Page 4 of Belong to Me
Conference room three has glass walls. I can see Kaye at the far end of the corridor, walking toward me with a coffee in one hand and a smile that saysthis is the beginning of everything I brought you here for, and behind her, through two more panes of glass and the width of the lobby, Anton Almazov is signing in at reception, and even from this distance I can tell that his suit today is charcoal, not black, and his tie is a deep, burnt blue, and I shouldn’t know these things already but I do.
I’ve been in this conference room a while.
The table is long, white, polished to a shine that reflects the overhead lights in two strips. I’m in the chair closest to the door because it felt presumptuous to sit at the centre, and because if I need to leave, the exit is within reach. I don’t know why I’mcalculating exits. I’m a paralegal in a conference room with a colour-tabbed file. This is what I trained for. This is why Kaye brought me to Monaco.
The door opens.
Kaye comes in first. “Daisy, you remember Mr. Almazov.”
He’s behind her. He fills the doorframe like a man in a foreign film I used to rent from the Boise public library, and the comparison is so absurd that a tiny, hysterical part of my brain tries to laugh and the rest of my brain shuts it down with force.
“Miss Fletcher.”
His voice. I wasn’t prepared for his voice. On Friday he didn’t speak to me, not directly, and I’d built a version of it in my head over the weekend that was deep and clipped and European and impersonal. The real version is warm. Lower than I expected. There’s an accent that isn’t French and isn’t quite Russian, and it sits on the consonants like candlelight on the edge of a glass.
“Mr. Almazov.” I stand. Extend my hand. His grip is dry and brief and I let go first, which I’m proud of, and then I ruin it by gesturing at the file like a flight attendant pointing out the emergency exits. “I’ve prepared the account summary. The retainer agreement, all current correspondence, and a timeline of key dates are tabbed and cross-referenced.”
He pulls out the chair across from mine. Not the one at the head of the table, where clients sit. The one directly across from me, so that when he sits and leans back, we are separated by a stretch of polished white surface and nothing else.
Kaye takes the head. “Daisy has been exceptionally thorough,” she tells him. “Top of her class at Boise State. We’re lucky to have her.”
“Boise.” He picks up the file. His fingers find the first tab, the red one, and he opens to the page and his eyes move across the text before they lift to me. “Idaho.”
“Yes.”
“A long way from Monaco.”
“About five thousand miles.” The number comes out before I can stop it. I calculated it on the plane. I don’t know why I’m sharing this.
His mouth does something. Not a smile. The corner lifts, holds, and his eyes stay on mine, and the lift tells me he is either charmed or entertained and I can’t tell which and I’m not sure it matters because either way my face is getting hot.
“Five thousand miles,” he repeats. “And how are you finding the other end?”
“The coffee’s better here.”
Kaye laughs. Anton doesn’t. His eyes don’t leave mine. He turns a page of the file without breaking contact, and the gesture should be rude, dismissive, except that his fingers brush the yellow tab on the retainer clause, the one I added, the one Blythe told me to file blue and forget, and he pauses.
“You added a category.”
My pulse picks up. “Yellow. For items that don’t fit the standard coding but seem relevant.”
“Relevant to what?”
“To the overall picture. The billing structure has a discrepancy between the service description and the—”
“Daisy.” Kaye’s voice is smooth. Warm. A hand on the wheel. “Mr. Almazov is here to discuss the new account scope. Let’s stay on track.”
I close my mouth. The heat in my face changes flavour, from flustered to something closer to shame, and I sit back in my chair and fold my hands in my lap and I’m young and I just tried to flag a billing discrepancy to a client and got shut down by my own aunt, and I want to dissolve into the polished white table.
Anton closes the file. He doesn’t mention the yellow tab again. But his thumb rests on it for a beat too long before he sets the file aside, and when he sets it aside, he does it gently, and I don’t know what to do with that.
“So, Miss Fletcher.” He leans back. His jacket falls open, one button undone, and his hands settle on the armrests with the ease of a man who has sat in every conference room and owned most of them. “Tell me about yourself.”
I blink. “I—pardon?”
“Yourself. Where you grew up. How you ended up here. Whether you like Monaco.” His head tilts. “Personal questions.”
“I’m not sure that’s relevant to the account scope,” I manage, and from the head of the table Kaye makes a sound that might be a cough.
