Don’t eat that, sir. He hadn’t processed the courage of it until right now. In the moment, in the party, with the crowd and Celestine’s hand on his arm and the security team moving in, he’d processed it as disruption, as something to be managed.
He’d managed it and he’d felt, somewhere beneath the management, a cold and quiet alarm that he’d refused to show.
Now he sat in the dark of the security room and watched a woman in yellow cleaning gloves make the eight-step walk that had, by Fenwick’s math, prevented him from spending the night of his own engagement party unconscious on the floor of his estate.
“Find out who she is,” he told DeMarco. “The cleaner?” “Yes.” DeMarco was quiet for a moment.
“She was let go this afternoon. Celestine” He stopped, recalibrated. “Ms. Harrow made a request that her temp agency be informed she was no longer welcome on Briggs properties.”
“I know,” Callaway “Find out who she is anyway.” Imani Osayi’s apartment was on the third floor of a building on the south side that had once been something nicer and was now in the specific condition of a place that had stopped being maintained a decade ago but hadn’t quite collapsed.
The elevator worked on alternating Tuesdays. The hallway lights were fluorescent and buzzed with a sound that Imani had stopped noticing three months after moving in which she took as a sign that human beings could adapt to almost anything.
She was at her kitchen table at 9:15 the next morning, laptop open, working through the job boards when her phone rang, a number she didn’t recognize, 312 area code, which was Chicago proper.
She let it ring once, twice, picked up on the third ring. “Ms. Osayi?” A man’s voice professional direct “My name is DeMarco Webb.
I work for Callaway Briggs. Mr. Briggs would like to speak with you.” Imani looked at her laptop screen.
The temp agency’s platform showed her availability rating had already dropped three points, which was the algorithm’s way of registering that she’d been released early from an assignment.
A three-point drop was enough to knock her into the second tier of placement priority, which meant longer waits between gigs, which meant “Is this about yesterday?”
She said. “Mr. Briggs would prefer to explain in person.” “I’m not going back to that estate.”
