She looked at the desk.
“I know what you’ve been managing,” he said. “For seven months.”
She said nothing.
“You should have told me.”
“No,” she said. “I shouldn’t have.”
“Nora—”
“You’re my employer,” she said. “In a company where what you are and what you do is considerably more complicated than the corporate structure suggests. I had no way of knowing what you would do with information like that. Whether it would be an asset to you. Whether it would be a liability. Whether I would be—” She stopped.
“Whether you would be what?” he said.
She looked at him.
“Whether I would become something that needed to be managed,” she said.
The room was very quiet.
Outside, the rain continued.
Marcus put his hands flat on the desk.
“I need you to tell me something,” he said.
“Ask.”
“Are you planning to disappear on Wednesday?”
She was honest.
“Yes,” she said.
“With my child.”
“With my child,” she said. “Who is also yours. I was going to — eventually. When I had established myself. When it was on my terms.”
“On your terms,” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked at her for a long time.
She held the look.
“Tell me what you’re afraid of,” he said.
PART 2
It was, she would think later, exactly the right question and she had not been prepared for it.
Not *why didn’t you tell me* or *how long did you think you could hide this* or any of the other questions that would have been easier to deflect, that she had prepared deflections for, that existed in the category of questions designed to reassert someone’s authority over a situation.
*Tell me what you’re afraid of.*
She looked at the desk.
“That you would decide,” she said.
“Decide what?”
“What my life looked like from that point forward. Whether I kept working here, or where I worked, or where I lived. Whether I was — an asset that needed to be secured, or a liability that needed to be managed.” She looked at him. “I’ve seen the way things work in this building. I’ve seen what happens when someone is a variable in a calculation you don’t control.”
He was quiet.
“You thought I would cage you,” he said.
“I thought it was possible,” she said. “And I had no way of assessing the probability. I’ve been working in this building for four years. I know the accounts. I don’t know you.”
“You knew me that night,” he said.
“That night was different.”
“How?”
“Because I forgot to be careful,” she said. It came out simpler than she had intended. “That evening — the conversation, the way the room was — I forgot what I was supposed to be maintaining. And when I remembered, I was already on the other side of it.”
He looked at his hands.
“I’ve been maintaining a distance,” he said.
“I know.”
“Not because of the situation. Because you were maintaining one and I was trying to follow your lead.”
“That’s — generous,” she said.
“It’s accurate,” he said. “I’m not generous. I’m accurate.”
She almost smiled.
He saw it.
“Tell me about the position in Seattle,” he said.