Five Minutes

I believed him, in 1991, the way you believe a man who has never once had to make good on a threat because nobody has ever tested him. I believed him for the next thirty-five years, which is its own kind of answer to whether I was ever as brave as tonight makes me sound.

But belief and obedience aren't the same thing. I never did it again exactly — I got smarter instead, buried the interference so deep in ordinary scheduling errors that even he stopped being able to prove I'd touched anything. Eight more names went into notebooks he never found, in a bank box he never knew existed, under a name that wasn't mine.

Back at the party, Yolanda was cutting the filing-cabinet cake into slices, and the room had thinned out to the after-ten-o'clock crowd — the ones who genuinely liked me, and the ones too junior to have left yet.

Talia Bloom's phone buzzed on the drinks table. She glanced at it, frowned, then looked up and scanned the room until she found Harlan across it.

"Mr. Voss wants me to grab the Renwick file from his office before I go," she told Yolanda, loud enough that I caught it from six feet away. "Says it's urgent, needs it for tomorrow's filing."

"Now?" Yolanda said. "It's Doris's party."

"He said five minutes." Talia was already setting down her cake plate, smoothing her blazer, doing the small automatic recalibration every junior woman in this firm has done before walking into his office alone since before she was born.

I watched Harlan Voss finish his drink, set the glass down, and start toward the hallway that led to his office — not toward the elevator, not toward his coat, toward his office — two full minutes before Talia had even put her plate down.

He wasn't following her.

He'd sent for her.