Chapter 3 THE INTERVIEW THAT WASN’T AN INTERVIEW
Sienna
It took Helen two days to turn Natalie Reeve into someone else, and she did most of it at the kitchen table with a pair of sharp scissors and a glass of wine she never touched.
Long ropes of tea-colored hair dropped onto spread newspaper. Sienna watched them fall with mild interest, the way she might have watched a stranger’s luggage go by on a belt. By Wednesday night the hair was dark auburn, cut blunt at the collarbone and blown straight, and the woman in the hall mirror had a mouth that looked as though it had never said sorry to a piece of furniture.
The transformation was not limited to the hair. Helen changed the small things first, because small things were what people remembered without realizing they had remembered them. Natalie wore soft cardigans, practical shoes and silver glasses that softened her face. Aurora wore fitted trousers, low black heels and a white silk blouse beneath a charcoal jacket that made her shoulders look straighter. Natalie looked at the floor when someone challenged her. Aurora looked directly at the person and waited for them to finish embarrassing themselves.
Even Sienna had to admit that Aurora looked like the kind of woman who would read a contract before signing it and send it back with corrections in the margins.
“Again,” Helen said.
“Aurora Jett. Twenty-nine. Six years at Calloway Brandt in Chicago, executive assistant to a managing partner who retired in March. I came to Ravenhurst because my sister’s husband took a position at the university.”
Sienna’s voice had dropped half an octave and lost every trace of Ohio. What was left was dry and level and unhurried, the voice of a woman who was never late and never asked whether she was.
Helen walked a slow circle around her. In the lamplight she looked like someone’s favorite aunt, and she smelled of the same gardenia soap she had used for nine years.
“He will look for Natalie,” she said. “He’ll look at your face first, because everyone does, and then he’ll look at the rest. People forget faces, darling. They remember what you did with them. So you give him nothing of her. Not the apology, not the shoulders, not the hand.”
“The hand.”
Helen took Sienna’s left wrist and closed a heavy silver bangle around it. It was cold, and it weighed about as much as a paperweight.
“Wear it on this side. You can’t tuck a hand into a sleeve when it’s holding up that much metal.”
Sienna turned her wrist and felt the weight pull her fingers down and away from her cuff. Helen had known about the tell for nine years and had only now decided to use it, and Sienna did not know how she felt about that.
“He’s seen my face, Helen. A haircut won’t change that.”
“It doesn’t have to change it. It only has to make him doubt it.” Helen’s smile was patient. “Aurora doesn’t apologize. She says of course, or she says nothing at all. Say it.”
“Of course.”
“Lower. As if you’d already done it.”
“Of course.”
“Better.”
Sienna looked at herself in the mirror and tried to see Aurora instead of the woman who had stood at carousel six with a suitcase between her and a stranger who noticed far too much. It was harder than she expected, and not because the disguise was poor. Kade Blackwell had already seen the woman underneath it, the one who had snapped at him and teased him and refused to surrender a suitcase because a handsome man demanded it. Aurora had never met him. Natalie had, and that line had to hold absolutely.
On the table, beside the scissors, a phone lit up and buzzed against the wood. The screen showed one letter, M., and nothing else. Helen turned it face down without a flicker, the way a person closes a door on a draft.
“Business,” she said.
Sienna knew what that word usually meant. When Helen said business, someone was about to lose money, or information, or a life they would never quite get back, and Sienna had survived nine years by not asking which until it was too late to matter. She let it go for almost a minute. She lifted her chin for the mirror, said of course once more under her breath, and watched Helen sweep the cut hair into the center of the newspaper.
Then she heard herself say, “M.?”
She knew it was a mistake before it landed. Helen’s hands stopped on the newspaper. Her expression did not change, but something behind her eyes closed, briefly and completely, like a shutter coming down over a shop window.
“Not your concern.”
That was all, and it was enough. Helen’s secrets were locked rooms. If Sienna found one, she did not open it unless she was prepared to live with whatever was inside, and she was not yet sure she was prepared to live with anything.
