Chapter 1

There were two kinds of people at Hartwell & Voss, Rachel had long ago decided, and the division had nothing to do with seniority or salary or which floor you sat on. There were the people who did the work, and there were the people who were thanked for it. She had made her peace with belonging to the first kind. Mostly. On a good day.

It was half past seven on a Thursday, the office emptied to that particular hum of standby lights and a cleaner two rooms over, and Rachel Hartley was redoing a slide deck that was not hers to redo. The bid was due to the client at nine the following morning. The version she had been sent at five — final, the email had said, final final, with the little hopeful flourish of a thumbs-up emoji — had a chart on slide eleven with the axes transposed, a typo in the one number that mattered, and a closing line so limp she’d felt secondhand embarrassment reading it. So she was fixing it. She was always fixing things.

She did not think of this as a flaw. She thought of it as the reason the bids went out clean.

“You know there’s a whole evening happening out there,” said a voice from the doorway. “People having fun. Ring a bell?”

She didn’t look up. She didn’t need to look up; she’d have known the voice in a coma. “Some of us have a deliverable.”

“Some of us have a life.” Cal came in anyway, the way he came into everything, as though the room had been hoping he would. He had his suit jacket hooked over one finger and his sleeves pushed up his forearms, and he dropped into the chair across the desk from her without being asked, because being asked was for other people. “That’s the Meridian deck.”

“It is.”

“That’s my Meridian deck.”

“It was.” She turned the laptop a few degrees so he couldn’t see the screen, an entirely petty gesture she enjoyed enormously. “Slide eleven had the revenue and the headcount the wrong way round. You had us projecting that they’d grow their staff by four hundred per cent and their income by twelve people.”

There was a pause, and then he laughed — a short, real laugh, not the polished one he used on clients — and she hated, in a small and well-managed way, that she had made him do it.

“Did I,” he said.

“You did.”

“And you stayed late to fix it.”

“I stayed late because if it goes out like that, it’s the company that looks stupid, not just you.” It was an accusation that didn’t quite land. She knew he’d have charmed his way out of it by telling them it was a draft, blaming the printer, taking the buyer for a long lunch.

Because the thing about Cal Brennan — and Rachel had given the matter more thought than she’d ever have admitted to under oath — was that you could insult him with total accuracy and it would slide off him like rain off a waxed jacket. He was the firm’s top account manager and had been for three years running, and he was top not because he worked the hardest (he plainly did not) but because clients liked him, immediately and helplessly, the way you like a warm room after a cold walk. He was somewhere north of six foot with the kind of easy, unbothered handsomeness that doesn’t seem to cost its owner anything, dark hair he never quite kept tidy, and a way of looking at whoever he was talking to as though they were, just for that moment, the most interesting development of his entire week. Half the women in the office were a little in love with him and not one of them was embarrassed about it; it was treated as a known feature of the building, like the lift that stuck between three and four. He flirted with all of them and meant none of it and somehow nobody minded, because the flirting was a gift he handed out freely and asked nothing for.

He flirted with Rachel too. He had been flirting with Rachel, on and off, for the better part of a year, in the way a man tests a locked door now and again on the off-chance someone’s left it open. And Rachel had spent that same year being the one woman at Hartwell & Voss entirely, conspicuously, on-principle unmoved by him, and she had come to think of this as a small but important part of who she was.

“You think I don’t work hard,” he said. It wasn’t wounded. He was turning a pen over in his fingers, watching her.

“I think you’ve never had to.”

“And that bothers you.”

“It doesn’t bother me even slightly.” She kept typing.

He stood, and instead of leaving he came round the desk — not crowding her, just near, propping himself against the edge of it where he could see the screen, where she could smell whatever it was he wore, something clean and warm and irritatingly nice. He read the slide. “The line. It’s better than mine,” he said, quietly, and there was no charm in it at all, just a man telling the truth, and that was so much worse.

“I know.”

“You always know.” He looked at her, and the office was very quiet, and Rachel was extremely busy not being aware of how close he was standing. “You’re the most competent person in this entire building, and yet here you are, cleaning up my messes.”

“Do you have a point,” she said, “or do you just like the sound of your own voice?”

“My point is that you’re wasted here.”

She laughed mirthlessly. “So Adam tells me.”

“Adam.” He said the name the way you’d repeat the name of a town you’d driven through once. “That’s the boyfriend.”

“That’s the fiancé.” It wasn’t, strictly — there was no ring, there was an understanding, there was a conversation they’d had about the conversation they’d one day have — but she said fiancé the way you put your hand on a door to close it.

