Part 2: Nora leaned her head against the cold window. “You could say I made an impression.”

Her apartment in Somerville occupied the third floor of a brick building that smelled faintly of old wood, radiator heat, and someone else’s garlic. The stairs creaked. The front door stuck when it rained. Her cat, Fig, met her on the kitchen counter with the grave expression of an unpaid landlord.

“Yes,” Nora told him, dropping her purse on a chair. “I humiliated us in front of billionaires. Thank you for your support.”

Fig blinked.

She kicked off the painful heels, changed into sweatpants and an oversized Boston University sweatshirt, and stood in the bathroom staring at herself. Makeup had smudged beneath her eyes. Rain had loosened her hair. She looked tired, ordinary, and safely unimportant.

Except she could still feel Roman Vale’s gaze like a hand between her shoulder blades.

The next morning, Boston woke under a gray sky and wet snow. Nora woke to Fig stepping on her stomach and her phone vibrating against the nightstand.

Caroline again.

Nora answered with her eyes half closed. “Unless someone died because of the champagne, I’m hanging up.”

“You left,” Caroline said.

“Good morning to you, too.”

“Do you know how many people asked about you after you disappeared?”

“More than the usual zero?”

“This is not funny.”

“It is a little funny.”

“No, Nora, it isn’t. Roman Vale doesn’t notice people by accident.”

The way Caroline said his name made Nora sit up.

“What exactly does that mean?”

There was a pause. When Caroline spoke again, her voice had lost its shine. “It means he isn’t just rich. His father was tied to unions, judges, port contracts, federal investigations, men who vanished from conversations and sometimes from Boston entirely. Nothing ever stuck because money makes excellent soap, but everyone knows enough.”

Nora looked toward the window. A cyclist splashed through a puddle below. A woman in a red coat hurried toward the T with a coffee cup clutched to her chest. The world looked too normal for Caroline’s words.

“And Roman?”

“Roman made it respectable. That’s what people say. He turned Vale Consolidated into hospitals, museums, waterfront developments, charity boards. He smiles for cameras now. But people are still scared of him.”

Nora remembered the silence in the ballroom.

“Maybe people like being dramatic.”

“Nora,” Caroline said, and there it was, the careful tone she used when she was about to say something unkind and call it concern. “You’re sweet. You’re smart. But you don’t understand rooms like that. Men like Roman Vale don’t look at women like us unless they want something.”

“Women like us,” Nora repeated.

She looked around her apartment: the chipped yellow mug near the sink, the overdue library book on the couch, the basil plant on the windowsill she had kept alive through sheer stubbornness, the stack of bills under a magnet shaped like a lobster.

“Caroline, he asked my name. He didn’t propose a hostile takeover.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

But after they hung up, Nora sat very still. She told herself she was not afraid.

Then she checked the lock on her door.

At 8:45, she walked into Ward & Huxley Financial Review with damp hair, coffee in one hand, laptop bag in the other. The firm occupied two floors of a narrow downtown building that smelled of toner, burnt coffee, and anxious ambition. It was not glamorous, but Nora understood it. Numbers came in dirty, incomplete, dressed up, or badly hidden, and she made them tell the truth.

Her boss, Warren Pike, called her before she reached her desk.

“Bennett. My office.”

Warren stood behind the glass wall of his office with a phone pressed to his chest and his tie already crooked, which meant he had been losing an argument for at least twenty minutes.

“Did you finish the North Pier reconciliation?” he asked.

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