“Four-thirty tomorrow,” Helen went on, folding the newspaper into a neat parcel as though the question had never been asked. “The agency has you as the last interview of the day. He sees every candidate himself. It’s his famous peculiarity, and Arthur is furious about it.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know everything about his office, darling. That’s why you’re going.”
Sienna turned back to the woman in the mirror. Aurora Jett had no childhood, no school photograph, and no neighbor who remembered what she had looked like at twelve. The name was clean, which was what made it useful, and for reasons Sienna could not have explained, it was also what made her feel so strangely empty.
The forty-third floor of Blackwell Tower smelled of expensive carpet and mild dread.
Sienna sat in the waiting area with her résumé on her knee and counted candidates. Five had gone in ahead of her, and five had come out. The first emerged after forty minutes, flushed and clutching her bag like a life vest. The second took the stairs rather than wait for an elevator. The fifth came out in nine minutes with the glazed look of someone who had been asked what she would do if she were wrong, and had answered honestly.
She watched each one the way Helen had taught her to watch, which was by looking bored. She noted who carried a phone, who checked her reflection before going in, who was offered water and who was not, and she learned from the receptionist’s face that the people on this floor were trained to look calm even when the person stepping out of the elevator made them nervous. It was a disciplined floor, and it suited the man who ran it.
Beyond the glass, an empty desk faced the elevators. It was a good desk, the kind chosen by someone who liked to see who was coming. The chair had been pushed in square. A single pen stood in the cup, and the blotter still carried the pale ring of a mug that no one had washed off. Six years of a person’s Tuesdays, and one morning had cleared them away.
Sienna did not need to ask whose desk it was. She had seen the woman’s photograph on Helen’s desk late on Monday night, neat and unsmiling in front of a glass door, and she had heard Helen say pleasantly that Roseline Wilbur did not know yet. Whatever had emptied this chair had been decided in the same study where Sienna’s own hair now lay folded in newspaper. She looked at the pen in its cup for as long as Aurora Jett could reasonably look at an empty desk, and then she looked at the carpet, because there was nothing on Aurora’s face that could be allowed to belong to that knowledge.
“You must be the one Priya’s been panicking about.”
A man dropped into the chair beside hers as though he had been invited to it. Twenty-six, lean, dark-haired, with a loosened tie and a smile arranged to be the first thing anyone noticed, which meant it was also the thing meant to stop them noticing the rest. He had his brother’s jaw. On him it looked like an accident rather than an argument.
“Arthur Blackwell,” he said. “The amusing one.”
“Aurora Jett.”
“You’re not on my list.”
“The agency told me I was added Wednesday night.”
“By whom?”
“I assumed by someone who wanted me here.”
Arthur grinned, and for a moment it was nearly real. “I’m going to like you. It’s a flaw. I like everyone.” He tipped his head toward her résumé. “Calloway Brandt. They don’t let anyone leave Calloway Brandt.”
“They let me, once I stopped asking permission.”
“Ha.” He lowered his voice, though the waiting room was empty except for the two of them and a potted fig. “Between us, my brother eats assistants for breakfast. If you want to survive on this floor, it helps to have someone upstairs who thinks you’re charming. I’m very good at thinking people are charming.”
It was an offer with the hook already set in it, and Sienna had been given enough of those to read the barb under the bait.
“Of course,” she said, in the low voice, as if she had already accepted.
His eyebrows rose. Then he stood and offered his arm like a man at a cotillion. “Come on. I’ll sit in. Kade’s been tired all week.”
She took his arm because refusing would have been stranger than accepting. As they walked toward the conference room she caught the two of them in the glass, Arthur relaxed and she composed, and neither expression telling the truth. That, she suspected, was how things worked on Kade Blackwell’s floor.
The conference room had a lake for a wall. Beyond the glass the rain slid down in long gray sheets, and the water beyond the city had gone the color of a bruise. At the head of the table, with his jacket off and his sleeves turned back to the forearm, Kade Blackwell sat reading her résumé as though it had personally disappointed him.
He did not look up.
“Ms. Jett.”
“Mr. Blackwell.”
“Sit.”
She sat.
