Chapter 2 Coffee

Nora's POV

The doors slide open, and I nearly walk straight into his assistant's empty desk.

Nobody's sitting there. That's the first wrong thing. Meredith is always at that desk, always, guarding Emory Sutter's office like a dog guards a bone. Today her chair is pushed in neatly, and her computer screen is dark, and the door behind her desk stands open just a crack, waiting for me.

I make myself walk toward it. My legs still haven't forgiven me for the train platform.

"Close the door behind you."

His voice comes before I even see him, calm and low, the kind of voice that's used to being obeyed without anyone asking why. I push the door shut and turn around, already rehearsing an apology in my head, for what, I don't even know yet, but three years of hiding teaches you to apologize first and figure out your crime later.

Emory Sutter is standing by the window with his back to me, phone in his hand, and for a second neither of us says anything at all.

"Sit down, Nora."

Nora. Not Josephine. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, and some of the ice in my chest starts to crack loose. Maybe that text really was just a typo. Maybe I imagined the whole thing, the way you imagine monsters in a dark room that turn out to be a coat on a chair.

I sit in the chair across from his desk, spine straight, hands folded in my lap so they can't shake where he'll notice.

He turns around, finally, and instead of firing me, instead of yelling, instead of anything I braced myself for on that elevator ride up, he crosses the room and sets a coffee cup down in front of me.

Not from the break room. Not from the cart downstairs. This one's in a real mug, the good kind, still steaming.

"You looked like you needed this."

I stare at the cup like it might be a trick. Bosses don't make coffee for the girl who answers phones on the third floor. Bosses definitely don't personally deliver it with the door shut and no witnesses. Every rule I've built my whole fake life around is screaming at me right now, telling me something here doesn't fit, something here is wrong in a way I can't name yet.

"Thank you," I say, because my mother raised me polite even when my insides are on fire.

I wrap both hands around the mug and take a sip, mostly to give my hands something to do besides shake. It's good coffee. Better than good. It's made exactly the way I like it, though I've never once told anyone at this company how I take my coffee.

That thought lands slow, like a stone dropping through deep water, and I almost miss what he says next because I'm too busy staring at the mug.

"You pour it just like your mother did."

The mug slips an inch in my hands before I catch it.

I don't answer right away. I can't. My whole body has gone very still, the way it does right before you touch something you already know is going to burn you.

"I'm sorry?" I manage, and my voice comes out smaller than I want it to.

"The way you're holding that cup. Both hands, thumb hooked through the handle instead of around it." He says it easily, like we're talking about the weather, like he hasn't just reached into a locked room in my chest and turned on the lights. "I only ever saw one other person hold a coffee cup exactly like that."

Nobody has said that sentence to me in three years. Nobody living is supposed to know enough about Diane Whitlock to notice something as small and stupid as how she held a coffee mug. I buried that woman's daughter in a lake off the Maine coast three years ago, and I buried the way she poured tea and the way she laughed too loud at her own jokes and every tiny detail that made her mine, because remembering costs too much when you're trying to disappear.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I say, and it comes out steadier than I feel, which is its own small miracle.

"No," he says. "I don't imagine you do."

He doesn't sit down behind his desk like a normal boss having a normal conversation. He leans against the edge of it instead, close enough that I have to tilt my head up to keep looking at him, and there's something in the way he's watching me now that I don't have a name for. Not suspicion exactly. Not kindness either. Something in between, patient and careful, like a man handling something he already knows is fragile.

My heart is doing something strange and unfair right now, something that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that when he looks at me like that, I forget for one whole second to be scared of him.

I hate that. I hate it more than I've hated almost anything in three years, because being scared kept me alive and this, whatever this is, this warm stupid flutter under my ribs, this is the kind of feeling that gets people caught.

"I have work to finish," I say, standing up too fast, coffee sloshing dangerously close to the rim. "If that's all,"

"It isn't."

Two words. Quiet. Final. The kind of words that close a door instead of opening one.

I stop halfway to standing, caught in that awkward space between sitting and leaving, and something about the stillness in his face makes the coffee in my stomach turn to ice.

"Sit down, Nora," he says again, and this time it isn't a request wrapped up as one. "We need to talk about the man who followed you to the train station this morning."

The mug slips completely out of my hands this time.

It shatters against the floor, coffee splashing dark across the pale carpet, and I don't even flinch at the mess, because every single thought in my head has narrowed down to one impossible question.

I never told him about the train station.

Nobody knows about the train station.

Nobody except me, and whoever was watching closely enough to see it happen.