Chapter 5 Because I Need You

Nora's POV

I'm out of the chair before I even decide to stand.

My legs just move, carrying me backward until my shoulder hits the wall beside his office door, and my hand fumbles behind me for the handle without my eyes ever leaving him. Two words. That's all it took. Hello, Josephine. Two words and three years of careful, exhausting work just came apart like wet paper in my hands.

"Don't," I say, though he hasn't moved from behind his desk. "Don't come near me."

"I'm not going to."

His voice stays low, steady, nothing like the voice of a man about to call security or the police or whoever it is that's supposed to come for people like me. That steadiness scares me worse than shouting would have. Shouting I understand. Shouting I could run from with a clear head. This quiet, patient thing he's doing feels like a trap dressed up as mercy.

My fingers find the door handle. I turn it half an inch before his voice stops me cold.

"I've known for six months."

I freeze with my hand still on the handle, my whole body caught between the door and whatever he's about to say next.

"Six months, Nora." He says my fake name as it costs him something, like he's choosing to use it out of some kind of courtesy I don't understand yet. "Since before I hired you. Since before you ever walked into this building for an interview."

The floor tilts under me again, the same way it did when I first saw my mother's name printed in cold black letters. Six months. That's longer than I've even worked here. That means every single day I thought I was disappearing a little further into Nora Bellamy's careful, boring life, he was standing somewhere behind the curtain, watching Josephine Whitlock hide in plain sight and saying nothing.

"You hired me knowing who I was."

"Yes."

"You've known the whole time." My voice cracks right down the middle of the sentence, and I hate that it does, hate that he gets to see exactly how deep this cuts. "Every meeting. Every project. Every time I sat across from you thinking I was just some assistant nobody would ever look at twice."

"Yes."

He doesn't flinch saying it. He doesn't look away either, which almost makes it worse, because a man with something to hide usually can't hold still like that. He just watches me fall apart from behind his desk with that same terrible patience, like he already rehearsed this exact conversation in his head a hundred times before I ever walked through the door this morning.

My hand slips off the door handle.

"Why?" The word comes out smaller than I want it to, stripped down to almost nothing. "Why would you do that? Why hire someone you knew was? " I can't even finish the sentence. There isn't a safe word for what I am. Fugitive. Fake. A dead girl walking around wearing someone else's name like a stolen coat.

"Sit down."

"I asked you a question."

"I know you did." Something shifts in his face, just barely, a crack in that careful calm. "Sit down, and I'll answer it. Standing by that door isn't going to change anything that's already happened."

He's right, and I hate that he's right, and I hate more that some small stubborn part of me actually wants to hear whatever comes out of his mouth next. I walk back to the chair on legs that still don't feel like mine and sit down slow, spine rigid, ready to bolt the second any of this turns into something I recognize as a threat.

"You should have turned me in," I say. "Six months ago. The day you found out. That's what people do, Mr. Sutter. They call the police, or they call whoever's looking for me, and they collect whatever reward comes with that name."

"Is that what you think I want? A reward?"

"I don't know what you want. That's the problem." My hands twist together in my lap so tight my knuckles ache. "You've had six months to turn me in, and you didn't. You've had six months to fire me quietly and let me disappear somewhere else, and you didn't do that either. So why am I still sitting here? Why aren't I already dead, or in handcuffs, or?"

My own voice gives out before I can finish. I press my lips together hard, refusing to let the rest of that sentence become real by saying it out loud.

He's quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I start to think he isn't going to answer at all, that this whole conversation is just some kind of slow cruelty designed to watch me unravel in real time before he finally does whatever he's been planning since the day he found out my real name.

Then he stands, comes around the desk, and crouches down in front of my chair so we're eye level, close enough that I can see something raw moving behind his composure for the very first time since I walked through that door yesterday morning.

"Because I need you," he says.

Three words. Quiet. Simple. Nothing like the cold, careful sentences he's used with me since this whole nightmare started twenty-four hours ago.

"I don't understand," I whisper.

"I know you don't. Not yet." His eyes hold mine, steady, unreadable, and something about the way he says it makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with fear anymore. "But you will. And when you do, I need you to remember that I could have turned you in the day I found out, and I didn't. Whatever happens next between us, that has to count for something."

I open my mouth to ask him what he means, what could come next that would need a woman with a dead name and a stolen life, a woman who isn't even supposed to exist anymore.

But before I can get a single word out, his phone buzzes once against the desk behind him, and he glances at the screen, and every ounce of color drains straight out of his face.

"We're out of time," he says. "He knows you're here."