The elevator opened on a floor with no number on the panel.
Thea stepped out into pale stone and glass, and the city lay below her like something behind a window.
A woman in gray met her and held out a folded page.
She called her Mrs. Shaw twice, and she did not ask her name.
Breakfast at seven. Car at eight. Dinner at eight. Quiet after ten.
Her whole life had been set into a table before she arrived.
Warren: Your key opens your door. It does not open mine.
Warren: That was the arrangement, and I keep to it.
Thea: And the staff?
Warren: They have their instructions.
Thea: Do they have my name?
Warren: They don't need it. They need the schedule.
Warren: Don't chat with them. They get fucking familiar, and then they get careless.
He went down the hall with his phone already at his ear.
The stone floor held the sound of his steps, then gave it back empty.
Her room was clean and correct, with a bed made to a measure.
Someone had unpacked her boxes. Her books stood squared to the shelf edge.
Nothing in it looked like a place she had chosen.
She took her mother's photograph from her bag and set it on the desk.
Then she turned it a little crooked, so one thing in the room was hers.
It was a small thing. It helped.
Her phone lit up with Edie's name, and her stomach went tight.
Edie: Your address changed in the staff system. Since when do you live by the river?
Thea: It's a sublet. Short term. I needed the space.
Edie: You could have told me.
Thea: I'm telling you now.
Edie: You'd tell me if something was wrong. Wouldn't you?
The lie came out smooth, and that was the part that shamed her.
After she hung up, she sat with the phone in her hands.
She thought about calling her mother, then about the hour, and did not.
Two people loved her, and neither of them knew what she had done.
Dinner was at eight, and the table could have seated twenty.
There was one place setting, at the end nearest the kitchen door.
A man in a dark suit set a covered plate down and lifted the cover.
He left without a word. The door closed softly behind him.
She ate alone, and her own fork sounded loud.
Warren did not come.
His message said he was working, and that she should eat without him.
She read it twice and put the phone face down.
The penthouse settled into its own quiet, and the quiet kept a schedule too.
At ten, the lights in the hall dimmed by themselves.
Thea: Thea.
She said her own name to the empty room, quietly, just to hear it.
No one in this house had asked for it. She would have to keep it herself.