The bangle struck the glass table with a small bright click, and across from her a woman with a legal pad and the expression of a referee who had not been consulted, Priya Nair, the human resources director, wrote something down. Arthur took the chair at Kade’s right, as though the meeting had been waiting for him.
Sienna kept her breathing even. The man at the head of the table was the man from the airport with everything unnecessary taken away. There was no wet overcoat now, no loosened tie, no irritation over a suitcase. He did not display his authority here. It simply occupied the room with him, which made him more dangerous, and made her painfully aware of a question she could not answer: whether he had forgotten her, or was only waiting.
It was a strange thing, to face a man who had been so expressive at carousel six and now offered her nothing at all. His eyes stayed on the page. His pen tapped, slow and even, against the margin of a pad squared to the table’s edge.
She could do this, she thought. Natalie was a woman who filled silences. Aurora let them stand until they were uncomfortable for everyone else.
“Let’s skip greatest weakness,” Arthur said easily. “Aurora, a hypothetical. My brother asks you to tell the board something that isn’t strictly true. What do you do?”
Priya’s pen paused.
Kade’s did not.
“I ask him what he needs the board to believe,” Sienna said. “Then I look for the true version of it.”
“And if there isn’t one?”
“Then I tell him there isn’t, and I tell him before the board does.”
“Diplomatic.” Arthur leaned back, delighted. “You’d be amazed how rare that is. Honestly, we’ve had candidates who looked wonderful on paper and wilted by week two. Roseline was a rock, and it’s a lot of rock to replace. We’d need someone who won’t cry in the supply closet.”
It was meant kindly, which was what made it contemptible.
Sienna felt her chin dip and her eyes lift, a look she had aimed at a hundred men who had mistaken her for furniture, one that needed a pair of glasses to finish it. She had not planned it. It was the look her face had learned to make over the rims of a pair of plain silver frames at midnight, and her face remembered it better than she did.
The tapping stopped.
She heard it stop before she saw it. Across the table the pen had gone still against Kade’s pad. He had not raised his head. But the silence where the tapping had been was louder than anything Arthur had said, and in it Sienna understood that she had just done something she could not take back, without knowing what it was.
She smiled, level and untroubled, and held it. The bangle felt heavier on her wrist than Helen had promised.
“Interesting,” Kade said at last.
It was the first word he had spoken that was not part of the interview.
Arthur looked between them. “What’s interesting?”
Kade ignored him and returned to the résumé. Sienna kept her hands still on the glass.
“I think we’ve seen enough,” Arthur said. “Priya, draw up an offer. Monday start, standard package, and we’ll save my brother the trouble of—”
“I said I would interview every candidate.”
Kade had still not raised his voice. He had not raised his head, either, and the quiet was somehow worse for it.
“Arthur. Take Priya and see about the paperwork. Ms. Jett and I aren’t finished.”
“It’s past six. She’s the best of the lot, and—”
“Now.”
Arthur’s smile stayed where it was. His jaw did not. He rose with a little salute to Sienna, as if they were conspirators, and followed Priya out. The glass door swung shut behind them and sealed the room into the rain.
For several seconds neither of them spoke. She could hear the ventilation and the rain on the glass, and beyond the door the ordinary sounds of a corridor full of people who had no idea that anything in this room had changed.
Kade turned a page of her résumé, though there was nothing left on it.
“Calloway Brandt.”
“Six years.”
“And before that?”
“A temp agency in Seattle, and a university department that no longer exists.” She said it lightly, as if it had become a joke over time. It was the one part of the story that was true.
He nodded. He squared the résumé against the edge of the pad. Then, for the first time since she had entered the room, Kade Blackwell raised his eyes, gray and steady and entirely without surprise, and held hers.
“You moved here recently.”
“Last week.”
“Then you’ve been through the airport.” He said it as one might remark on the weather. “Which carousel did your bag come out on, Ms. Jett?”
The rain went on against the glass. In the corridor, faintly, she could hear Arthur laughing at something Priya had not said.
Sienna looked at him. If he knew, he would have said so. If he did not know, he would not be asking. She had one second to decide which of those was worse, and every answer she could give him, true or false, would put her somewhere she had not chosen to be.
