Chapter 1: Jessica - Forced Marriage to the CEO

Jessica

My morning starts like every other day. I’m on the phone with Marisol Vega, wife of a veteran who is two weeks home from his third tour. Last night he put his fist through the bathroom door instead of anything with a pulse in it, and she wanted to know if that meant she should leave.

“It means you call me,” I told her. “Every time. Not just the bad episodes.”

She is quiet for so long, I thought the call had dropped. Then, in a small, lowered voice, “He didn’t used to be like this.”

“I know, but that’s not the situation right now and we need him and you to be safe.”

I authorize an emergency housing supplement before I hang up. With three weeks’ rent, they’ll have enough to keep her and the kids out of her sister’s already-crowded apartment for another month. This gives him enough time to get into the VA program. I can’t help but think this kind of money represents one dinner at so many galas I’ve attended for charity. I sigh and make a note to follow up with the people that will get Marisol’s life stable for a month.

I sit down and open my laptop to the Gardner Museum’s events portal for the eleventh time this month. I look at a folder of mask samples I still can’t afford to greenlight. Some have gold leaf surrounding Porcelain white or Midnight black. A blank Bauta has no decoration at all. I keep coming back to that one. I can’t explain why, just something about a mask that erases the wearer entirely instead of only hiding them. I’d built the whole thing in my head over a year ago. A night where nobody’s name matters more than anybody else’s Donors, clients and staff are all made equal by anonymity. I had it all lined up, all the arrangements were set and my father nodded along, until the moment he understood there’d be no way to work the room. A gala where nobody knows who’s worth talking to isn’t a gala, Jessica. It’s a party.

I think someday I get my gala and closed the laptop.

My father calls at four. “Tonight,” he always starts without any greeting. “The Belmont House. I’ve got some very interesting people coming through, and I want you there.”

“I have three families I’m supposed to call back.”

“Call them tomorrow. This matters, Jessica.” He pauses, timed just long enough to sound like reluctant honesty. “I’d like them to meet you. See the work firsthand. You know it means so much more coming from you than from me.”

“You said that last time too.”

“Because it’s true every time.” A small laugh, warm on the surface. “Seven. Don’t make me wait on you.”

What it means is that I stand next to him for two hours while he tells strangers, my daughter runs the whole thing, I just make sure the doors stay open. As if the doors stay open because of him and not because I have spent eight years building relationships with people like Marisol’s caseworker at two in the morning. As if Anchor Point is a wing he built onto his own reputation instead of the other way around.

“Who exactly am I meeting?” I asked.

“Good people. Important people.” Which means he either didn’t know or wasn’t going to tell me. It doesn’t matter anyway, they’re all the same.

I told him I’d be there by seven, and I always keep my word.

* * *

The cab lets me out under the Belmont House awning at seven exactly, cold air giving way to the smell of white lilies and candle wax the second the doors open. I find my father before I find anyone else in the room. It’s an old habit I’ve acquired and have never changed. If you know where he’s standing before he knows you’ve arrived, you have a few extra seconds to brace.

He’s near the bar with a cluster of five people I don’t recognize. He catches my eye across the room, lifts two fingers off his glass in a small acknowledgment, and keeps talking. He continues to work his way out of whatever sentence he’s in the middle of. He’ll get to me when he gets to me.

The group briefly looks in my direction now. A mild, reflexive curiosity but then their attention turns back to my father and something he’s saying. All except one. One man isn’t glancing. He’s looking at me. I wait for him to turn his head back to the conversation, but he doesn’t. He just continues to stare directly at me, not moving an inch.

I’m barely inside the door, but I don’t look away either. I’m as transfixed as he and I have no idea why.

Neither of us moves. It’s absurd. We’re sixty feet apart, there are two hundred people and a string quartet between us. But for a second none of that seems to matter to either of us at all.

I don’t know his name, but I already know I want to.

My father is easing himself out of the group now, a hand on one man’s shoulder, a word to another. He has the mastered the art of leaving a conversation without anyone feeling left. Meanwhile, I’m still standing here, held in place by a stranger’s attention that pins me where I stand.

The stranger’s eyes still hold mine across the room. There’s no practiced society smile, no casual glance, just a steady, unguarded focus that stops me mid-step. My hands go still around the clutch I’m holding. I realize, a moment too late, that I still haven’t moved. The air between us feels tighter, as if the space itself has narrowed to the line of his gaze. I feel it low in my stomach, a slow, insistent pull that makes me aware of every place my dress touches skin. The strap at my shoulder, the soft pressure of the fabric against my ribs, the bare line of my throat, the way the silk shifts when I breathe. My pulse moves into my fingertips. For a second I forget to maintain my normal gala persona. Stand approachable enough to draw people in, guarded enough that nothing real gets through.

He isn’t smiling. Whatever expression he’s wearing on his face, it isn’t charm.

I take him in without meaning to. He’s wearing a dark suit, cut close in a way that only comes from a tailor who knows every precise line of a man’s body. Broad shoulders are held with rigid control. His jaw is cut sharp and unyielding. Everything about him is cold and striking. He’s handsome in a hard, almost severe way, all stillness and tightly held strength. His eyes are dazzling, they somehow sparkle from this distance, but I can’t tell what color. When those eyes stay on me the coldness doesn’t leave. It burns hotter underneath.

Someone near him says something, but he doesn’t look away from me.

I can see my father in my peripheral. I turn to him as he reaches me. His hand closes around my elbow, warm and certain, already moving. He’s steering me back the way he came.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he says.

I let him walk me toward the group, toward the man who hasn’t stopped looking since I came through the door. With every step the distance closes and his face sharpens a little more. He stands with perfect stillness, and I feel a flicker of recognition arrive a half-second before I can place it. I’ve seen this face before. He was on a magazine cover, a headline, some article about biotech funding I only half read on a train.

My father is already introducing me to the rest of the group, warm and easy. I’m given one name, then another, and I couldn’t tell you a single one of them if my life depended on it. The room has narrowed down to the space between myself and the man who continues to stare at me. None of the other names matter at all.

Then my father turns, with that self-deprecating smile he uses when he’s won something, and says the one name I do hear.

“Jonathan Atwell,” he says. “I’d like you to meet my daughter, Jessica Shaw.”

The name hits me at the exact instant his face does, both of them arriving together like a door swinging open, and I understand, all at once, exactly who has been watching me all night.

I don’t know yet what this chance, not so chance meeting is about. I only know, standing here with my father’s hand still at my elbow, and this man staring back at me with his heated expression and devastating eyes, that I’m not sorry to find out.