Evie stands on the corner of Eighth Avenue, surrounded by the skitter and hustle of a Midtown New York morning, uncomfortably aware that she is looking at her last best chance. She’s wearing a thousand-dollar dress she got for seventy-five bucks, only slightly shopworn, and her shoes and bra both pinch but she could conceivably belong among the neatly attired office workers flowing into the glass tower over the street from her. The little voice that tells her that she’s a fake, she’ll never belong, keeps her teetering on the curb until it is drowned out—first by the scream of a passing ambulance, then by the grumble of her own stomach. Breakfast is for people who can pay rent, and Evie is not one of those people.

The tourists milling behind her stare at their phones and quarrel over reviews of local diners, on a mission to find the most authentic New York bagel experience (good luck); they’re shocked into silence as she flings herself into the street. Real New Yorkers don’t wait for the light, and this is still, tenuously, her city. She jaywalks around a taxi and dodges the messengers in the bike lane and then she’s across, feet on the curb and heart in her throat. She slips, an impostor, into the flow of the fully employed, spinning through the rotating golden doors of One Worldwide Plaza.

She’s young, smart, on time, and vastly overqualified, and she manages to maintain her sense of optimism all the way up to the seventeenth floor, and Meserov & Co’s small office suite. But there’s another candidate already waiting, perched on a white sofa under a big, abstract black and white painting that could almost be a Franz Kline. While Evie understood that this wasn’t her usual temp gig, that she’d have to interview, it didn’t hit home until the competition was sitting right there in front of her. The girl glances up at Evie, brief and disinterested, before returning to scroll through her phone. She’s got blonde highlights and fake eyelashes and a perfect manicure, and looks like she weighs 120 pounds soaking wet. Evie looks down at her own messy drugstore nail polish and feels her hopes founder in the storm of the other girl’s perfection.

The HR woman, Abi, is wearing headphones and making quiet mmhmm sounds at a laptop balanced on the arm of her chair, presumably in the middle of a video call. She catches Evie’s eye, smiles, and mouths we’re running late, have a seat before returning to her meeting. Her braids are lavender this week.

Evie was used to temping. The agency calls you up, sends you out, you work one day to six months, rinse, repeat. It was an ideal gig for a girl who just needed to meet expenses while working on her freelance career. Or it was, until Evie blew it by walking out of a more than usually terrible assignment, and the agency stopped calling her all spring in retaliation. They probably wouldn’t even have called her for this if Abi hadn’t been handling the selection on the client side. The job was listed through Meyer, Luchins & Black, the big law firm that took up about five floors in the tower. Evie had temped there for three whole months over the winter, covering someone on maternity leave. She had hit it off with Abi, the law firm’s bubbly HR person whose shoulder-length hair was an ever-changing rainbow of yarn braids. Part of Evie—the part that had student loans and rent and a maxed-out credit card—had hoped that the gig would be located on one of the law firm’s floors. They always had leftover sandwiches from catered lunch meetings, and free sodas in the fridges. If a girl was careful at a job like that, she didn’t have to buy food for the whole time she was temping.

But the consultancy is on a much lower floor, one comprised of hallways lined with the closed doors of mysterious small office suites. The Meserov office is tiny, just an outer foyer with a reception desk covered in paperwork that had clearly been dropped there on the way past never to be touched again, and closed double doors to the principal investigator’s office. Which, presumably, had a window, unlike the outer office. There is a leather sofa and an armchair, but the blonde has the sofa, and Abi has the armchair. Evie is left to perch against the reception desk, trying not to dislodge the Matterhorn of folders and expense reports tossed haphazardly on it. Her stomach grumbles loudly. She’d been told to arrive at 10:30, and it’s now 11 with no sign of a start in sight.

