She sat with this for a moment. In her experience, when powerful people found themselves in vulnerable situations, other people almost always found a way to benefit from it. A story told at the right moment. A favor implied.
A leverage accumulated quietly for future use. She had been in this position before or near enough to it, and the outcomes had consistently instructed her in the cost of lowering her guard. But the note said nothing happened, and the house looked exactly the way it had looked when she left it the previous morning. Except for the water and the ibuprofen and the handwriting she didn’t recognize.
She called the office. She asked for Ethan Cole. The receptionist paused and said, I’m sorry. Who?
Victoria said it again. There was a longer pause, and then the receptionist said, Oh, Ethan from maintenance? In the particular tone that people use when they are surprised that someone on the 14th floor knows the name of someone in the maintenance department. Victoria said yes and asked him to come up when he arrived.
He knocked on the glass of her office door at 9:45. She looked up and saw him, the same man who had driven her home, standing in her doorway with a quietness about him that she was now seeing in a different light. She said, Come in. He came in and stood just inside the door in the way of someone who was not planning to stay long.
She studied him from across the desk. He was unremarkable in the way that people are unremarkable when you haven’t been paying attention to them. Medium height, dark hair threaded with the first signals of gray, the specific kind of lean that comes from physical labor rather than a gym membership, eyes that were a gray-green color, and were currently looking at her with a complete absence of the nervousness that most people brought into her office. That absence was itself notable.
I wanted to thank you, she said. For last night. You don’t have to, he said. I know I don’t have to, she said in the tone she used when people misread courtesy as obligation.