Returning to my office with a coffee, I find that Nicole has arrived and is parked at her desk, laptop open, and staring intently at the screen. Hearing me enter, she glances up. She’s twenty-six, pretty, and petite, with curly light brown hair just below her chin.
“Oh, hi, good morning,” she says. “I hope you’re feeling better.”
“I am, thanks,” I say, forcing myself to get out of my own head for a minute. “You look so refreshed. I take it the trip was fun for you.”
“Fun enough, I guess. I wore SPF 50 every second, but I still ended up getting burned. . . . You want to go over what I sent you last week?”
Nicole is a terrific assistant and researcher and we get along well, but unlike Casey, she’s fairly reserved and no-nonsense, never much of a gabber.
“Um, yeah,” I say, sitting back at my desk. “And then I have a list of topics I’d like you to explore next.”
She rolls her chair closer to mine, dragging her laptop across the polished wood. Though I absorbed little from reading her notes, I’m able to fake it by skimming a few sentences ahead as we talk. I manage to ask several questions and request that she flesh out a few of her notes. But I’m still having trouble concentrating.
“You want to take a break?” Nicole says after we’ve been at it for about forty minutes. “I know you said you’d been under the weather.”
“I’m better now, but I didn’t sleep very well last night. So yes, let’s take a break.”
“No problem, I’ll get to work on these questions. And do you have any more stuff for me to proofread?”
“Uh, I’m actually a little behind cranking out new pages. Maybe next week, okay?”
She nods, not doing a good job of hiding her surprise. I never fall behind.
“You want anything from Starbucks?” she asks, rolling her chair back. “The micro roast here just doesn’t do it for me.”
“No, I’m good. But thanks.”
She rises and grabs her coat from the peg on the wall.
“Oh, before I forget,” she says, pausing. “I did a little digging on Greenbacks, per your request.”
“Find anything?”
“There’s a rumor floating around—wait, are you thinking of mentioning them in the book in some way? Because this is really gossip and it wouldn’t be right to include it.”
“No, not for the book.” I hold my breath. Could Sasha be right about something unethical going down there? “Definitely not for publication of any kind.”
“Okay, so it sounds like it’s about to be sold to some big financial services company.”
Ahh, the longed-for endgame. I take a few moments to reflect. I’d always known that a sale was Damien’s goal—without ever hearing it from his own mouth. Everyone knew it. What you aim for with a startup is to sell it eventually, take home several boatloads of dough, and be the secret and not-so-secret envy of everyone you know. A term of the sale might require Damien to stay on and run the operation for a period of time, but then he would be free (and very rich), able to start some shiny new company or sail across the Pacific Ocean or do whatever he damn well pleased. If the deal went through, of course.
“Good for them,” I say finally. “Did you hear any details?”
“About the sale? No, I’m not sure who the potential buyer is, though I could make a few guesses.”
“You didn’t hear anything negative about Greenbacks, did you? Irregularities or anything like that?”
“No, but there’d better not be if they’re really hoping for a sale.”
Exactly. If there’s been inflation with the number of accounts, like Sasha alluded to, and the buyer finds out during the due diligence process, it could kill the deal. And Greenbacks would be tainted.
“Well, thanks for the intel,” I say. “Since I worked there, I’m always a little curious.”
“I don’t blame you.” As she turns to finally leave, her gaze falls to the surface of my desk. “I would have cleaned up your desk area when I came in yesterday. But I always want to be respectful of your space.”
So the unaccustomed disarray caught her eye. I wonder if anything else did.
“Thank you, I was in a bit of hurry the last time I was here. . . . By the way, when you came back today, did anyone mention anything about me?”
“About you? I’m not following.”
“I worked really late one night, and I wondered if anyone had noticed or commented. I don’t usually hang out here after six.”
She looks at me as if I’m asking her a trick question. “No, no one said anything. I doubt anyone here would find it weird you were working late.”
Once she’s gone, I rest my elbows on the desk and drop my face into my hands. I don’t feel any real connection to Greenbacks anymore or to Damien, but it still bothers me to think that something bad might be happening there. Or that Sasha, in her foolhearted desire to transform herself from beauty blogger to muckraker, will cause people to think there’s trouble when there isn’t.
Regardless of what’s going on—or not—at Greenbacks, Damien would of course be pissed about the idea of Sasha nosing around. Or me nosing around if he thinks I really did put Sasha up to the call. I flash back on the bluntness of his first text to me the other day. Can we meet? I need to see you. And how the temperature dropped at the café when I mentioned the call to the company PR person. Maybe his interest in seeing me was never concern for my well-being but instead a fishing expedition. Even his coming to the bistro last night might have been nothing more than a ruse to learn more.
How stupid of me to allow myself to be touched by his texts and calls. I thought they were a sign that he’d cared more than I realized all those years ago.
I’m never going to be able to concentrate on work today, I realize. I scribble down a note for Nicole, saying something’s come up but I’ll email her later with her next assignment, and punch my arms into my jacket, desperate to get out of here.
But as I’m turning to leave, an unseen force tugs at me. I’d promised Mulroney a good look around and I need to be thorough. Bending slightly, I open the top drawer to the filing cabinet underneath my desk, which usually holds nothing more than a few empty hanging folders.
I almost recoil in shock. My purse is sitting there.
The soft black leather hobo bag that’s been missing for days. It’s crouched toward the very back of the drawer, like a little kid who’s been hiding in a game of Sardines.
I spin around and stare through the glass wall of the office. Across the hall, three people are gathered around a drawing table in a slightly larger office, their backs to me.
Swiveling back, I grab the bag and tear it open. My wallet’s inside, holding my license and the now-canceled bank card and credit cards, minus the one I used at Eastside Eats; my Metro card; and my WorkSpace key card. Rooting through the bag, I also find my apartment keys; rollerball pens; tiny Moleskine notebook; a comb; my makeup bag with blush, lipstick, and a Bobbi Brown foundation stick; a small Ziploc bag containing Claritin and Advil. There’s no cash, I notice, other than twenty cents in the change purse.
No receipts either, or scraps of paper teasing me with hints.