She touches her hair to make sure it’s behaving, and tries to ignore the rapid spiral of her anxiety. The ad specified executive assistants with a track record of confidential work. The pay is good, enough to survive (and wasn’t it pathetic that it had come down to that, anything to survive in New York, so different from five years ago when she’d arrived fresh out of college, planning to set the city on fire with her dreams). But the business had called itself a “small investigative consultancy” associated with Meyer, Luchins & Black, a description that would usually be anathema to career executive assistants like the blonde on the sofa. Those women wanted name-brand firms with cachet and fabulous benefits and biannual paid retreats where they could bat Sephora’s best eyelashes at newly divorced managing directors. What was left for jobs like this was usually girls fresh off the plane from somewhere else; moms and misfits and back-to-workers with a hint of desperation in their eyes; and folks like Evie, who were still telling themselves this was the day job.

Still, she’d temped for enough law offices and venture capital firms that she qualified under the confidentiality angle. Hell, back when she first arrived, her journalism degree still shiny and new, she’d run back office at a strip club, and not a classy one, because it was colorful and maybe she’d get a book or a column out of it. But all she’d got was exhaustion migraines and a ferocious hatred of loud pop music. And investigative work? She was beyond qualified for that. And god, wouldn’t that be better than booking flights and running expense reports and making PowerPoints and collecting dry-cleaning? It was still a day job, of course, but maybe it wouldn’t be an incredibly shit day job.

Out of the corner of her eye, Evie sees Abi take off her headphones and close her laptop. “Sorry about that,” Abi sighs, shaking her head. “This week’s been a disaster. Thank god it’s almost over.” She leans back to peer at the closed wooden doors, as if she could see through them. “He’s finishing up with the previous candidate, and then it’s you, Gemma, and Evie, and that’s it. So not too much longer, I hope.”

Gemma, the blonde, looks up. “I’m happy to go last. I took the whole day off.” She smiles at Evie. It doesn’t reach her eyes. “You look like you’ve got places to be.”

Evie doesn’t have anywhere to be. She doesn’t even have anything to take the day off from, and she knows exactly what Gemma is doing: angling for the last interview slot so she’s the one who’s freshest in memory when it comes to the hiring decision. But Evie smiles back, nonetheless, and tells Gemma that she’d prefer to keep their existing interview order. Then she turns to Abi and says, “So, can you tell us anything about”—she sweeps her hand around to encompass posh sofas, painting, paperwork—“this?”

“Well.” Abigail clears her throat. “Meserov is an investigative agency frequently used by Meyer, Luchins & Black, mostly by the Family Law division. As you can see,” she continues, indicating the messy reception desk covered in badly stacked paperwork, “its principal, Misha, needs—”

She is cut off by the sound of the inner doors opening, and the click of heels on thin carpet. An Asian-American woman in a sharp black cardigan and wide-legged trousers strides out, jaw clenched. She doesn’t meet anyone’s eye as she stomps out of the office suite and into the hall leading to the elevators.

“I guess that’s a no, then,” Abi says to the woman’s retreating back.

“Next,” sighs a low, husky male voice from the doorway, the sort of voice that sounds like it should be whispering lazy secrets across linen sheets. There is the smallest hint of another, older accent behind the cool, received-pronunciation British vowels; something from considerably further east.

Evie doesn’t know what she’s been expecting the principal of a small investigative consultancy to look like. Maybe a nervous, tired-eyed woman who washed out of Kroll for something quietly scandalous, and is still a little paranoid people will find out. Or a character out of an old film noir: middle-aged white guy with a shirt that smells like bourbon and a face like an unmade bed. Or, more realistically, an ex-FBI lifer trading up to private-sector pay to afford a house in a good school district on Long Island.

She is in no way prepared for the tall figure who slopes out of the inner office like a bored, hung-over panther.

Evie has been temping for a few years now, and the bosses never look like Misha Meserov.

He’s about thirty, give or take, and over six feet tall, with the sort of aggressively v-shaped body that is only achieved from spending every spare moment at the gym, and his expensively understated charcoal-grey suit is tailored to show off every one of those angles. The suit looks bespoke; Evie would bet it cost more than her first car. Despite that, Misha looks like he’s been partying for the past week: golden-tinted skin faded to sallow, and dark circles under the most arrestingly blue eyes Evie has ever seen. The areas around his pupils are ice-pale but the outer edges of the irises are ringed darker. The effect is startling, almost predatory.

