The white tablecloths had been folded away. The fountain had been shut off for the night, its basin still and black.
“I’ll need to report this to” “Not yet,” Callaway said. “Callaway, not yet, Fenwick. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He looked at the garden. “Don’t report it yet.” He hung up. He sat with it for a while, the specific quality of this kind of silence, the kind that settles over you when something you half knew becomes something you can’t unknow.
He had suspected things about Celestine. Not this. Not this exactly. But he had sensed, in the way that people sense things they don’t want to name, that certain elements of their relationship existed in a register he couldn’t fully read.
Her interest in his schedule, her careful questions about the IPO timeline, the way she’d positioned herself in conversations with his attorneys.
He hadn’t named it because naming it would have required him to accept that he’d been careless.
And Callaway Briggs did not make careless mistakes. Except, apparently, he did. [clears throat] He went to the security room at midnight.
DeMarco was there. He lived on the estate. And the two of them sat in front of the monitor bank without speaking while Callaway navigated to the outdoor garden camera feed.
The timestamp he needed was early in the party, between 1:30 and 1:50 p.m., the window when the entrees had been plated and served.
He found Celestine on camera at 1:44 p.m. He watched it four times. The angle wasn’t perfect.
Garden cameras were positioned for perimeter security, not table-side surveillance, but it was enough. Enough to see the turn of her body, the deliberate shift away from his sight line, the movement of her right hand beneath the table’s edge, the motion that lasted approximately 3 seconds and changed everything.
“Do you want me to” DeMarco started. “No,” Callaway said. “Not yet. I need to think.”
He rewound the feed, watched it again, and then, in the corner of the frame, he saw something else, a figure in a blue uniform standing at the service station near the east side of the garden.
He could see her clearly, better than he could see Celestine because she was standing rather than seated, and the camera angle caught her full on.
Young, focused, her eyes tracking the head table with the particular attention of someone who was watching something that wasn’t her business and deciding whether to make it her business.
He watched her across the garden in eight steps. He watched her arm shoot forward, her gloved hand on the table’s edge, the way her body angled itself directly toward him like an arrow, like something with direction.
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.”
A pause. “He’s offering to come to you.” Imani sat back in her chair. Through the kitchen window, the south side street was doing its morning routine.
A bus heaving past, two kids in school uniforms cutting through the corner store’s parking lot.
The usual argument between the guy on the second floor and his upstairs neighbor about the subwoofer.
