Chapter 9: Offer Letter

“We’ll take a cab,” Elliot said.

He let a second pass and then said the other thing, because there was no version of him that got into a stranger’s car without saying it. “Thank you. For today. If there’s ever anything you need from me, tell me.”

There wasn’t. He knew it before the sentence was all the way out of his mouth — a car at the curb with the driver already coming around the front of it, a key card that had opened a floor the elevator buttons didn’t list. But you said it anyway. That much of him had made it through.

Sam added a thank-you of his own, shorter. He’d been on the receiving end too.

“Mm,” Adrian said, and that was the end of the thank-yous.

He walked them out to the curb. The black car sat there with its engine running.

“Get them home,” Adrian said to the driver.

“Mr. Hale—“ Elliot got that far.

Adrian nodded at him. Chin down half an inch and back up, finished before Elliot had the rest of it out, and then he was walking the other way — back along the walkway, past the doors, toward the corner. Elliot watched him the whole way and never came up with anything worth calling after him.

It read like a goodbye. He let it be one.

The driver had the rear door open and a hand out. Sam got himself out of the chair on his good leg and into the seat, which took a while and a good deal of breathing through the teeth. Then the driver straightened and offered Elliot the same hand, and Elliot said, “I’ve got it,” and got in on his own and pulled the door shut.

Forty minutes. The city went by and Elliot watched it from the one position the knee allowed, and Sam watched it from the other side, and neither of them said anything. They turned in at the campus in the dark — lamps on along the path past the library, four or five people walking it, and not one of them looked at a black car with a driver in it for more than a second.

At the residence hall the driver got out and offered to take them up. Elliot thanked him and said they had it from here. The man said something helpful about the elevator, Elliot said it again, and the man got back in and drove off.

The room looked exactly the way he’d left it that morning. He sat down in his own chair and got the weight off the knee, and the whole day came down on him at once. A few hours out of one afternoon, and his body was acting like he’d been gone a month.

They ate what was in the fridge — Sam with the bad leg stretched out in front of him, Elliot leaning on the back of his chair — and then took turns in the bathroom. Elliot kept the wrapped knee out of the spray and washed around it with one hand flat on the wall.

He thought he’d be gone the second his head hit the pillow. Everything else was finished — knee, back, shoulders, all of it heavy enough to sink the mattress. His head was still running, and the thing it kept running back to was a man walking off down a walkway without once looking around.

Hale.

He’d called him that at the hospital and the man hadn’t corrected him. The name had come off a wall — HALE, in letters as tall as he was, behind the security desk of the building where Elliot had sat through three interviews with a folder in his lap — and it had been a guess. But it was a guess with a lobby that size behind it, so he’d said it out loud, and it had held.

There was a second thing hooked to the name, and he’d spent the whole ride home not doing anything with it. He had an application in at Hale Group. He’d put it in before he had ever met anyone named Hale. Which made it a coincidence. The kind of coincidence a person with nothing else going stops being picky about.

In Bonded to the Alpha, Hale barely appeared.

He’d gone through that book the way you go through a book you can’t get out of, hunting for names, and that one wasn’t in any place that mattered. Not the alpha. Not the omega. Not either family, not the bond the whole thing turned on, not any of the chapters where the killing happened. Which put the man off the page — and in a world where every bad thing had a scent and a cause and a run of chapters leading up to it, off the page was the best news he’d had in a while.

He would have liked it better if the book were any good. It wasn’t.

The other one he kept turning over was the hospital. Why the man had been there at all. Why he’d moved through the place like he’d been born in it. It could have been an appointment of his own. It hadn’t looked like one.

Whether he ever wanted to see Elliot again wasn’t something one nod was going to settle. He’d read it as a goodbye on the sidewalk. Lying here, he couldn’t get it to stay one — and that was fine, because there was one thing he needed, and it took a room and a second person in it, and he wasn’t going to get either by standing outside a hospital.

He turned onto his side. After a while he slept.

Monday he woke at six out of habit, remembered there was nowhere he had to be, and went back to sleep until eleven. Tuesday he did it again, with less guilt. By Wednesday he’d admitted to himself that this was the most rest he’d had since he started working — back then he’d been a corporate grunt, the kind who ate lunch over the keyboard, and eleven in the morning hadn’t been a thing that happened — and that he owed all of it to a knee.

Wednesday afternoon, Sam’s phone rang. Sam answered it sitting on the edge of the bed with the bad leg out in front of him, said nine or ten words into it, and hung up. Then he looked over. “I got it.”