His hair is dark brown, nearly black, and surprisingly long for someone who works with one of the snobbiest white-shoe law firms in Manhattan. It is caught in a low twist at the back of his neck, but a few strands have fallen loose and Evie watches as he reflexively tucks one lock back behind his ear. It lasts there for approximately three seconds before slipping forwards again across his high, aristocratic cheekbones.

She would have preferred the Walter Matthau jowls and the Jim Beam in the bottom desk drawer. Or the ex-Fed who’d eventually spill stories to her about Brighton Beach mobsters and jurisdictional fights with the NYPD. Not this pretty-boy Eurotrash who probably reeks of cologne and wouldn’t know a real problem if it bit him in his unfairly perfect ass.

It’s a job, Evie tells herself. It’s a job. It wasn’t as good as interning at the magazine, but unlike the magazine it would pay, and it would use some of her actual skills. She thinks back to her all-time worst temp gigs: the Canadian venture capitalist with an untreated short-term memory disorder that everyone in her firm had chosen to ignore because her name was on the door. She would give Evie three contradicting instructions in the same morning, and once called her at 4am on a Sunday to scream at her for not being in the office. Or the one she walked out of: a bond trader with hair plugs and a habit of sneaking so much vodka in his morning orange juice that it became almost translucent. Every morning he’d leave his sweat- and vomit-stained shirts from the previous night’s client entertaining on her desk for her to dry-clean. She bore with it for three weeks and finally bailed when he dumped a pair of his chinos on her chair, and she picked them up to discover he’d shat in them. She takes a deep breath, and tells herself that everything is up from here.

Evie watches Misha Meserov watching them, those strange pale eyes raking slowly over the three women in the room as he takes into account how they’re sitting, what they’re doing. She forgets to smile when he gets to her, too lost in staring back at him, trying to figure him out.

He raises an eyebrow at her. She quickly plasters on her happy face.

The corners of his eyes crinkle and he makes a little huff of amusement. He doesn’t look very thrilled to be here either.

Abigail thwacks Meserov in the chest with a manila folder. He flashes Abi a surprisingly wry smirk, then the mask of boredom descends again. “Who wants to be first?” he drawls, opening the folder and perusing its contents, before glancing up through lashes so dark that Evie briefly wonders if he’s wearing mascara.

“You’re seeing Gemma, then—” Abi begins.

“It’s fine, I’ll go now,” says Evie, sliding off her perch on the reception desk. She feels odd; Meserov makes her anxious somehow, his very presence knocking her off balance. Sitting around waiting will only make it worse.

Gemma’s eyes widen momentarily in surprise, and when she says, “Okay, good luck,” she almost sounds sincere.

Abigail smiles gratefully to her, then says, “I have an 11:30 upstairs. I’ll pop back once I’m done to see who you’ve decided on,” and closes her laptop.

“If I decide,” Meserov says, arch.

Abigail puts her hands on her hips and steps forwards. She’s almost a foot shorter than him, soft and round, her dark skin set off by a pretty wrap dress in an ivory and green print, and she is giving zero quarter. “Misha, you’re picking one and that’s final. Look at this mess. I am not dealing with Don and Dee bitching to me about where your files are, or how they can’t get anything out of you before 11am. It is not my job.”

Misha glares at Abi, and Abi glares right back, until the sound of a stack of files cascading off the reception desk and scattering onto the ground distracts them.

Abigail looks pointedly at the jumbled mess of papers on the floor, folds her arms, and looks back at Misha. She raises an eyebrow.

“Fine,” he growls.

“Good,” Abigail counters, just as steely. She tucks her laptop under her arm. “I’ll be back later.” In the doorway, she points at Meserov. “Play nice,” she says, her voice a mix of fond and scolding, as if he were a reckless nephew.

Meserov tilts his head and pouts, the brat. “I always do, Abi.”

Abigail snorts in derision and shakes her lavender braids as she strides out the door.

Evie walks the few steps across the outer office to where Meserov waits, and lifts her head up to look him in the eye. Nope, no mascara, she thinks. Just lashes that girls like Gemma would maim for. She sticks her hand out. “Evie Cross. Hello.”