“Right,” said Cal. He nodded slowly, as if absorbing a fact of mild geographical interest. And then, because he was Cal, because no door went untested, he said, “Have dinner with me.”

“Nope.”

“I didn’t say when.”

“The answer covers all the whens.”

“You haven’t even —”

“Cal.” She turned in the chair and looked up at him, fully, for the first time since he’d come in, and she made her face do the thing her face was very good at doing, the flat clear executive no that ended meetings and returned undercooked food. “I’m not one of them. I’m not going to giggle and put my hand on your arm and tell my friends about the time the office heartthrob asked me out. I’ve got a deck to finish and a man at home who’d quite like to see me before midnight, and you’ve got — “ she gestured vaguely at the whole of him, the jacket, the forearms, the unbothered face — “wherever it is you go. So. No. Thank you for the chart, it gave me something to feel superior about.”

For a moment he just looked at her. But he didn’t look rejected. He didn’t even look surprised. He looked interested, the way he looked at a difficult client across a table, the way a man looks at a knot he’s just realised is going to be worth the untying.

“Too bad,” he said.

And he picked up his jacket and left, and she listened to him whistle something tuneless all the way to the lift, and she sat in the dark and discovered that her heart was going far too fast for a woman who had simply finished some slides.

She finished the slides. She told herself the heart rate was the deadline.

It was a long drive home.

Across the city, Cal let himself into a flat that was nicer than a man his age had any business affording, poured two fingers of something he didn’t really want, and stood at the window for a while with the lights off, thinking.

He was not, whatever Rachel believed, a stupid man. This was in fact the great secret of him, the thing the easy face was built to hide: that he saw everything, all the time, and filed it. He’d known within a month of Rachel Hartley joining the firm exactly what she was — the best of them, the engine in the boiler room, the one who’d never be thanked — and he’d known within a week of meeting her that she found him attractive and would rather have chewed glass than show it. Most people, when they wanted something, leaked it everywhere; you could read them like a departures board. Not Rachel. Rachel had sealed herself shut. She’d built a whole little fortress out of I’m not one of them, and she lived in it, and she thought the walls were secure.

He’d asked her out a dozen ways over the year, but never as explicitly as tonight. Lightly, deniably, the way you’d toss a coin into a fountain — never minding when it sank, because that wasn’t really the point. The point was that every no told him more. Tonight’s had told him the most of all. Too bad, he’d said, and he’d meant it, and he’d also already begun to wonder what a door like that would actually take.

A man who wants for nothing learns to want the few things he is denied.

He finished the drink he hadn’t wanted and went to bed, and slept the clean dreamless sleep of a man who has never once in his life failed to obtain anything he decided he wanted; and across the city Rachel lay awake beside a sleeping Adam, staring at the ceiling, telling herself, with the patient firmness of a woman managing a junior colleague, that she had not noticed how he smelled.

Adam was a good man. Rachel would have led with this in any honest account of him, and she’d have meant it without reservation, and she’d have noticed — if she let herself, which she generally didn’t — that good had quietly become the entire sentence rather than its opening clause.

They had been together five years. They had met at the wedding of mutual friends, in that brief window of her mid-to-late twenties when she’d grown tired of dating men who were a project, and Adam had been the opposite of a project: solvent, kind, on time, in possession of his own opinions about pensions. He worked in something to do with insurance underwriting that she had understood fully exactly once, during the early conversations when she’d still been paying the close attention you pay a stranger you’re deciding about, and had since allowed to blur into a comfortable noise. He cooked three meals well and rotated them. He remembered her mother’s birthday. He loved her with a steadiness that never spiked and never dipped, a pilot light of a love, and for five years Rachel had warmed her hands at it and called it the thing she’d wanted, which it was, which it genuinely was.

That he never quite saw her — that he praised her competence the way you’d praise good weather, as a pleasant condition you’d done nothing to earn and expected to continue — was not something she held against him. She held it against nobody. She had simply concluded, somewhere along the way and without any particular grief, that being seen was a thing that happened to people in the early part of their lives, before everyone settled into the shape they’d be, and that she had had her turn and it had been fine and now she was a person who managed things and was loved by a good man and that was a perfectly good life, an enviable life, and she’d have been ashamed to want more.

“You’re home late,” he said, when she finally came down on Friday morning, not as a complaint — Adam didn’t complain, Adam observed, mildly, like a man reading out the shipping forecast — but she found herself bristling anyway.

“The Meridian bid. Cal sent it out with the charts wrong.”

“Cal’s the salesy one.”

“Cal’s the salesy one.”