Chapter 2
It had always mattered.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I didn’t know where you had gone.
By the time the review changed direction, you were on emergency leave.”
“My supervisor had my number.”
“Your supervisor retired three months later.”
I stared at her.
Natalia continued carefully.
“There was never a formal finding against you, Elena.”
“There didn’t need to be.”
I could still remember the polite language.
Concerns.
Procedural irregularities.
Questions regarding verification.
Nothing that said guilty.
Nothing that cleared me either.
In that world, ambiguity had been enough.
“I was twenty-five,” I said quietly.
“Do you know how many calls I made after my father stabilized?”
Natalia said nothing.
“Seven.”
I remembered each one.
One former colleague had promised to call back.
Two had sounded uncomfortable.
Three had sent messages later.
One number had been disconnected.
“I stopped after seven.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need an apology.”
“No.”
Her answer surprised me.
“You need the truth.”
Before I could respond, Victor returned.
He looked from Natalia to me.
“Am I interrupting?”
Natalia glanced at me rather than answering for us.
“No,” I said.
Victor sat down.
Natalia spoke to him in Russian.
“I was right.
It’s her.”
Victor’s expression became serious.
“The Riga interpreter?”
I crossed my arms lightly.
“Apparently I’m more memorable than I thought.”
Victor’s smile was kind.
“You prevented an error that might have taken six months of lawyers to undo.”
“I noticed a word.”
“That is frequently what prevents six months of lawyers.”
Natalia almost smiled.
Then Victor said something that caught me off guard.
“We are not asking you about Mr.
Pierce’s business.”
I hadn’t realized how visibly guarded I had become.
“I wouldn’t discuss a guest’s private conversation.”
“I assumed as much,” Victor said.
“That is why I wanted to say it directly.”
Natalia reached into her handbag.
She withdrew a simple white business card.
No dramatic gesture.
No whispered proposition.
She placed it on the table.
“If you want to know what happened in Riga, call me.”
I didn’t touch the card.
Dominic returned at that moment.
He glanced at it.
“What are we recruiting now?”
“No,” Natalia said.
“We are finishing an old conversation.”
Dominic looked at me.
Something in his expression had changed again.
He seemed less interested in mocking me now.
More interested in understanding where I fit.
“Elena, is it?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I suppose I underestimated you.”
The words were technically an apology.
The tone suggested he had not practiced many.
I waited.
He seemed to expect me to rescue him from the awkwardness.
I didn’t.
Finally he said, “Well.
That happens.”
“It does.”
Victor hid a smile behind his glass.
Dominic signed the bill.
The gratuity was generous enough to be noticed but not so generous that it felt like remorse.
I had seen that kind of money before.
Money used to close a conversation without participating in it.
I thanked the table as I would any other.
At the elevator, Natalia turned back.
For a moment, she was simply another guest in an expensive coat.
Then she tapped two fingers lightly against her handbag.
The card.
I nodded once.
The elevator doors closed.
Simon appeared beside me.
“You’re going to explain something.”
“I’m going home.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Maybe.”
“Elena.”
I looked at him.
He smiled.
“I have worked with you for fourteen months.
You once convinced a French wine importer that we had not insulted him when our sommelier accidentally called his vineyard ‘historically interesting.’
You pronounce every foreign name on the menu correctly.
And somehow I never thought to ask why.”
“You thought I watched educational television.”
“I thought you were terrifyingly prepared.”
“That too.”
By midnight, Le Rêve was empty.
I changed into jeans, pulled on my coat, and took the subway downtown.
Natalia’s card remained inside my pocket.
I told myself I wouldn’t call.
By Canal Street, I had taken it out twice.
By Brooklyn Bridge, three times.
At home, I placed it beside the chipped ceramic bowl where I kept my keys.
My apartment was small but warm.
My father’s old reading lamp stood beside the couch.
A photograph of us sat on the bookshelf.
He was fifty-nine in the picture, grinning beside a lake in Vermont, holding a fish so small he had insisted it was “still considering its options.”
I touched the frame.
“You would tell me to call.”
The photograph offered no argument.
My father had believed unanswered questions were worse than unpleasant answers.
He had also believed every car engine could be repaired with enough patience and that hotel shampoo was “basically free groceries for your bathroom.”
I missed the ridiculous details most.
I opened my laptop.
The name Natalia Volkov produced a law firm biography, conference photographs, and articles about European infrastructure compliance.
Nothing sinister.
Nothing dramatic.
Just a career.
A life that had continued while mine changed direction.
At one fourteen in the morning, I typed her number into my phone.
Then deleted it.
I slept badly.
The next morning, I worked brunch.
Le Rêve served no ordinary brunch.
There were linen tablecloths, smoked trout, miniature pastries, and guests wearing watches worth more than my annual rent.
At noon, Simon found me near the service elevator.
“There’s someone asking for you.”
My stomach tightened.
“Who?”
“Not Pierce.”
I hadn’t realized until then that I was relieved.
“Natalia?”
Simon shook his head.
“A courier.”
The envelope was thick.
My name was handwritten across the front.
Not printed.
Handwritten.
Inside was a photocopy of an old document.
Riga.
The annex.
I knew it instantly.
Across the bottom were my initials.
EW.
Beside them was a timestamp.
2:14 a.m.
Attached behind it was another page.
Same document.
Same paragraph.
Different wording.
A later timestamp.
2:47 a.m.
My initials were gone.
In their place was an electronic authorization code belonging to someone else.
I read the name twice.
Then a third time.
I knew him.
Everyone in our division had known him.
He had been senior enough that no one questioned him.
And beneath the copied document, Natalia had written only one sentence.
Call me when you’re ready.
I called during my break.
She answered immediately.
“You sent the documents.”
“Yes.”
“Where did you get them?”
“An archive review eighteen months after Riga.”
“Why wasn’t I told?”
“That is what I’ve been trying to understand.”
My hand tightened around the phone.
“Natalia, who changed the paragraph?”
“We know whose authorization was used.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
She was silent for a moment.
Then she said, “There’s something else.”
I leaned against the cold service corridor wall.
“What?”
“The authorization code wasn’t the only reason your name became connected to the error.”
I closed my eyes.
“What are you saying?”
“Someone gave a statement during the original review.”
My pulse quickened.
“A statement about me?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Another pause.
Natalia’s voice softened.
“Elena, do you remember Thomas Bell?”
I did.
Thomas had been my supervisor.
The man who recruited me.
The man who told me I had a rare ear for meaning, not merely language.
The man whose calls I had waited for after my father became ill.
“He said I missed the alteration?”
“No.”
Her answer came quietly.
“He said you warned him about it before anyone else noticed.”
I opened my eyes.
“That makes no sense.”
“I know.”
“If he said that, why did everyone treat me like—”
“Because that statement never appeared in the final internal summary.”
The corridor suddenly felt too narrow.
I stared at the two documents in my hand.
“Why?”
“That,” Natalia said, “is what I think you deserve to find out.”
And then she added the words that changed the shape of everything I had believed about Riga.
“Because you weren’t responsible for the mistake, Elena.”
Her voice was calm.
May you like
Certain.
“And I have the original report that proves it.”