Evie is close enough as Meserov takes her hand to realize he doesn’t reek of loud cologne at all. What she can smell is very quiet, limes and old leather. Rather than shaking her hand, Meserov just holds it, pressing gently with his thumb on the back of her knuckles as he inclines his head. His hands aren’t as soft as she expects, and for a moment Evie has the weird feeling he’s going to raise her hand to his lips. But then he lets go, and turns towards the office. “Miss Cross,” he says, indicating for her to follow with the file in his other hand.

The interior office gives surprisingly little away about the man. There’s a window overlooking Madison Avenue that takes up an entire wall. The rest of the walls are painted the blooming, faded silver of an old mirror, which augments the daylight coming in and makes the entire room feel shimmery and bright. There’s more modern art on the walls: something splattery and Pollock-esque over Meserov’s desk, a steel-grey and rust Anselm Kiefer (or near as dammit) above a worn tobacco-leather chaise longue that reminds her uncomfortably of a psychiatrist’s couch and looks about a hundred years old. Further down is a tall, narrow white canvas stenciled with a stack of huge black letters: RUN DOG RUN. The desk and bookcases are all mid-century modern, and the whole office would look quite sleek if it weren’t for the fact that Misha Meserov is an unrepentant slob.

His desk is littered with papers and 8x10 photographs, all turned face down, and even the chaise longue where he motions for Evie to sit has a few files dumped on it. He doesn’t need a secretary, he needs a containment crew.

Evie gingerly moves the files and stacks them crossways at one end of the chaise longue, then sits down, smoothing the skirt of her secondhand designer dress. She folds her hands and tries to look keen and professional and able to be trusted with secrets, and not at all like a girl who won’t be able to make rent next week if she doesn’t land a job by the end of this one.

New York is a cruel mistress. Evie and her roommate Claudia live in a tiny apartment in Bed-Stuy. It’s all they can afford, and even so, they can’t really afford it.

Meserov leans against his desk and sighs, glancing down at her résumé in the file. “So. Call me Misha.” He seems tired.

“Are you Russian?” she asks.

“No. Georgian. Caviar and horses Georgia, not peaches and hip-hop Georgia.” He smiles wearily, clearly accustomed to having to explain. “A small and fiercely independent country which has spent most of its history wedged between two large empires. Three, if you count Persia.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs, paging through her résumé. “Americans never know where anything is.” He looks at her over the folder. “You’re overqualified. Journalism degree from a top school; internships at a big magazine. What are you doing here?”

Evie sighs and glances out at the towers of Manhattan, arrayed outside the window, glittering in May’s midday sun. “You know how many ads were in the print edition of the New York Times main section today?” she asks, with a sadness she can’t keep out of her voice. “Three. Three ads. The news is free now, and even the papers lucky enough to still exist are employing half the people they did when I started my journalism degree. The newspapers are dying. Magazines are, too. Even the big digital sites can’t make money; they’ve been shuttering for years.”

She pinches the bridge of her nose, suddenly feeling entirely too emotional for a job interview. “Hundreds of journalists more experienced and better connected than me can’t find work. The only way I can compete is working for free. And I do. I write my pieces on Medium and Vox and hope somebody notices. I took that internship, which didn’t pay a dime, hoping it would pave my way. That I’d impress them enough they’d hire me. But they didn’t.” She tries to smile, but it still hurts, more than a year later. “They just got a new intern.”

She realizes she’s been staring down at her hands, which have curled into white-knuckled fists where they rest on her thighs. She forces herself to relax, and looks up to meet her fate.

Misha hasn’t moved. He just watches her, his posture neither tense nor relaxed, letting her fill the quiet of the office with words. Somewhere in the back of Evie’s mind she notes it down as something she wants to try later, the way he uses silence as a trap for the unwary.

For now, she shifts on the chaise longue, its horsehair stuffing creaking, and hopes she’s not blushing too hard. “But yeah. That’s what I’m doing here. I’m super organized and a great executive assistant, and I’m a trained investigative journalist. So whatever you investigate, I can, uh… help.”

