“What did you do?”
“I pretended I thought he was cute.”
“Eww. How did you do that?”
“I basically said, ‘Hey, I feel as if I’ve seen you around a lot.’ And then asked him a bunch of questions about himself, where he lived, as if I was into him. I think it threw him off. Because if you’re following people around, the last thing you want is someone to notice you, right?”
“Sure,” I said, but my skin was still crawling with worry, and then there was this drumbeat inside me. A reminder. That all the signs were pointing to Bryan and me being impossible. I had to stop being foolish, and start being wise.
Chapter Seventeen
I left for class the next morning still surrounded by the sense that there were unwanted eyes on me. I jumped when I saw a black town car at the curb. Bryan’s driver was waiting by the door.
“Hi. Bryan Leighton sent me for you.”
I had half a mind to say thanks, but no thanks. But I was so glad to see him, and relieved too to avoid the streets with their easy opportunities for Wilco to track me. I slid into the backseat only to find I was alone. “Excuse me. Where’s Bryan?”
“He asked me to drive you wherever you need for the next few days.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say.”
I rooted around in my bag for my phone. This situation was veering too close to my college ex-boyfriend Michael, and I wasn’t someone who craved danger like a drug. But my phone was nowhere in sight. Then I remembered Jill had dismantled it, and I’d somehow gotten so used to the few hours of being phone-less that I hadn’t even looked for it this morning.
The driver took me to class and I expected him to drop me off curbside. Instead, he stepped out of the car, scanned the street in each direction and then placed a hand on my back and led me into the building, as if he were a secret agent on my security detail.
“What the heck is going on?”
“Just getting you safely to class, Ms. Harper.”
“Is there a reason I wouldn’t get safely to class?” I asked, even though I had a feeling the answer was the man in the diner last night. Jill’s strategy to disarm Wilco by flirting hadn’t quite rattled the guy as she’d hoped.
“I’ll be here when class ends,” the driver replied and that was clearly all the information I was getting.
Sure enough, the driver was waiting inside the lobby of the business school building in the early afternoon. I started walking towards the main door, but he gestured down the hallway, wrapped a hand around my elbow, and guided me to a back door that led to the building’s rarely used service exit. There, the car was waiting.
“Is someone going to tell me what’s going on with the cloak and dagger?”
“Just following orders,” he said, as he started the car.
“Fine. Then can you take me uptown?” I gave him the address of a cafe where I was meeting Claire, and he drove me there, standing guard outside as I Claire and I sipped hot chocolate and I tried to pretend my day hadn’t been turned upside down with covert affairs.
“I want a full report when you return from Paris,” Claire said. “I’ll be out of the country for a week. I convinced my husband to take me away on a technology-free trip to Tahiti.”
“That’s funny because I spent the whole day without my phone. My roommate hid it from me.”
“And see! You still made it to our appointment on time. Maybe we don’t need to be tethered to our phones as much as we think.”
But I was missing my phone because I had no idea what was going on. When it was time to head home I settled into the safety of the leather seat of the town car, closed my eyes and tried desperately to let go of the caged-in day, to forget about the run-in last night. Then, as we idled in the stalled Park Avenue traffic, I heard the driver’s phone ring. My ears pricked as he answered.
“Hello?”
In his pause, I could make out the gravelly sound of the other voice. Nicole Blazer.
“Yes?”
A pause.
“She’s with me right now.”
Another pause, and a strange fear ricocheted through my body.
“I’ll bring her now.”
He ended the call and looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Nicole says Bryan has been asking for you.”
*****
Nicole placed a gentle hand on my arm. “His hand is pretty banged up, and it looks like he might have broken one of the bones in it.
“What on earth happened?”
Nicole held open the pristinely painted white door that led into the foyer of Bryan’s four-story brownstone on Sixtieth and Park. “We were meeting with Wilco’s attorneys this afternoon to review the wrongful termination suit and attempt to settle. We were all there, and it was going fine, and Bryan stepped out for a minute, then walked back in, and Wilco blew a gasket. Stood up, sucker punched him in the gut, jammed him in the back, and smashed his hand into the table.”
My eyes widened with shock. “Oh my god. That’s awful.”
She nodded. “His attorneys were totally freaked out. It all happened so quickly, and they didn’t even know what to do. The security guard at the office rushed in and restrained Wilco, and when the police came a few minutes later, they found a knife in his coat pocket.”
I rewound back the diner. To the way he’d touched the inside of his pocket. He’d seemed so unhinged. “I saw him last night. He followed me to a diner. I think he had the knife then too.” I placed my hand on my mouth. A tear slid down my cheek.