Page 3 of Belong to Me
Kaye is saying something. Conference room. This way. He turns to follow her. He is a few steps past me when he glances back.
Just once. Over his left shoulder. His eyes find mine like he already knew where I’d be.
Then he’s gone. Through the glass doors, into the conference room, and Kaye pulls the door shut behind them, and the lobby exhales.
Blythe is beside me. I didn’t hear her arrive.
“Anton Almazov,” she tells me, and her voice has the same careful neutrality from the billing-code conversation, except now it’s laced with something drier. “Ace Royale casino. Biggest client Keyes has ever landed. His family owns half the waterfront.”
I’m still facing the conference room doors. Through the glass, I can see the shape of him, dark suit against the white chairs, and Kaye across the table, and his hand lifting in a gesture that is fluid and easy and sends something through my chest that I have no yellow tab for.
“Daisy.”
I turn.
Blythe is assessing me like she assessed my pre-cut tabs: with the faint surprise of someone who expected something predictable and got something she’s still deciding how to categorise.
“You’re doing the thing,” she tells me.
“What thing?”
“The thing where a girl from Idaho stands in a marble lobby with a colour-tabbed file and forgets how to blink because a man in a dark suit has grey eyes.” She picks a piece of lint off my jacket. “Don’t do the thing.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.
“He’s a client,” I manage.
Blythe’s expression does something complicated. “Yes,” she agrees. “He is.”
She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t need to. Her turn back toward our desks carries the weight of something she has decided not to tell me, and I stand there in the lobby with my Marchetti file and my sensible flats and the ghost of a grey-eyed glance still burning a hole in my peripheral vision, and I think:Tab it blue, Daisy.
I go back to my desk. I file. I tab. I do not think about grey eyes or smiles that don’t connect or how he glanced back like he was making a note of me in a system I can’t see.
Just before five, my desk phone rings.
“Fletch. My office, please.”
Kaye is standing behind her desk when I come in. The harbour is behind her, all blue and gold, and the late-afternoon light makes her hair glow like a halo, and she is smiling at me with an expression I will remember for a long time.
Pride. Like I’ve done something right. Like this is the beginning of everything she brought me here for.
“Sit down, sweetheart.”
I sit.
“Mr. Almazov has requested you be assigned to his account.”
The harbour burns behind her. The world tilts. And something in my chest, something I don’t have a tab for yet, something that is neither red nor blue nor green nor yellow, catches.
Chapter 2
DAISY
I’ve colour-tabbed the file three times.
Red for litigation. Blue for compliance. Green for correspondence. Yellow for the two clauses in the retainer agreement that don’t match the billing code but that Blythe told me to stop asking about. I’ve squared the spine, aligned the tabs so they cascade down the right edge in exact quarter-inch intervals, and clipped a summary sheet to the inside cover with the client name, account number, and a timeline of key dates that nobody asked me to prepare but that felt necessary.
The file is immaculate. I am not.