“Miss Cross.” Misha smiles at her, wry and melancholy at the same time.

“Evie,” she says, sitting up straighter. She will get through this interview and, dammit, she will do so with honor. Evie Cross is not a quitter.

“Evie,” he repeats, inclining his head slightly in acknowledgement. “Most people think of the law as a shield, but it can also be a sword. It shouldn’t be, but then many things in this world aren’t as they should be. Sometimes the law can even be wielded like a stiletto, thin and sharp and hardly felt at all until it causes irreparable damage.” Misha reaches back onto the surface of the desk he’s leaning against and picks up a photo, seemingly at random. He shows it to Evie, his hand mostly covering the image. She doesn’t catch much context, enough to see that it’s of two mostly naked people in a compromising position.

Misha tosses the photo back on the desk, face down. “The work I do is… not for everyone. Most people will loathe it. A few people will enjoy it immensely. Neither of those groups do I wish to hire. So I’m going to ask you a couple of questions to give myself a feel for where you fit. They are not standard interview questions. It’s okay if you don’t want to answer some of them.” He looks at her, face sincere and his wide, feminine lips slightly parted. “It’s okay if you don’t answer any of them.”

Evie can’t help but smile a little. “Though silence is an answer in itself.”

A brief expression flickers across Misha’s face, too fast for her to catch whether it’s approval or annoyance, but bitter experience tells her it’s the latter. Being too smart too soon never wins you anything as a woman, and Evie thinks it’s one of the great flaws in the world. She’d always assumed if she were really good at something, if she worked hard to be the best, it would impress the boys, and then they’d like her as much as they liked the other girls. Maybe even more. But finally, at twenty-five, she’d realized that boys didn’t want the best girls. They wanted girls like Gemma: decorative little blondes who were always a complement, never a challenge. She isn’t surprised that Misha is so typical, but her shoulders slump a little further, and the weight of the world settles a little heavier upon them. She’s blowing this, and she can’t afford to blow this. Not if she wants to stay in New York.

Misha crosses his arms, which only serves to accentuate the thickness of his shoulders and upper arms over his narrow waist. “You’re walking down the street and two men start kissing right in front of you. What do you do?” he asks.

“I look away and keep walking,” Evie says. “Not because it’s two guys, but because this is New York and I mind my own business. Plus, PDA is gross, no matter who’s doing it.” Then, before she can stop herself, she throws the question back. “Are you gay? Or is this because of” — she gestures towards the surface of the desk — “all the compromising photos?”

Evie internally cringes as she realizes what she’s done. She’s upset the implicit power balance of the interview and let her mouth run away with her because Misha is interesting, unexpectedly so, and she wants to find out what his deal is. By interviewing him. Good one. But still, she reasons, if he’s going to ask invasive questions, he should be willing to answer them, too.

She is brought back into the room by a snort of amusement from Misha. “Yes,” he answers, unhelpfully. “And I’m bi, actually. Next: are you religious?”

Play dumb, says Evie’s internal voice. Tone it down, or he’ll never hire you. “No. My grandparents are big-time Catholic. My mom and dad less so, me not at all. I can still recite a ton of scripture, though it’s mostly from comp-lit courses in college.”

“Are you superstitious? Ghosts and things like that?”

Evie rolls her eyes. “I mean, I have a lucky poker chip, and I read my horoscope, but I don’t believe any of it. Well… I don’t rationally think ghosts and things like that exist, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid of the dark.”

Misha’s expression never changes. “Hm,” is all he says, and Evie can’t tell if she’s making a good impression, or talking herself out of a job.

“Last question, Evie. What’s the strangest thing that ever happened to you?” Misha asks.

Evie thinks. Misha is still watching her. She begins to stutter a half-dozen things, then stops herself, as every story she’s about to tell either involves bad-mouthing previous employers or making herself look dangerously irresponsible. She shakes her head. “I can’t think of anything,” she mumbles. “I guess I’m very dull.”

The silence stretches across the room like a heavy snow, cold and suffocating.

