The Price of a Nobody

You don't answer her.

You can't. Your mouth won't make anything that sounds like a sentence, so you stand up, and the heavy chair scrapes on the floor, and you walk out of the Gilt Room past the maître d' and the gold-leaf panels and into an elevator that drops forty-one floors while your stomach stays at the top.

Outside, it's raining. March rain, the cold kind, the kind that gets into your collar and stays. You walk anyway. Park Avenue, then Lexington, then some street you don't know the name of. Taxis hiss past. A man under an awning sells umbrellas and you don't buy one.

I paid for you.

You keep hearing it, and every time you hear it something in your chest rearranges itself.

Three years. Three years of telling yourself a story. The story went like this: the rich girl played house with a mechanic, and when her family snapped their fingers, she went home. Simple. Clean. A story you could put in a drawer.

The night before the courthouse, you stood in the kitchen above the garage. The radio was on, low, the Pirates losing to somebody. She had her coat on. She had a suitcase by the door that her mother's driver had already come for once.

"Talk to me," you said. "Whatever it is. We'll fight it."

She looked at you for a long time. Then she said, "I can't," and that was all she said, and she walked down the stairs, and you heard the car door close on Butler Street.

You thought I can't meant I don't want to.

You stop at a corner and put both hands on a wet steel railing and breathe like you've just run a mile.

It's past midnight when you get back to the hotel. You're soaked through. Blythe is in the lobby bar with her laptop and a glass of white wine, and she takes one look at you and closes the laptop.

"That bad?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Fine. Then let me talk." She pats the stool beside her. You sit, dripping on the leather. "The book is at forty percent. If we don't find an anchor by Thursday, Lindquist Marsh will recommend postponing until the patent board rules. That could be June. It could be next year." She looks at you over the rim of her glass. Her eyes are green, and very steady. "Holt's money fixes Thursday. I'm your banker, Ethan. My job is to tell you to sign."

"And if you weren't my banker?"

Something warm moves across her face. "Then I'd tell you to get out of those wet clothes," she says lightly, "and we'd discuss it in the morning."

You almost laugh. It's the first thing all night that's felt simple.

"Good night, Blythe."

"Good night." She doesn't look offended. She looks like a woman who's patient.

Upstairs, Rosh is asleep on the couch in your suite with her laptop on her stomach. She wakes when the door clicks, squints at you, and sits up.

"You look like you got hit by a bus."

"Close." You drop into the armchair across from her and tell her everything. The Gilt Room. The decree. Page fourteen. The note on the building, the fraud suit, the anonymous letter from the bank that you never understood.

Rosh listens without interrupting, which for Rosh is a medical event.

When you're done, she's quiet for a long time.

"So the garage," she says finally. "The loan. Our first year. That was her."

"That was her."

"I hate that." Rosh pulls her hoodie sleeves over her hands. "I hate that so much. I had a whole thing. I had a whole villain arc for her in my head."

"Me too."

"Doesn't mean she's not a shark now." Rosh points at you. "People don't change. They just get better lawyers."

You don't sleep. You lie on the hotel bed with the curtains open and watch the rain run down the glass and think about a woman in a coat by a door, saying two words she wasn't allowed to explain.

At seven in the morning, someone knocks.

Not room service. You didn't order any. Room service doesn't knock like that, three precise raps, like a gavel.

You open the door in a T-shirt and yesterday's jeans.

The woman in the hallway is fifty-seven years old and looks forty-five. Silver-blonde hair in a low chignon. Pearls. A camel coat over a dress the color of weak tea. Her face is Cressida's face, if Cressida's face had been carved out of something colder and left out in the snow.

"Mr. Dunaway," says Rosamund Holt. "May I come in?"

You remember the last time you saw her. The courthouse hallway. She'd smiled at you, just slightly, the way you smile at a dog that's been put out.

"No," you say.

"Then I'll be brief." She opens a slim handbag and takes out a checkbook. An actual checkbook. You didn't know people still carried them. She writes something, tears the check out with a neat little rip, and holds it toward you between two gloved fingers.

Twenty-five million dollars. Payable to Ethan Dunaway.

"Refuse my daughter's term sheet," Rosamund says. "Find your money elsewhere, or postpone, I don't care which. And when this is over, don't contact her again." She tilts her head. "You'll notice that's considerably more than I offered last time."

"Last time?"

"Two million. The week before the courthouse. You told my lawyer to go to hell." A thin smile. "Very romantic. Very unnecessary. You signed anyway."

"Because she signed first."

"Yes." Rosamund doesn't blink. "My daughter has a weakness for grand gestures. It's her father's blood. I'm trying to spare her from making another one. She's expected to marry Thatcher Vandermolen this summer. A good man. A suitable one. An alliance that will matter to this family for fifty years. She doesn't need her ex-husband reappearing in the business pages, holding her hand in front of photographers."

You look at the check for a long moment.

Then you tear it in half. Then in half again. You let the pieces fall onto the hotel carpet between her shoes and yours.

Rosamund watches them fall. Nothing in her face moves.

"Three years ago," she says softly, "you were a nobody. A man with a garage and a mortgage. Nobodies are easy. You take away the garage and they disappear." She closes her handbag with a click. "Now you're a somebody. You have a company. Employees. Investors. A patent under challenge." She steps back toward the elevator. "Somebodies have so much more to lose, Mr. Dunaway."

The elevator opens. She steps in. She doesn't look back.

The doors are still closing when your phone buzzes in your pocket.

You know before you look. Some part of you has been waiting for this for three years.

Cressida.