What He's Been Hiding

Chapter 1

Claire Bennett had eleven dollars in her checking account, a mother three months into recovery from surgery that she still didn't have the money to pay for, and just four minutes until her interview was set to begin on the thirty-second floor of Whitfield Tower.

The elevator wouldn't work.

"Come on," she mumbled again, pressing down the button, as if anything had ever been resolved by pressing that button.

She had set out one hour earlier, allowing her to factor in the time for traffic between her apartment and the park, the time to park at the designated lot, and the time to wait in line at the visitor's security desk to exchange a driver's license for a laminated badge. She had no intention of the elevator stalling between floors on a day when she was too busy to be anything but perfect. She wasn't sure what would happen if she returned to temping, to the string of short contracts that never seemed to be enough for rent and her mother's drugs. She had already done the calculations on her savings twice this week. It didn't work either time.

It was okay. The first lie she told herself that day. Not the last.

The lights dimmed, and the car shook and sank half a foot before hitting hard, slamming her against the wall. It made her stomach roil.

She pressed the emergency button. "No, no, no." Nothing. She pushed it again, and harder, as if it was missing something—the volume.

A bored voice came through the speaker. "Building maintenance, please hold."

Claire checked the time. Just a few more moments. She pressed her hand flat against the wall and began counting her heartbeat. She counted just as she had done as a child when she would wait for her parents with fear and worry, though she had no idea the reason for the fear. She counted—one, two, three, four, and so on—until time passed and distractions became more important than the fear.

A minute passed. Then another. The car sat motionless. Claire began to worry about the structure of the building. She swore she heard a strained metallic groan coming from below.

"Hello?" she called out, displeased with the tremor in her voice. "Is anyone... I have to get to something, with somebody."

A soundless hiss was the only response to her call, the motor of the car stalled.

The car door opened, trapping her in the space between floors. Crouched there was a man, desperately prying at the door frame with a flat tool.

"Don't move," the man said without looking up. He sounded miserable and incredibly displeased to have to address yet another annoyance on an already terrible morning. "The car's not stable."

Claire couldn't hold herself back. "I wasn't planning to tap-dance."

That garnered his attention. He looked up, and for a quick moment something like amusement flashed through his expression—a face that had the look of someone who had not slept properly for days. He had faint shadows under his eyes, a tight jaw, and a tie that had been loosened, like he had given up on it a while ago.

“You’re not injured?”

“No. Just inconvenienced and about to become unemployed.” She looked at her watch again. “Do you work for the building?”

“Something like that.” He did not want to say more, and Claire had the feeling he would not elaborate. “I was already down here—this car had a third malfunction this month, and the contractor keeps assuring it’s fixed. I wanted to see for myself before I fired them.” He tested the gap with his hand. “We can get you out through here. Take my hand.”

She did. He pulled her through the gap abruptly and let go as soon as her feet were on the thirty-first floor.

“Thanks.” She brushed some dust off her blazer. She felt deflated that he had not even offered a smile.

“Good luck with wherever you’re going.” He was already focusing on the gap again with tool in hand. A maintenance worker jogged up, shouting something about a reset switch. Claire had no time to ask for his name. She had one flight to ascend, and there was no time for anything but running.

---

The conference room on the thirty-second floor had three sides of glass, with the sunlight spilling on one side of the long table. Waiting were two people. One was Patricia Reyes, a woman with a sharp gaze and shorter patience, who had no interest in making pleasant the fact that Claire had interrupted her with her entrance. The second, to Claire's horror, was the man from the elevator, now in a suit and somehow more at ease, despite Claire's assurance that he was as real as her imagination had made him.

"Ms. Bennett," Patricia said. “You are two minutes late.”

"There was an elevator incident."

“There is always an elevator incident.” Patricia still had no interest in making her entrance more pleasant as she held her place in her folder. “This is James Whitfield.”

Claire’s stomach dropped once again. “We’ve met.”

James’s mouth twitched, now almost smiling. “Briefly.”

Patricia's gaze switched from the two of them to the folder in her hands. “Walk me through an instance when you made an error that cost your company money or time. Be certain you are not giving me a mistake you are trying to use as a humble-brag.”

Claire was unprepared. “I misfiled a client renewal date, and we lost the account. I didn't find out until it was too late.”

“What did you do?”

“I told my supervisor, and built a tracking system as a measure to ensure it would not happen again. I hear it is still in use.”

“Convenient story,” Patricia said. “How do I know you are not simply presenting a story you think will sell in an interview?”

"You don't," Claire replied. "You'd need to hire me to find out."

Nobody spoke for a moment. Almost as if he was talking to himself, James said, "I like that answer."

Patricia gave him a glare that indicated he had exactly one more comment before this would turn into his interview instead of hers. Then she continued. "Tell me about a time when you dealt with a thoroughly difficult person. Not just someone having a bad day. Someone truly difficult."

"There was a case where a client was going to sue over a deadline that he missed," Claire explained. "I remained calm, continued to communicate with him, and kept a record of every single email, letting the record do the talking for me."

"And what happens if you weren’t able to keep the record? What if it was just his word against yours?"

