The CEO’s Paper Wife

Chapter 1 Claire I was good at it the way some people are good at piano or chess. It took practice, discipline, and a certain kind of stubborn pride. I arrived at Hart Global at seven-thirty every morning, before the cleaners had finished mopping the lobby. I left after nine, long after the glass tower had gone dark and the city beyond its windows had turned into a field of tiny lights. I fixed other people's mistakes, finished other people's reports, and stood quietly at the back of the room while other people took the bows. And every year, when promotion season rolled around, I smiled and told myself the same sentence. Next year. They will notice me next year. Eight years. Eight next years. That Tuesday morning, my alarm went off at five-forty, the way it always did. For a few seconds, I lay still in the gray light, listening to the old radiator knock on the wall like a neighbor who wanted something. My apartment was on the fourth floor of a narrow brick building in Brooklyn, with a view of a fire escape and, if I leaned out far enough, a thin slice of the river. It wasn't much. But it was mine, and I had paid for every inch of it myself. I got up, washed my face, and stood in front of the bathroom mirror longer than I needed to. A woman looked back at me. Twenty-eight years old, with wavy chestnut hair that never agreed with any clip, hazel eyes that always looked a little more tired than I felt, and a dusting of freckles I had spent my teenage years trying to hide. A small silver locket lay at my collarbone on a thin chain. I touched it the way I did every morning, without thinking, like checking that a door was locked. It had belonged to my mother. "All right, Mom," I said to the empty room. "Let's go do something brave." It was a joke we used to share. She would say it on the mornings I was afraid, before a school exam, before the first day at a new school, before the long, awful year I turned seventeen. Let’s do something brave, Claire-bear. Then she would wink at me over her coffee as if bravery were as simple as putting on shoes. She had been gone eleven years. I still said it anyway. The apartment was full of her. I don't mean ghosts, or anything dramatic. I mean books. My mother, Elaine Bennett, was an accountant, a quiet and precise woman who believed that numbers never lied and people only did when they were frightened. But she was also a reader, and when she died she left behind shelves and shelves of paperbacks with cracked spines and coffee rings on the covers. I had carried every single one of them through three apartments, and now they lined the walls of my living room from floor to ceiling, so that coming home felt like walking into a hug made of paper. Mark hated them. "It's like living in a library," he'd said once, laughing, the first time he stayed over. "Don't you ever think about, I don't know, donating a few?" I'd laughed, too. But I hadn't donated a single one. And a small, quiet part of me had noticed that he'd asked. I made my coffee. Mark's jacket hung on the hook by the door, and his running shoes lay kicked off near the mat, one on its side, the way he always left them. He wasn't up yet. He'd said he had an early meeting with an investor, a "make-or-break" breakfast across town, and the night before he'd kissed my forehead and said, "Wish me luck, babe." I had wished him luck. I'd wished him luck every day for a year. Mark Doyle was thirty and impossibly charming. He had the kind of smile that made waiters remember his name and strangers hold doors open for him. He could talk about anything with such easy confidence that you started believing him before you'd had time to check the facts. We had met at a friend's birthday dinner two years earlier. He'd made me laugh so hard I spilled my wine, and he had spent the rest of the evening apologizing for it as if he had been the one to spill it. I fell for the way he made the world feel simple. Later, he told me about the start-up. It was an app, something to do with connecting small restaurants to local suppliers. I never fully understood the details, and when I asked questions, he would squeeze my hand and say, "You don't need to worry about the technical side. That's my department. You just keep being you." Just keep being you. It sounded so kind. Last spring, the money ran short. He came home one night with a folder of papers and a look I had never seen on his face, something between shame and hope. "It's a bank loan," he said. "The bank just wants a cosigner. Someone stable." He took my hand. "I wouldn't ask if I didn't believe in this, Claire. I need someone who believes in me." Eighty-four thousand dollars. I remember looking at the number, and at the signature line beneath it, and hearing my mother's voice somewhere in the back of my mind: Read everything twice, Claire. Then read it again. I did read it twice. The language was dense, the clauses were long, and the numbers did what numbers always do when they are put in front of someone who loves someone. I told myself it was only paper. I signed. At 6:50, I stepped out into the cold. The street was still half asleep. A bakery down the block had its lights on, and the smell of warm bread drifted out and followed me to the corner. I walked fast, hands in my coat pockets, past the dry cleaner and the shuttered pharmacy. That was when I noticed the car. It was a long black sedan with tinted windows, parked across from my building, engine idling. I might not have noticed it at all, except that it had been there yesterday morning, too. And the morning before that. A man sat behind the wheel, too still, his face hidden in shadow. Someone's driver, I told myself. Someone rich, waiting for someone rich. But as I passed, I could have sworn the window lowered a quarter inch, as though whoever sat inside wanted a better look at me. I didn't turn around. I kept walking, my heart tapping quickly and lightly against my ribs, and I did not let myself run until I reached the corner. That was when my phone buzzed. An unknown number. A single line. Good morning, Miss Bennett. Please keep walking. You are being looked after. I stopped dead. The street behind me was empty, but I could feel it, the weight of a stranger's eyes between my shoulder blades. I had never given that number to anyone. And whoever had sent it knew, to the second, that I had noticed the car. Looked after. By whom? And why did it sound so much like a warning?