Page 4 of Danny

He didn't mention it.

Which means either he's forgotten — unlikely — or he's chosen not to.

And I can't figure out which one scares me more.

Outside, November hits me like a slap. Cold air, car exhaust, the smell of Manhattan at midnight — wet pavement, food carts shutting down, steam curling up from the subway grates like the city is breathing. I pull my coat tighter — a wool thing from Goodwill that's warm enough if I walk fast and button it to the throat — and head for the A train.

My feet hurt. The heels are going to be a problem. I'm going to need insoles, or different shoes, or entirely different feet. I'm also going to need to learn fourteen more types of whiskey by next week, and figure out how to carry a full tray across polished marble without dying, and stop thinking about the way Danny Sterling looked at me when he said first night — flat, unreadable, but with something behind it. Something that cracked open for a half second and then sealed shut.

I'm not going to think about that.

I'm going to go home, microwave the leftover lo mein in my fridge, sit on my bed in my apartment that's the size of a generous closet, and go over the whiskey list Matteo printed for me until I pass out.

That's the plan.

The plan does not include thinking about gray eyes or cedar cologne or the way a stranger's stomach felt under my palm — hard and warm and alive in a way that sent a jolt up my arm like I'd touched something electric.

The plan absolutely does not include any of that.

Just as I’m about to go down the subway steps, MetroCard in hand, I stop. I have that same weird feeling I’m being watched. I check the street quickly, but all I can see are people hurrying past trying to flee from the cold, and a big blacked out town car on the corner.

Danny

Ishould have fired her.

That's the correct move. That's protocol. The Sterling Club operates on a set of standards I built myself, brick by brick, over four years — and those standards exist because the alternative is chaos, and I don't do chaos. Every glass at the precise angle. Every napkin folded to spec. Every member greeted by name within four seconds of walking through the door, because if you're paying $250,000 a year for a membership, you deserve to feel like the building knows you're alive.

A waitress who dumps eighteen-year-old Macallan on the founder's chest does not meet the standard.

I stand in the bathroom on the Black Floor with my ruined shirt balled up in the sink and look at myself in the mirror. The Scotch has soaked through to the undershirt. The undershirt is done. The shirt is done. Three thousand dollars of Tom Ford, murdered by a woman with all the spatial awareness of a golden retriever puppy on a freshly waxed floor.

I peel the undershirt off and throw it on top of the shirt. There's still a faint wet mark on my stomach where the Scotch landed. And below that, the place where her fingers touched me, which I’m definitely not still thinking about.

She'd reached for me. Some kind of reflex — spill something, fix it. Her hand had landed on my stomach through the wet fabric, and my entire body had gone rigid. Like I was a fucking teenage boy, seeing a girl for the first time.

And not because I don't like being touched, although I don't. Because something happened in the half second between her fingers making contact and her yanking them away that I'm choosing not to examine.

I pull on a fresh shirt, straighten the collar and definitely do not think about a cocktail waitress’ fingers on my stomach.

I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up.

I should call Lola and tell her the new hire is a liability. I should tell her to fix it. Lola would handle it — Lola handles everything, has been handling everything since before I figured out how to run this place without her, which, four years in, I still haven't.

I open Anna Chester's personnel file on my phone instead.

Standard headshot. Brown hair pulled back, barely any makeup. That same soft, open face that had stared up at me from three inches away, damp with horror and Scotch fumes, mouth working around an apology that kept coming apart in her hands.

I should stop reading, right about now.

Twenty-six years old. Community college. Previous employment: Mama’s Diner, Ninth Avenue. Three years. Emergency contact: Patricia Chester. Mother.

No father listed. No partner. Nobody except the woman she's clearly grinding herself into the ground to take care of.

I close the file.

Open it again.

Read the whole thing a second time, slower, like I might have missed something critical between "community college" and "Mama’s Diner" the first time around. I haven't. There's nothing else there. Her life fits on half a page, and every line of it tells the same story — a woman carrying a weight she has no business carrying alone.