Chapter 4

Dominic

My alarm went off at five fifteen every morning.

Not because it had to. I was usually awake by five, lying in the dark with my mind already running through the day’s schedule. But the alarm was part of the sequence, and the sequence was non-negotiable, so it went off at five fifteen and I silenced it in one clean motion and got up.

I ran first. Six miles, same route, same pace. No music. Music suggested the present moment needed improving. I used the time to think instead.

This morning I thought about Vantage & Cross.

The acquisition had closed three weeks ago. It was the fourth integration I’d overseen, and it ran the same way the others had—six weeks of due diligence, two weeks of negotiation, and then the quiet administrative work of absorbing a company that didn’t necessarily want to be absorbed. The upper management definitely had feelings about it. Vantage & Cross was a mid-size literary publisher, with a respectable backlist, two commercially reliable imprints, and the typical overconfident financial management that had led to its ultimate demise.

I showered and dressed in my usual charcoal grey suit and white shirt. I stood at the kitchen counter with my coffee and the morning briefing notes that my personal assistant, Priya, sent at five forty-five every morning without fail. Priya was excellent. She understood that late information cost the company money.

The Vantage & Cross integration summary was third on the list.

Staff restructuring on schedule. Backlist catalogue transfer proceeding. Current contracts under review. One item flagged.

Lennox, Cara — contract for third novel cancelled prior to acquisition. Royalty obligations for existing titles transfer to Hale Media Group per standard terms. Note: recent media coverage may affect backlist performance. Monitoring.

I didn’t know the name. I made a note to have Priya pull the sales figures and moved on.

I crossed the street to Groundwork at eight forty-five, as I did every morning I was in the office.

The coffee at Hale Media was adequate. The coffee at Groundwork was excellent, which mattered because I was not a person of wide-ranging appetites. I knew what I liked. I ordered the same thing. I sat at the same table—rear left, wall at my back, sightline to the door. The staff knew me well enough that my order was started when I walked in and my table was kept clear until nine. I hadn’t arranged this. It was simply what happened when you were consistent enough for long enough.

I nodded to the barista, collected my coffee, and went to my table.

I opened my laptop.

I had been sitting for approximately four minutes when I noticed her.

She was by the window.

I hadn’t registered her on the way in. She’d been looking down at her screen, and I didn’t scan rooms for people, I scanned them for anomalies. She was definitely an anomaly. Something in my peripheral vision snagged and held.

Blue dress. Cream cardigan. Two braids that had been neat at some point that morning and were now coming undone in small increments. She also had a laptop open in front of her. She stared at it with great intensity. I could see a page of text reflected in the large tortoiseshell sunglasses that had been pushed up on her nose despite the fact that she was indoors and it was November.

She was completely wrong for this environment.

I looked back at my screen.

She reached up and took the sunglasses off her head and set them on the table, and I saw her face properly for the first time. No makeup, or very little. It was a young, pretty face with flawless skin and a cute nose that was wrinkled with concentration. She was chewing the inside of her cheek and didn’t seem to know she was doing it.

She wrote something, her fingers moving rapidly. Then she stopped and looked out the window at my building. Her eyes softened into the unfocused gaze of someone whose mind was somewhere else entirely.

I tried to focus on my work and had to read the same sentence four times.

I was not a man who got distracted. I had no patience for it in others and none for it in myself. Distraction was just another word for a mind that hadn’t been properly organised. I closed the Vantage & Cross file, opened the morning’s acquisition proposals, and applied myself to them with the focused efficiency that had built everything I owned.

She pushed her braids back over her shoulder and leaned into her laptop, as if leaning into it would make it work faster.

I scowled at my computer and vowed that I would not look up again until my hour-long working coffee break was over.

When the clock on my laptop ticked 9:45, I looked up, and my eyes immediately searched for the woman by the window. But the woman with the braids had left the building, and the barista had already cleared away her empty cup.