Elliot said congratulations and meant it. Sam had been after a developer job at Cub Technologies, and it hadn’t been a sure thing.

“Don’t start staring at the wall yet,” Sam said. “Hale Group’s a big company. Big companies move slow. It’ll be another few days.”

“Sure,” Elliot said, and went back to his laptop, and got nothing done on it for the rest of the afternoon.

Sam was right, and it didn’t help, because every day the call didn’t come made the no more likely. A no meant no badge. No badge meant no reason to be anywhere near the name on that wall, and the question he was carrying would stay exactly where it was, with nobody in this city to hand it to.

The phone was on the desk when it went off, Thursday, just after four. The number had a name attached to it, saved from the week of the interviews. It took him three seconds to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Hi — is this Elliot Vance?”

“Speaking.”

“Hi, Elliot. This is Bianca Hoyt, from Hale Group.” A pause, the kind where somebody looks down at a sheet of paper. “Do you have a minute?”

He had a minute.

“Great. So the team finished their review, and I’m calling because they’d like to move forward. You went through three rounds with us, and everyone who sat in on them agreed. If you’re still interested, we’d love to have you.”

“Thank you,” he said. It came out shorter than he wanted it to, and on the other end she laughed a little, the way people do when somebody sounds like that.

Then she took him through the rest of it. Forty-seven hundred a month, before taxes. Benefits, which she went over in a way that suggested the packet would explain it better than she could. A background check, which she apologized for twice. An offer letter that would come as an email attachment and would need a signature. And a start date, whenever he was ready.

He asked for a week — the knee — and she said a week was fine, and they settled on the Monday after next, and she told him who to ask for at the front desk.

He hung up and sat with the phone in his hand.

It was real. He wanted that on the record somewhere, even if the only place it could go was his own head: the happiness was real, and it had gone through him in the first few seconds, before the second half showed up and stood next to it. The second half was arithmetic. A badge, a building, a name on a wall.

Across the room, Sam, who had heard all of it, said, “See.”

The letter came the next morning as an attachment with a signature line at the bottom. He signed it at the desk before he found a reason to wait, sent it back, and sat there for a minute.

The rest went fast. The knee scabbed, which was disgusting, and then it itched, which was worse, and by the second weekend he could walk to the corner store and back with a hitch he’d started calling a walk.

The night before, an email said to come in at one. Monday he put on the least-wrinkled shirt he owned and took the subway.

Half an hour, door to door, which was less than he’d expected and more than he wanted to spend twice a day.

He’d been inside the tower three times and it was still a lot to look at from the sidewalk, all that glass giving nothing back, and he stood across the street and looked up the whole height of it, which he hadn’t done at any of the interviews.

Somebody from HR met him at the elevator bank — not Hoyt, a woman with a lanyard and a folder — and rode up with him and didn’t talk much and didn’t need to. On twenty-two, which was marketing, she walked him down a row of desks and stopped at the last one. “This is you.”

His desk: a monitor, a keyboard with the letter worn off the A, a phone with four buttons, and a chair that had been set up for somebody taller. The badge photo was taken in a basement room by a man who told him not to smile. Twenty minutes later the badge hung around his neck, his name on it and a gray picture of him on a white background. The login on the sticky note didn’t take, and IT got to it before lunch.

He asked who he’d be reporting to. She pointed down the row with her chin. “Gordon Ostrow. He’ll come find you.”

Ostrow was at the far end of the floor, standing next to somebody’s desk with one hand flat on it and a phone against his ear, talking at a volume that carried the length of the row. The person he was talking to stood there and said nothing. He did not come find Elliot that day. He looked down the row once, took in the new desk, and went back to his call.

Elliot located the break room, the bathroom, and the printer. Then he sat down and read the benefits packet front to back, twice, because there was nothing else to do and nobody had told him anything else to do. Medical, dental, a retirement account with a match in it, a page about parking he had no use for. He read all of it and kept two numbers.

At four-thirty somebody dropped a folder on his desk and asked when it would be done.

He left at seven on Monday. Nine on Tuesday. Nine-forty on Wednesday. By Friday he’d stopped checking the clock, and the window behind his monitor had gone black without his noticing.

He stretched his neck to one side and then the other. It wasn’t personal and it wasn’t new. He’d done this before, in a place he wasn’t going back to, and the first week of a job had looked about the same.

His stomach made the decision for him around eight-forty. He got his phone up with his left hand, kept the right one moving down the column, hit the same order he’d been hitting all week, and set the phone face down on the desk. Then he put the left hand back where it had been.