court reporters get benefits." "Ah. And what's job number two? Since I'm guessing there's job number one that involves that apron, I can see it hanging out of your bag." She hadn't realized it was visible. She shoved it deeper without answering, which he seemed to find funnier than if she'd actually replied. "You're not going to tell me." "I'm not going to tell you anything. I don't know you. You interrupted my work by being loud, and now you're interrupting it by being nosy. It's a real theme with you, I imagine." "It's been mentioned." He didn't look remotely chastened. If anything, he looked more entertained, chin propped on his hand, studying her like she was a puzzle he'd decided, arbitrarily, to solve before lunch. "You're very good at this." "At what?" "Making it extremely clear you find me insufferable while somehow still being interested in it." "I contain multitudes." "Clearly." He stood, finally, buttoning his jacket with one hand while the other found his phone again, already half-distracted by whatever had lit up the screen. "I'd apologize for the noise, but I'm not sorry, so I won't insult you with one." "How refreshing." "I try." He paused at the edge of her table, and for just a second the smirk eased into something more curious. "Good luck with whatever's got you counting numbers you're not saying out loud." Then he was gone, out into the noise of the street, leaving her oddly rattled by the fact that he'd noticed at all. She told herself it didn't matter. Strange, charming men who talked too loud on the phone were not, in any version of her life, a category she had room for. She went home to her mother's apartment in Sunset Park, made dinner for three people on a budget meant for two, and didn't think about him again. Much. It was four days later when the call came, not from Dylan, whose name she hadn't caught anyway and wouldn't have remembered if she had, but from a woman with a clipped, professional voice who introduced herself as calling on behalf of Sterling Industries and asked, with no context whatsoever, whether Ms. Adams would be available for a meeting regarding "an employment opportunity of a personal and confidential nature." "I think you have the wrong number," Zoey said. "I assure you we don't. Mr. Sterling was quite specific." Sterling. The name settled into place slowly, uncomfortably, alongside a memory of dark hair and an unrepentant laugh and a business call about Tokyo numbers. Her stomach did something complicated. "What kind of employment opportunity?" she asked, already knowing, somehow, that the answer would upend everything she thought her life was going to look like for the next year. "Mr. Sterling would prefer to explain that himself," the woman said. "Tomorrow, two o'clock, if that works for your schedule." Zoey glanced at the bills stacked by the door, thought of Micah's cleats and her mother's prescription and the rent that never quite stopped being due, and said yes before she'd fully decided to.