“Sit still.”
“Dom.” It was the first time she had ever used it. Her voice was raw, barely there, and her hand found the sheet and twisted it. “I didn’t leave.”
“I know.”
“I left at 11:30. I got to the lobby and I went back up. I had the folder and I was going to put it in your hands and then I was going to go home and I was never going to—” She stopped. Her chin trembled once and she bit down on it. “The doors opened and it wasn’t you who walked out. It was him, and he said you knew, he said you told him to handle it, and I thought — God, I thought you’d let them use my name.”
Dominic’s throat worked. He looked at his hands on the rail of the bed, the hands that had pulled her out of the snow.
“I saw you go up,” he said.
The room was very quiet.
“My phone lit up at 11:31. Lobby access, forty-first floor. And I looked at it, and I turned back to my glass, because Sloane was talking and I didn’t want to hear anything except what I’d planned to say at midnight.” He stopped. “Four minutes later you were in a stairwell, and eleven minutes after that I was standing in the snow holding you, and I have never in my life been anywhere at the right time.”
Emma stared at him. A tear slid sideways into her hair and she did not wipe it.
“Planned to say,” she said.
Dominic reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, which no one had made him take off in twenty-two hours, and took out a square of yellow paper, folded twice, soft at the creases from being handled.
He held it out. She took it with both hands because only one of them worked properly, and she unfolded it, and read four words in sharp black handwriting.
*Dinner. Friday. Just us. D.M.*
Underneath, in a different ink, as if the pen had pressed hard and hesitated: please.
“That was at 6:50,” he said. “That’s why the contracts said handle when you can. There was no deadline, Emma. There was never a deadline. I wanted you in the building, and I couldn’t think of a single sentence that wouldn’t make me sound like a man who doesn’t know how to ask.”
She was quiet for a long time, the note lying open on the sheet, her thumb resting on the word please.
“You nearly didn’t ask,” she said. “You almost never did.”
“I know exactly how close it was. I’ve had twenty-two hours to count.”
At 7:05 a.m., a black car pulled up under the canopy and Victor Sloane got out of it wearing a cashmere overcoat and a look of practiced grief, flanked by his lawyer, a state alderman, and Judge Hargrove, and he came through the ICU doors like a man arriving at his own house.
“Dom. Thank God. I came as soon as I heard. The girl’s whole family must be—”
“Sit down, Victor.”
Something in the tone made the alderman stop mid-step. Sloane kept smiling, though, because Sloane had been smiling through thirty years of rooms exactly like this one, and he lowered himself into a chair and set his gloved hands on his knees.
“I’ve been on the phone all night. I’ve spoken to Ray, I’ve spoken to your people upstairs. This was a terrible accident, an ICE accident, and the family shouldn’t have to read anything ugly about this firm—”
“There was no accident,” Marco said.
He had come in from the corridor with his old notebook in his hand, and he stood beside the vending machine with the light on his face, and Sloane looked at him the way you look at a piece of furniture that has started to speak.
“Marco. Go home. You’ve had a long—”
“At 10:58 last night you authorized a maintenance shutdown of the alley camera. At 11:28 you called me and asked where the girl went. At 11:33 you met her in the lobby and pointed her toward the service stairwell, and at 11:36 Kessler and Dunn walked her out of her own building.” Marco turned a page. “And at 11:12, from your car, you left a voicemail for Kessler that I think the federal prosecutor is going to listen to more than once. You said, ‘Handle it. I don’t care how. She has copies and I want them back before the ball drops.'”
The corridor seemed to tighten around the room.
Sloane’s smile did not move, but everything behind it did. “That’s a servant’s notebook and a servant’s imagination. Dom, this man has been with you long enough to know which stories you’ll believe—”
“Eleven months of escrow transfers,” Dominic said, “routed through your nonprofit, carrying my signature. She found them in October. She spent eleven weeks putting them in order instead of running, because she wanted to give them to me in person, and you spent eleven weeks deciding which of us to bury with them.”
