Chapter 8: The Woman With Cold Eyes

The message sat on my screen like a bruise.

Stay away from him. You have no idea.

I read it six times. Seven. I turned it over in my mind the way you turned over something sharp you had found on the ground, carefully, trying to understand what it was before you decided whether to pick it up or leave it where it was.

No name. Unknown number. Those words and nothing else, sitting in my phone at three in the morning like a small deliberate grenade.

I should have ignored it.

I knew even as I was getting out of bed and padding to the kitchen to make coffee at seven in the morning that the sensible thing, the logical thing, the thing that a woman who had made a clear headed business decision the night before should do, was to delete the message and get on with her day.

I did not delete it.

I was still staring at it over my first cup of coffee when my phone rang. Damien’s number this time, clean and identifiable on my screen, and I picked up before the second ring because apparently my body had already made its decisions about him entirely independent of my brain.

“Good morning,” he said. His voice in the morning was slightly lower than it had been across a restaurant table. Slightly rougher at the edges. Like something that had not yet been fully assembled into its daytime version and I needed to stop noticing things like that immediately.

“Someone sent me a message last night,” I said. “From an unknown number.”

A pause. Shorter than the ones he usually permitted himself.

“What did it say?”

I read it to him word for word. The silence that followed was a different quality from his other silences. Tighter. Controlled in a way that suggested something moving quickly underneath the surface.

“I’ll send a car at ten,” he said. “We need to talk in person.”

“Damien.” It was the first time I had used his first name. It came out of my mouth naturally and then sat between us on the phone line doing something I had not anticipated. I heard him go very still on the other end. “Who sent it?”

Another pause.

“I think you already know,” he said quietly.

He hung up.

I stood in my kitchen in my oversized sleep shirt with my coffee going cold in my hand and the morning light coming pale and thin through my single window and thought about a woman named Victoria Haines who had apparently suggested her ex fiancé hire a companion and then sent that companion a threatening message in the middle of the night, and tried to make those two things fit together into a shape that made sense.

They did not fit.

The car arrived at ten exactly.

This one was different from the car he had sent the night we met. Longer. Darker. The driver held the door open with the same seamless discretion but the interior when I slid in was warmer somehow, more deliberate, like something that had been prepared rather than simply summoned.

There was a small note on the seat beside me.

I picked it up.

We’re not going to my office. I thought somewhere less formal. D.

Twenty minutes later the car stopped in front of a building on the Upper East Side that announced itself with the quiet confidence of old money. Not a hotel. Not a restaurant. A residence. Tall and grey stoned and set back slightly from the street with a doorman who nodded at the driver like they knew each other.

I stepped out onto the pavement and looked up at the building and understood that I was about to go inside Damien Cole’s home.

The elevator opened directly into the apartment.

I had prepared myself. I had told myself in the car that it would be large and expensive and impersonal the way I imagined billionaire apartments to be, all glass and grey and carefully curated emptiness. A space designed to impress rather than inhabit.

I was wrong.

It was large, yes. The ceilings were high and the windows that ran the length of the far wall showed a view of Central Park that made my breath catch in a way I had to work to conceal. But there were books everywhere. Real ones, lived in ones, with broken spines and pages that had been turned too many times. There was a jacket thrown over the back of a chair in a way that suggested someone had come home tired and not cared where it landed. There was a half finished cup of coffee on the kitchen counter and a sketchpad on the low table in the center of the living room that stopped me completely.

A sketchpad.

I looked at it and then looked up and found him standing in the kitchen doorway watching me notice it with an expression I could not read.

“You draw,” I said.

“Badly,” he said. “Sit down Mia.”

He said my name differently than he said everything else. Everything else he said with precision and economy, each word placed exactly where he intended it. But my name he said like it was something he was allowing himself rather than something he had decided on, and I sat down on his couch and pressed my knees together and told my nervous system to behave itself.

He brought coffee without asking if I wanted it, set it on the table in front of me, and sat in the chair across from me. Not beside me. Across. Like he was being careful about distance. Like distance was something he was actively managing.

I noticed. I filed it away.

“Victoria sent the message,” he said.

“I thought you said she suggested this arrangement.”

“She did.”

“Then why.”

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees and looked at the coffee table for a moment before he looked back up at me. In the morning light of his own apartment he looked different than he had in the restaurant. Less assembled. More real. There was a tiredness around his eyes that the dim golden lighting of Eleven had concealed and it made him look younger somehow and considerably more dangerous to my peace of mind.

“Victoria suggested the arrangement because she genuinely believed it was the right thing,” he said.

“She and I have reached a place of understanding about our history. But understanding something with your head and accepting it with everything else are two different experiences and sometimes the gap between them opens up at three in the morning.”

I looked at him. “She still has feelings for you.”

“She has complicated feelings,” he said carefully.

“About many things.”

“Including you.”

“Including me.”

I wrapped my hands around the coffee mug he had brought me and let the warmth of it seep into my palms and thought about a woman sending frightened messages in the dark to a stranger she had never met, and felt something unexpected move through me. Not quite sympathy. Something more complicated than that.

“What don’t I have any idea about?” I asked. “That was the rest of the message. You have no idea. No idea about what?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Outside his windows Central Park spread itself out in the pale October morning, all bare branches and grey sky and the particular melancholy beauty of a city settling into the cold.

“There are things about why Victoria and I ended,” he said slowly, “that are not simple. Things I am not yet certain how much to tell you.”

“You agreed to be honest with me,” I said. “Last night. That was my condition.”

“I know.”

“So be honest.”

He looked at me across the coffee table and something in his expression shifted. That careful composure he wore like a second skin developed the faintest crack, and through it I caught a glimpse of something I had not expected to see on the face of a man like Damien Cole.

Something that looked very much like fear.

He opened his mouth.

And then his front door opened.

Not knocked. Opened. With a key.

I turned around.

The woman who walked in was tall and blonde and dressed with the effortless precision of someone who had never once in her life had to think about whether she could afford what she was wearing. She was beautiful in the way that certain women were beautiful, like a painting that knew it was being looked at. Her eyes swept the apartment and found me on the couch in approximately one second and something moved across her face that she controlled almost immediately but not quite fast enough.

She looked at Damien.

“Victoria,” he said. His voice was completely level. “This is not a good time.”

Victoria Haines looked at me with eyes that were very blue and very cold and very carefully composed, and then she smiled. It was the kind of smile that had nothing warm in it at all.

“So,” she said softly. “You’re the girl he rescued.”

She said rescued the way you said a word you found slightly distasteful, delicately and with precision, like you wanted to make sure the person you were speaking to understood exactly what you thought of it.

I set my coffee mug down on the table and stood up slowly because I was not going to have this conversation from a seated position.

“And you’re the woman who sent me a message at three in the morning,” I said.

The smile on Victoria’s face flickered.

Damien stood up from his chair.

And the three of us stood in his living room with Central Park grey and quiet behind the windows and the air between us pulled tight as a wire, and I understood in that moment that whatever secret Damien had been about to tell me was not something Victoria wanted me to hear.

Which meant it was exactly the kind of thing I needed to know.

“Sit down Victoria,” Damien said quietly.

Victoria looked at him. Something private and painful moved between them in the silence, the kind of thing that only existed between people who had once known each other completely and now had to navigate the wreckage of that knowledge.

Then she sat.

And what she said next made the floor drop out from underneath everything I thought I understood about Damien Cole, about this arrangement, about why a man who owned half of Manhattan had been standing alone in the rain on a street in the Bronx on a Thursday night.

It made sense of everything.

And it changed absolutely everything.