“Put the phone away, Ms. Harrow.” Imani kept her voice level. “Whatever you’re about to do, call Fletcher, call your lawyers, call whoever you call, you should know that what I found in that room is already somewhere you can’t reach it.
It was copied 20 minutes ago.” She let that sit. “I’m a cleaner. That’s what you decided I was the first time you saw me, and you were so sure of that that you left 12 transfer authorizations and a photograph of you and Fletcher Voss on a folding table in an unlocked room and didn’t think twice about whether someone might find the service corridor behind the guest suite.”
Celestine stared at her. For the first time since the engagement party, since the garden, since the gray eyes behind the practiced smile, Imani watched something real cross her face.
Not fear, exactly. Something adjacent to it. The specific expression of someone who has understood that the piece they assumed was fixed has not only moved, but has been somewhere they didn’t account for.
The phone went slowly back into her pocket. “You should leave this house,” Celestine said.
Her voice was still controlled, but the temperature of it had changed. “I’ll be here tomorrow morning,” Imani said.
“7:00 a.m., same as always.” She walked down the hallway. She did not look back.
Behind her, she heard Celestine’s voice, quiet, certain, and stripped of everything that wasn’t threat.
“Prove it in court, Callaway.” A pause, as if she were rehearsing. As if she’d known this day might come and had been ready for it.
“My lawyers are already there.” Imani kept walking. She was shaking by the time she reached the staff room.
Not from fear, or not only from fear, from the specific physical response to the moment when a thing that has been abstract becomes real.
When the calculation you’ve been running in your head meets the world and the world doesn’t blink.
She sat down. She pulled out her phone and she called the number Callaway had given her for emergencies only.
He picked up on the second ring. “I’m in,” she said. “I found everything. It’s all copied.”