There was a slight pause as the air conditioning kicked on. She could smell the freshly brewed coffee that had gone cold in the carafe that no one had touched. "Then I would continue to keep a record from that moment on, and I would make sure that it didn’t happen again. You can’t go back and change what already happened."

Patricia continued to keep a straight face to hide that she was actually taking notes on what Claire had said.

James was the only one who actually leaned forward and spoke. "What if I told you that for a personal matter I couldn't explain to you, we needed to move a meeting? What would you say?"

"Move the meeting. I wouldn't ask why at all, unless it changed what you needed from me."

"And what if that actually changed what I required from you?"

"Then I'd need what I could use to help you, not what I could use to gossip about you. They are two different things."

He studied her for what seemed like too long. All of a sudden, he was a man who, for the first time that morning, seemed to have been taken by surprise.

---

Two days later, she got the call. Patricia's voice was brisk over the phone. "You start Monday. Don't be late."

She didn't tell her boss how close she was to not being able to pay her phone bill that week, or how she had cried from relief in her kitchen.

Whitfield Dynamics built battery storage systems for power grids. By the end of her first week, the technology had become interesting. Whitfield was six weeks from launching technology to power grids with a huge competitive margin, and half the office was afraid it wouldn't be done on time.

Daniel Ortiz, the head of operations, was the first person she met. He offered her a handful of trail mix and introduced himself with a mouthful of it. "Ortiz. Don't worry, I always look like this." He was wearing socks with cartoon flamingos. "James goes through assistants like coffee filters. No offense."

"None taken," Claire said, and registered the first thing she liked about him.

Sophie Marsh from comms always talked too fast and always apologized for it. Her words waffled on about the dangers of James’s calendar and left Claire breathless. Patricia glanced at Claire as she passed her in the corridor and said exactly four words: “Don’t disappoint him." Her eyes continued their cold indifference.

By Thursday, Claire caught an error in a vendor contract for the first time. It contained a clause that no one else had seen, which would have cost the firm a delay of two weeks. Claire’s hands were shaking slightly as she printed the contract. *What if,* she thought, with her stomach in knots, *she had made a mistake only to show up in front of a man with no tolerance for mistakes?* But she did walk to James’s office, and knocked twice before he motioned for her to walk in without looking up.

James read the contract twice. Claire caught the sound of Sophie's fast heels as they tapped past the door and the ding of the elevator down the hall. Something softer was behind James’s eyes as he looked right at her and began to calculate again. “How long have you been here. Four days?”

“Five,” she said, bracing for the expected scorn that mercifully didn’t come.

“Good catch.” That was it. But it seemed like this was a rare phrase for him. Claire was caught off guard with even more reason to seem pleased the rest of the day. This pleasure distracted Claire enough to make her smile at her computer. When Daniel asked her what was funny, she had to pretend there was something funny in an article just to keep focused.

---

Claire always looked closely at what was around her. Protein bars were kept in James's desk and remained stocked. During conversation, he seemed to have a sudden urgency to check his watch, a habit that caused his brow to furrow. The drawer in his credenza was off-limits to everyone, according to Patricia. A courier frequently dropped off confidential documents signed only by James, who always signed his name with white-knuckled intensity, as if holding on for dear life.

Separate, not one of these observations meant anything, but together, James set off every warning instinct she had honed as a paralegal over two years. She learned that people were like the contracts she studied: full of inconsistencies, but patterns would always remain. She couldn’t tell if he was protecting his health, his company, or something else.

Some nights, she ran through the options on the drive home, speeding with the radio off and the city lights blurring past. She reminded herself that it was not her business. She decided it wasn't her business and said nothing. At least not yet.

After three weeks, she stayed late to finish all his reports before his next flight. The office was empty, and James was still working. Gold and silver light spread across the city outside. The deep silence of the building surrounded them. James sat at his desk with his sleeves rolled up, his tie gone.

"Go home," James said, still focused on his work.

"You first," she replied from the doorway.

"After this."

She lingered anyway. "Can I ask you something?"

He looked up, tension in his expression. "Depends."

"You've seemed off today. More than usual."

He was quiet, leaving her to take in the silence of the office and the remnants of his last coffee, which was now cold. "Long week," he said finally. Not a lie, exactly, but she couldn't say it was the whole truth either.

"Okay," she said, focusing back on the report. "I'll leave this here."

"Claire."

She froze. It was the first time he had used her name.

"Thank you," he said. "For not pushing."

"I figure you'll tell me when you're ready. The contract says the same, yeah?"

"That's the deal."

His expression relaxed, approaching a smile.

"Goodnight, Claire."

"Goodnight."

She was almost at the elevator when, from behind her, his phone started to ring. With no other office noise to cover it, the ringing echoed through the empty floor. She heard him pick it up, and his voice changed completely. It was flat, it was sharp, and it was suddenly devoid of any of its previous warmth.

"Say that again," he said. "Slowly."

Claire stayed still.

Through the glass wall of his office, she watched every bit of color drain from his face. Whatever he was hearing, it wasn't a work problem. It was something else—something that made his free hand grip the edge of his desk as if the floor had suddenly gone completely unbalanced under him.