She Stole My Job… And My Nightmare! novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Three A.M.

Hallie goes back to the 41st floor, walks Ivy out past Elliot in the dark, and wakes to a courier: her sister's $212,000 surgery bill, paid, no conditions.

"Stay on the phone," I told Ivy. "Don't hang up. I'm coming."

Maggie sat up on the other end of the couch, hair flat on one side.

"Who is that?"

"The girl I gave my job to. He's keeping her at the office."

"Keeping her how?"

"I don't know."

Maggie was already looking for her shoes.

"I'm coming with you."

"You have a double tomorrow. Go to sleep."

"Hal."

"If I take you, he'll have a reason to look at you," I said. "I'm not giving him that."

She pressed her lips together and let me go, and she texted me her address twice before I got to the stairs.

The cab dropped me in front of Maddox Holdings at ten to three.

The lobby was dark except for the security desk.

The guard let me up without a word. He knew my face.

The forty-first floor was lit only by the screens.

Ivy was sitting at my old desk with her coat on and her bag in her lap.

She stood up when she saw me and nearly fell.

Her mascara had run down both cheeks, and her hands were shaking.

"I didn't do anything," she said. "I swear I didn't. I made the coffee and I made the second coffee and he drank neither one."

"I believe you."

"He just stood in his doorway and watched me. For hours. Every time I asked if I could go, he said, 'Not yet.'"

I looked past her.

The glass office was dark.

Elliot stood in the open doorway with the lights out behind him.

He had taken his jacket off. His tie was loose and his sleeves were rolled to the elbow.

He was looking at me.

"You came," he said.

His voice was low and rough from not being used in hours.

"I came for her."

I took Ivy's bag out of her lap and put the strap over my own shoulder.

"Get your things. We're leaving."

"It's two fifty-eight in the morning," Elliot said.

"I know what time it is. I know what time it is every night."

I walked to him until there was one step between us.

"You don't keep an employee against her will. Not in this building, and not after midnight. If you call her again, if you call me again, I'll send the guard's log to every reporter in this city."

His eyes moved over my face.

He didn't look angry.

I had seen him angry. This was something I had never seen on him, and I didn't know what to call it.

"She isn't you," he said.

"That's not her fault."

"She makes the coffee wrong."

"She makes it exactly the way I wrote it down."

"It's wrong," Elliot said quietly, "because you didn't make it."

I didn't answer that.

I put my hand on Ivy's elbow and walked her to the elevator, and we stood side by side and watched the numbers go down.

Neither of us spoke until the lobby.

Outside, the street was empty and wet. A cab idled by the curb.

Ivy stopped under the awning and wiped her face with her sleeve.

"You knew," she said.

"Knew what?"

"What he's like."

I could have lied.

"Yes," I said. "I knew."

"You let me take it."

"I did." I made myself look at her. "I'm sorry. I should have told you in the hallway. I didn't, and that's on me."

Ivy didn't say anything for a while.

She was looking at the building, up past the dark glass, to the forty-first floor.

I expected anger.

What I saw looked more like arithmetic.

"He didn't touch me," she said slowly. "He didn't even raise his voice."

"No."

"So what exactly are you running from?"

I opened my mouth, and I found I didn't have a short answer.

"Go home, Ivy," I said. "Get some sleep. Don't go in at seven."

"I'm not quitting," she said.

I looked at her.

"It's a hundred and fifty thousand dollars," she said, and her voice was almost steady. "I'm just going to do it right."

I put her in the cab and paid the driver.

When it pulled away I stood under the awning for a minute, and I did not look up.

Then I walked to the subway and went home.

Maggie had left the light on over the stove.

I slept four hours on her couch, and for the first time in four years nobody called me at all.

At eight a.m., the buzzer went.

A courier in a gray jacket stood at Maggie's door with a thick envelope, and he held out a tablet for me to sign.

Inside was a statement from a hospital billing office in Manhattan.

I knew the name of the patient. I knew the date of the surgery.

At the bottom of the last page, in black ink, it said: PAID IN FULL.

The amount was $212,000.

It was the bill I had spent two years working through, four hundred dollars a month at a time.

A card was clipped to the corner, written in his small, upright handwriting.

No conditions. Elliot Maddox.

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