Chapter 5: The Gala

I folded the invitation back into its envelope.

"It's perfect," I said. "I wouldn't miss it."

Kristen's smile flickered.

She'd wanted me to cry in the hallway.

I walked out to my Honda and didn't cry there either.

Two days later I moved to New York for good.

Mr. Pruitt found me an apartment on the Upper West Side that Evelyn had owned and never used.

Sebastian found me a desk.

It was across from his, on the fifty-first floor.

"You don't have to learn all of it," he said the first morning. "Evelyn didn't."

"What did she learn?"

"People. Who lies. Who shows up."

He taught me for twelve hours a day.

Hotels, ports, trucks, contracts.

I learned faster than he expected.

Nurses learn fast or people die.

On the third week we were still there at ten at night, eating noodles out of cartons at the boardroom table.

"How did you meet her?" I asked.

He turned his right wrist over so I could see the burn scar.

"I was nineteen. Line cook at the old Hale on Forty-Fourth. A fryer went up."

"And she was there?"

"She was eating dinner in the dining room. She came into the kitchen in a silk suit and put my arm under the cold tap herself."

He almost laughed.

"Then she asked why I was frying potatoes when I could read a balance sheet upside down from across the room."

"Could you?"

"I'd been reading the manager's. He was stealing."

I laughed for the first time in weeks.

He looked at me across the noodles.

It went on a little too long, that look.

"The Sterling gala is Saturday," he said. "At the Hale Grand. I'm expected to go."

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