He thought about how that conversation would go. A janitor walking into the CEO's office to tell her the fleet her father built might have doctorred safety records with nothing to back it up but a thumb drive and a gut feeling. She'd laugh him out of the building or worse, she'd believe him and it would blow up in ways he couldn't predict yet in a company already one bad headline away from losing her the corner office. 3 weeks he thought he had 3 weeks before the gala before he'd be back in a cockpit with her name on the tail and every camera in the city pointed at them both. He closed the laptop and told himself that was enough time to be sure before he said anything at all.
He was wrong about that, though he wouldn't find out how wrong until it was almost too late to matter. 40 blocks up town, in an apartment with better views than his and none of the warmth, Marcus Vance poured himself a drink he didn't taste and stared at a phone that had gone quiet after one last instruction delivered in that same unhurried voice. Watch him say nothing yet. Some men, the voice had said, were more useful standing exactly where they already stood. For now, Marcus set the glass down and told himself he could live with that for now, and didn't quite believe it either.
The three weeks before the gala moved fast in the way weeks do when two people are pretending not to count the days. Dany still worked the third floor most mornings, mop and card and all. But four afternoons a week, he traded coveralls for a flight suit and ran pre-flight checks with the chief mechanic while Viven watched from the hanger door with a clipboard she rarely looked at. She told herself she was there for liability reasons. She told herself that every time and every time it got a little less convincing.
You're doing it again. Dany said one afternoon without turning around. Doing what? Standing there like you're timing me. I'm making sure my company's investment doesn't end up in the East River.
Sure you are. He tightened a bolt on the tail rotor housing and glanced back at her. Something easy in it that she still wasn't used to. You could just say you like watching. Don't flatter yourself, Whitfield.
Wouldn't dream of it, Miss Callaway. But she stayed until the checks were done. Same as she had the day before and the day before that, and neither of them mentioned it out loud. Mia met her by accident on a Tuesday when a scheduling mixup left Dany without a sitter and Viven without the good sense to send him home instead of letting a seven-year-old spend an hour in the corner of her office with a coloring book. "Are you the lady my dad's marrying? " Mia asked.
Halfway through a purple giraffe. Vivien nearly choked on her coffee. "Your dad told you about that? " "He didn't have to. He does the smiling thing when your name comes up. " Mia held the giraffe up for inspection. He hasn't done the smiling thing since before mom left.
Viven didn't have an answer for that either and found standing in her own office in her own building that she'd run out of the sharp words that usually came so easily. Dany appeared in the doorway a minute later, breathless from the elevator and took one look at his daughter's face and Viven's expression and seemed to understand exactly how much damage had already been done. "She's a menace," he said. "I apologize for whatever she said. She's honest.
Viven said it's a nice change around here. They ended up ordering pizza, the three of them. Because Mia refused to leave until she'd finished the giraffe and then refused to leave until she'd started an elephant. And somewhere in the space of 2 hours, Vivien Callaway found herself sitting cross-legged on her own office floor in a $5,000 dress holding a purple crayon a 7-year-old had assigned her without asking. "You don't have to stay for this," Dany said.
Low. While Mia argued with herself over which shade of green belonged on an elephant's ears. I know you're the CEO of a company with 40 floors. You could be doing literally anything else. I know that, too.
She colored inside the lines with more care than the task probably deserved. I don't want to, though. Is that a problem? He didn't answer right away. And when she looked up, he was watching her with an expression she hadn't seen on him before.
Something unguarded that made her feel for a second like she'd caught him without his coveralls on in the truer sense of the phrase. "No," he said finally. "Not a problem. " Mia looked between them, unimpressed by whatever had just passed over both their heads, and held up the elephant for approval. "Is this good? It's perfect, bug," Dany said, and meant the wrong noun, and neither of them corrected him.
Later, after Mia had fallen asleep on the office couch under Viven's suit jacket, and Dany had called a cab he couldn't quite afford to carry her home in, Viven walked them both to the elevator, and for one strange, quiet moment on the 40th floor of a building her father built. She let herself imagine what it might feel like to have somewhere to be at the end of a day that wasn't this office. "Thank you," Dany said at the elevator doors. Mia asleep against his shoulder. For today.
Don't get used to it. Viven said, though there wasn't any heat left in it, and they both knew that, too. Marcus Vance's mystery backer had a name. Though Marcus was careful never to say it out loud where anyone could record it. He said it now low into a phone in a parking garage two blocks from the office.
The kind of place chosen precisely because nobody who mattered ever went there. The pilot's a problem. Marcus said he's not just flying the thing. He's asking questions about maintenance records. My contact in the hanger says he's been pulling files.
Then handle it, the voice said, unbothered. Handle it. How? Fire him. And he goes straight to a lawyer with a thumb drive.
Or worse, straight to her. A pause on the line. Patient. The kind of patience that came from decades of getting what he wanted. Richard, you worry too much for a man in your position.
Marcus flinched even though there was no one there to see it. He hated when the old man used his first name like that, like a leash. I'm not worried. Marcus lied. I'm careful.
There's a difference. Be careful then. Quietly. The gala is in 2 weeks. After that, none of it will matter and you'll have the corner office you've been circling for a decade.
A soft, satisfied exhale, assuming you don't do something foolish before then. The line went dead before Marcus could answer, which was, "He'd come to understand exactly how Richard Callaway liked to end every conversation. " Marcus stood alone in the garage a long moment, replaying the name he'd let slip, hoping it wouldn't matter, already knowing that it would. He didn't drive home right away, he sat in his car for 11 minutes with the engine off, staring at nothing, and pulled up a photo he kept buried three folders deep in his phone. A picture from a Christmas party a decade ago. Vivien at 19 in a paper crown some intern had put on her at the office party, laughing at something her father had said.
Marcus had been the one to take that photo. He'd liked her back then, the way you like the kid of a man who trusts you with things that matter. He put the phone away before he could look at it any longer and told himself the way he'd been telling himself for 2 years now that there wasn't a version of this that ended with him walking away clean. So, there was no sense pretending the guilt would change anything. Dany found the last piece two nights before the gala, sitting in his kitchen with Mia asleep down the hall, and a stack of printouts spread across the table like evidence at a trial nobody had asked him to build.
The tailrotor gearbox on the aircraft scheduled for the flyover had been serviced 11 days ago by a technician who didn't exist. Not officially, the badge number on the work order belonged to a man who'd left the company 8 months earlier and moved to Arizona. Verified by a two-minute phone call Dany made under a name that wasn't his. Someone had used a dead man's credentials to sign off on a repair that, according to every manual Dany had ever memorized in a decade of flying, should have grounded that aircraft for a full week. He thought about calling Viven right then.