“I very much doubt that,” Misha says, soft and low. “But even so, I don’t recommend seeking strange things out. You’re right to be afraid of the dark.”

Evie immediately, furiously rejects Misha’s casual world-weariness, which only serves to rub in her face how much her own life hasn’t even gotten off its launch pad yet. She stands up and stalks over to the window, looking down to the cars and pedestrians hurrying about like hot ants under the midday sunshine far below. The window is heavily polarized, dimming the intensity of the light and leaving New York a soundless pantomime at her feet.

Behind her, she can hear Misha drag his desk chair out and sit down in it. She turns around to see him stifling a yawn. She wants so badly to say sorry I’m keeping you up, pal, but on the very slim chance she hasn’t blown this interview to smithereens already, she holds fast to her discretion.

“Do you have any questions for me?” he says, slumping back in his chair.

“Yes,” Evie says. “What do you investigate?” Still-simmering anger gives her the courage to meet his pale eyes with her plain brown ones.

“Relationships. Marriages, affairs, things like that,” Misha says, waving one hand vaguely in the air as he stretches his legs out beneath the desk. “There are tons of agencies and apps and services to bring people together. I do the opposite.” He smiles, predatory. “I tear them apart.”

“Is that… legal?” Evie frowns.

“Yes,” Misha says. “In an obeying the letter, but not the spirit, way.”

“Is it moral?”

Misha shrugs. “Not often. But the cases I take mainly involve the super-rich.” He tips his head back and lifts one hand to point lazily up to the ceiling, to the lawyers’ offices several floors above them. A wry smirk begins to pull at the edges of his lips. “No-one else can afford them.” He looks at Evie, his expression oddly sincere. “And I don’t harm anyone who doesn’t deserve it.”

“Oh, and you get to decide?” The words are, as usual, out of Evie’s mouth before she can stop them. So much for playing dumb.

“Yes, I do,” Misha replies, soft and final as he rises, no doubt to dismiss her. “Just as a journalist chooses who to write about.” He gestures to the door. “Now, if you don’t have any more questions?”

Evie knows she’s blown it; flunked whatever test he was giving her. So she asks her last question, because there’s nothing left to win. It’s the oldest question in the world: “Why?”

Misha arches an eyebrow.

Evie continues. “People like you don’t normally turn against their own kind.”

“Excuse me?” Misha says, an edge of command creeping into his tone.

“The rich. You come from money. A lot of it. It’s in every movement you make. It’s hanging all over your walls. That’s a real Franz Kline out there, isn’t it? I thought it was fake until I came in here and saw that.” Evie points at the Christopher Wool RUN DOG RUN painting. “I worked the cocktail party at the auction house’s sale preview a couple years ago. I remember staring at that painting, fascinated by how sometimes it was just words on a canvas and how sometimes it would dissociate into nothing but shapes and patterns.” She looks right at Misha. “I remember what it cost.”

She doesn’t regret it. For the first time in the interview she feels like she’s standing on her own two feet, strong and sure. She knows she’s on to something, and it’s been eating at her since she first saw Misha: why is a ridiculously handsome rich guy slumming around doing divorce investigations for a bunch of stuffy lawyers?

Misha is just gazing at her, head tilted, face a quiet mask. “Huh. I don’t remember you, from that preview.”

“I was the help,” Evie says. “You’re not supposed to remember us.”

“Still,” Misha says. He indicates the door again. “Thank you for your time, Miss Cross. It was very interesting, meeting you.” His expression is still shut down, melancholy, and Evie feels something sharp in her chest that she was the cause of it.

“When I get nervous, sometimes I…” she says, pausing with her hand on the door. She takes a last look at this impossible man and realizes that he is the strangest thing ever to happen to her, and in a moment, she will leave and never see him again. “Really, I’m sorry. I was making assumptions and that was wrong of me.”

“On the contrary. You were correct,” Misha says, as he looks down at her. Evie feels the warmth of him as he reaches past her to turn the doorknob. Just before he opens the door, he leans down to speak softly into her ear.

“But you should be careful, Miss Cross. In my experience, people easily forget wrong answers. But seldom do they forgive right ones.”