Chapter Two — The Elevator Problem (1)

Mia Carter’s campaign of gentle tyranny accelerated with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had been practicing her entire life.

Day one: Elowen’s desk was “reorganized” to the corner by the printer, where the paper jammed constantly and the light flickered. Elowen, who had grown up in a house where the lighting alone cost more than most people’s mortgages, found the flickering almost soothing. It reminded her of the server room at the Voss family compound, which was the only place in the building where nobody talked to her.

Day two: Tasha, at Mia’s direction, “accidentally” deleted Elowen’s access to the shared pitch folder. Elowen noticed at 9:13, restored it from her local backup at 9:15, and said nothing. She had backups of everything. She had had backups of everything for three years. It was not paranoia; it was the only habit she had kept from the family business.

Day three: Mia announced, at the morning stand-up, that she would be “leading the Sterling & Vane presentation personally,” and that Elowen would be “support,” which everyone understood to mean: invisible. Dennis nodded. Marcus winced. Tasha smiled with her whole face, the way people smile when they are watching someone else’s fun.

“Elo’s not a presentation person,” Mia said, placing a hand on Elowen’s shoulder with the gentleness of a person testing a bruise. “She’s a behind-the-scenes girl. We all have our roles.”

Behind-the-scenes girl. Elowen looked at Mia’s hand on her shoulder and thought about the last person who had touched her without permission. He was a hedge fund manager who had tried to grab her wrist at a charity gala when she was nineteen. Her grandmother had made three phone calls, and the man had spent the next five years of his life explaining to regulators why he had, regrettably, chosen to retire from finance to pursue a quieter career in, as it happened, a country that didn’t extradite for securities fraud.

“Sounds good,” Elowen said pleasantly. “I’ll make sure the deck’s perfect.”

Mia’s eyes narrowed, looking for the trap, finding nothing, moving on. That was the thing about playing the houseplant. People assumed the pot was empty.

* * *

At lunch, Elowen escaped to her usual refuge: the coffee cart on the corner of Greene and Prince, run by a woman named Cec who made the best cortado in lower Manhattan and never, ever asked personal questions, which made her the most trustworthy person Elowen had met in three years.

“You look like someone scheduled a meeting about you,” Cec said, sliding a cortado across the counter with a raised eyebrow. She was a compact, sharp-eyed woman in her forties with forearms like a dockworker and a smile that suggested she was enjoying a private joke that had been running for years. “What’d they do, give your desk to the printer?”

Elowen blinked. “How did you—yes. Exactly that.”

“Girl, I’ve been watching those vultures for three years,” Cec said. “You’re the only one there who works. The blonde one—the one who walks like she’s at a fashion show for people who can’t afford the show—she’s been eating your lunch since before you had lunch.” She pushed a free pastry across the counter. “You’re too nice, hon.”

Elowen took the pastry. She had tried to pay for the pastries before; Cec had refused with the finality of a woman who had once told a very large man to get out of her cart and he had, without argument. “Nice is free. Drama is expensive.”

“Mm-hm.” Cec watched her with a fondness that Elowen, starved for affection, had decided not to interrogate. “And what do you do when the drama bill comes due?”

Elowen considered the question. She was, at that moment, the most unremarkable woman in SoHo, in a coat she’d had for fourteen years, drinking a four-dollar coffee, eating a pastry she hadn’t paid for. She was also the only person in the city who could, on a whim, buy the block, the cart, and the franchise that made the cups, and then have the street renamed after her family, which she would never do, because the street was already named after a different branch of her family.

“I pay it,” she said. “When it’s due.”

Cec’s smile widened, sharp and knowing and entirely too amused. “Good. I look forward to the collection call.”

Up the street, Mia strutted past with Tasha in tow, narrating loudly about a “private tasting” she’d attended, where—Elowen gathered—she had touched a bottle of wine that had cost more than her apartment. Tasha gasped on cue. Mia’s voice carried: “…and honestly, the sommelier could tell I was from a good family. Some people just have it, you know?”

Cec watched them go. She watched them with the serene patience of a woman who had once disarmed a man with her bare hands and had kept the story to herself for reasons of national security.

“That one,” she said to Elowen, nodding at Mia’s retreating back, “has no idea who she’s dancing in front of.”

“She thinks she’s the main event,” Elowen agreed mildly.

“Mm-hm. And you’re just the stage, huh?”

Elowen smiled. “The stage doesn’t dance.”

Cec laughed, a warm, rolling laugh that made Elowen feel, briefly, like she had done something clever. “You keep telling yourself that, hon.”

She did not tell Elowen that she had spent the last three years of her life pouring coffee across the street from Halcyon Creative, in a role she had invented for herself, because the single most important asset of the Voss family—its only heir, its little hidden ember—had decided to live out a disguise in SoHo, and someone had to watch her back while she did it.

Cecily Hart, former Director of Family Security for the Voss Consortium, three-time world-class operative in a discipline she was not allowed to discuss, looked at her heiress drinking a four-dollar coffee and thought, with genuine professional admiration: She could buy this whole block by noon. And she won’t, because she’s having the best time of her life being nobody.