She continued. "I know I have no right to be here, but I need one night to think without someone watching me and then I'll figure out the rest." He thought about asking her to leave. He thought about it seriously the way you think seriously about things that are probably the right call but feel wrong in your chest. She was his boss's boss's boss.
She was a woman who owned four times his annual salary in company stock alone. She had no business being in his kitchen, in his neighborhood, in his life. But she also had mascara on her jaw, and she'd read his daughter two chapters of a bedtime book she'd never heard of before, and she was standing in front of him with steady eyes that were working very hard to stay that way. "The couch pulls out." He said finally.
"There are extra blankets in the hall closet." "I'll be up at 6:00 for Maya's school routine, so it won't be quiet." Something moved across her face, not quite relief, not quite gratitude. More like a person who had braced for a wall and found a door instead. By morning, the situation had calcified into something considerably worse.
David's phone showed 47 news notifications before he'd finished making Maya's oatmeal. Every major outlet had picked up the story. The headline that appeared most often was some variation of Vance Industries CEO vanishes amid financial misconduct allegations. One tabloid had already published a photo taken outside her apartment building timestamped 11:47 the previous night. The caption read, "Where is Elena Vance?"
Maya sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast with focused intensity, unconcerned with the weight of the morning. She looked up at David and said, "Is the lady still here?" "She is." "Is she your friend?" "Something like that."
Maya considered this. "She's pretty, but she didn't know how to turn on the TV. I had to show her." Elena appeared in the hallway a minute later, still in yesterday's clothes, hair pulled back with one of Maya's spare hair ties, a purple one with a small plastic butterfly on it. She looked at the table, at Maya, at David, and made a visible decision not to comment on any of it.
David poured a second coffee and set it on the counter near her. They didn't talk until Maya had finished eating and wandered off to find her backpack. "There's someone outside." Elena said quietly. "Dark blue sedan.
It's been parked across the street since before I woke up. That's not a journalist. That's a private investigator." David looked out the window without being obvious about it. She was right.