He Was Supposed to Be Impossible, So Why Is He Helping Me? novel · Chapter 1 of 5
Chapter 1: The Door He Should Not Open
Audrey arrives early to find Leonard waiting with her marked-up model, and after he gives her a place in his private review session and tests whether she will step closer, she asks if he chose her because she is useful; he refuses to explain and instead tells her to come with him, and she follows him into the private office suite.
I saw the red ink before I saw him.
My model was open on the glass table, and someone had been through every page of it. Not Halton's lazy scrawl. This was precise, surgical, a margin note in a hand I didn't recognize.
Leonard Faust stood beside the table with his arms crossed, watching me read.
'You're early,' he said.
'So are you.'
He didn't answer that. He just waited, and the silence did something strange to the room. It made the empty conference room feel like a stage, and I was the only one who didn't know my lines.
I looked down at the model again. My model. Six months of my life, reduced to a stack of paper someone had marked up like a failing exam.
'Did Halton give this to you?' I asked.
'No.'
'Then how did you get it?'
'I have access to every file in this building.'
That landed somewhere between an explanation and a warning. I pressed my lips together and looked down at the table, then back up at him. He hadn't moved.
'You saw him present it,' I said. 'You saw him sign his name to six months of my work.'
'Yes.'
No outrage in it. No apology. Just a confirmation, like I'd asked him to verify a line item.
I waited for him to say something else. He didn't.
That's when I understood. He wasn't here to comfort me. He was here because he'd been watching, and now he wanted something.
'Why am I here?' I asked.
The question came out quieter than I meant it to. He heard it anyway. Leonard Faust heard everything.
'Because your work is correct,' he said.
'That's not an answer.'
'It is the only one that matters.'
I almost laughed. Almost. The sound stayed trapped behind my teeth, because nothing about this felt funny. It felt like being handed a key to a room I'd been locked out of for years, and being told the door had never actually been locked.
He pulled out a chair and sat down. Not at the head of the table. Across from me, like we were equals.
'Sit,' he said.
I sat.
He turned the model toward me and pointed to a section near the back. The stress tests. His finger rested on a line I'd flagged three weeks ago and then deleted, because I'd been afraid it looked like an accusation.
'You flagged this,' he said. 'Then you removed it.'
'It wasn't ready.'
'It was correct.'
I stared at the page. He was right, and he knew it. The anomaly was there, buried in the cash flow statement, a discrepancy that didn't fit. I'd found it at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday and spent the next hour convincing myself I was wrong.
But I wasn't wrong.
'Why did you remove it?' he asked.
'Because I'm a junior analyst, and pointing out an irregularity in a partner's work is a good way to get fired.'
'You're not a junior analyst anymore.'
I looked up. His face was exactly as unreadable as it always was. The thin black frames of his glasses, the level dark eyes behind them, the full mouth that never moved.
'What does that mean?' I asked.
'It means I'm pulling you into every high-stakes meeting I run from now on. You'll present your own work. You'll answer your own questions. And you'll never hand another model to Halton again.'
The words were flat, businesslike, as if he were reading from an agenda. But underneath them, something else moved. Something I couldn't name.
I should have said thank you. I should have been grateful, or at least professional. Instead I asked the question I'd been biting back since the moment I walked in.
'Did you choose me because I'm useful?'
He didn't answer. He just looked at me, and for a second I thought I'd finally found the line I wasn't supposed to cross.
Then he stood.
He didn't rush it. He unfolded from the chair the way he did everything, deliberate and unhurried, and I felt the air change. The conference room was suddenly too small, and he was too close, and I couldn't remember why I'd thought this was about my career at all.
'Come with me,' he said.
'Where?'
'My office.'
'It's not even seven yet.'
'I know.'
He walked to the door and held it open, and I followed him because I wanted the reason. Because I wanted to know why Leonard Faust, who had never once smiled at a staff meeting, had marked up my model in red ink and told me I wasn't junior anymore.
The hallway was dark, the floor-to-ceiling windows showing the first amber light cutting low through the glass. The building was empty, and my heels sounded too loud on the polished concrete.
He stopped at a door I'd walked past a hundred times. The private office suite. The one with the frosted glass and the brass nameplate that said FAUST in letters so small you had to be close to read them.
He opened the door.
The room inside was warm, lamplit, and I could smell coffee and something else, something clean and sharp like cedar. His office. His space. I'd never been inside.
He turned to face me, his hand still on the door.
'If you come in,' he said, 'stop calling this work.'
I stepped across the threshold.
His hand closed around the door.
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