Janeal Mikkado had not gone to Greece right away. That did not happen until several years afterward, when Milan booked the trip, a vacation to celebrate the promotion he had given her.
A promotion she had weaseled out of him without his knowing it.
Instead, when she left her meeting with Salazar Sanso in an Albuquerque sports bar, she took her authentic small bills, rented a car, and drove to Missouri, where she connected with a kumpanía her father had done business with three years earlier.
She was in this camp only briefly, because she had no intention of staying with them, and because they expressed no desire for her to stay. Her terse visit had the unexpected side effect of injecting bitterness into her grief over her father’s death. In this place where people were valued for little more than their business transactions, she found herself angry at her father for his dishonesty. Who he really was, what he really did with his money and his allegiances—he had hidden it from her, the one person who loved him above all else.
Somehow, allowing bitterness to overshadow her loss made it easier to move on. To forget what she had left behind. To believe she had left it unwillingly.
The little community had been welcoming of her money, what she told them she had, which was a fraction of the truth. But it was enough to fund their resources and secure for herself a new name, a birth certificate, and a functioning social security number, the first personal documents she’d ever possessed.
When summer waned and September leaves turned gold, Jane Johnson bought a cheap but reliable used car and pointed it in the direction of New York City. Janeal never came to think of herself as Jane, though no one had called her by her given name afterward—not even Milan, who neither knew nor seemed to care about the details of her past. That was as she wanted it. But Jane was a good, invisible name that would be of use in a city where she wanted to be invisible.
Vanishing turned out to be easier than she imagined, a magic trick facilitated by her funding, which she invested and rationed strategically. Within the year she rented a nondescript studio apartment, secured a food-prep job in the kitchen of a small family-run restaurant, enrolled at New York University, and began to work on creating her new life.
At the center of her vision for this life was a dark hole. She intended to fill it with her regrets, her loss, and her choices, then use her new life to form a lid that would cap it, seal it, and obscure it from anyone who dared to look.
She planned to do this alone and had a good running start. But four years later, as she prepared to enter NYU’s graduate publishing program, she met Milan Finch.
Janeal had become an apprentice pastry chef at an upscale restaurant by then and was summoned from the kitchen at the request of a patron. He wanted to meet the person responsible for the astounding sweet-cheese pastries, kalitsounia kritis, the likes of which he had not tasted since his recent visit to Crete.
When Milan saw Janeal emerge from the kitchen, he stood and stared without saying anything for several long seconds. She glanced between him and the man he dined with. A business associate, she assumed by the suit and tie and the portfolio that balanced on the corner of the table. Janeal had to break the silence, not because she was embarrassed but because people were starting to look.
“I hope everything is agreeable?”
“Everything,” he finally said. “Especially the stunning color of your hair.”
The remark struck a chord of loneliness in Janeal that his stare had failed to trigger. She involuntarily reached up to tuck a strand back into her toque, then returned his stare to compensate for her momentary lapse of composure. Janeal found him to be handsomer than she had first noticed. Late thirties if she had to guess, but he was fit and might be older than he appeared. Italian descent maybe, with those olive-colored eyes and square face. Wealthy, judging by the tailored suit.
“And the food?”
“What are they paying you? Tell me and I’ll pay you double to be my private chef. My employment package is very appealing. I offer many fine benefits.”
Janeal had chosen pastries and publishing over her more likely choice as a chef in part to avoid, as much as possible, the gas stovetops, open flames, and flambés of nearly every professional kitchen. Yet she was too amused by his brazenness to be offended. “Your money would be better invested in a native Greek,” she said.
“You’re not one?” He feigned surprise.
She would swap mockery with mockery then, if that was what he wanted. "No more than you are. I’ve never been there.” Maybe she had meant to boast.
“Then I’ll take you,” he announced. “I really must take you.” And she believed he was fully conscious of his double entendre.
He did take her, in both senses, and she let him because it served her purposes. Milan, it turned out, was a rising star in the world of periodicals, and she soon convinced him that she was more talented in his editor’s chair than in his kitchen.
Janeal recognized many years prior to seeing the Acropolis, though, that he was even more motivated by selfish goals than she was. She also recognized the black hole at the center of his own life. Unlike hers, his hole was uncapped and bottomless. Insatiable.
Even so, she leaned into it quite daringly.
Janeal could not say why she had chosen this day, some fifteen years after the death of her father, to review the path her life had taken. Maybe the flashback was a longing, or maybe it was some kind of misplaced hope, or maybe it was a temporary balm, like the cool emptiness of the elevator she rode in as it zoomed up to the twenty-first floor of her workplace above Manhattan.
Or maybe the memory had merely escaped from that pit she had spent so many years failing to seal off. The nightmares, recurring with increasing regularity, oozed out from under the lid like steam escaping a manhole cover. The headaches, too, drove memories of the past into the center of her brain, threatening to split it apart.
Whatever the true explanation for her reminiscing this evening, she understood the memories to be a symbol of an old transition in her life—and a harbinger of a new transition she would soon have to make.
Janeal gingerly touched her ribs. Milan was always careful to bruise her where no one would see it. He’d never raised a hand to her face, never pinched her throat, never mangled her wrists. The violence had started out years ago as play, as a twisted fantasy that always teetered at the edge of a cliff, with pleasure on solid ground and terror on the drop-off. All this time they had balanced there, mutually demanding, enjoying the danger of a possible freefall without ever having to encounter it.
Until last night, when Milan shoved her over the edge, replacing the thrill with the certainty that death was rushing up to meet her. If Milan had not removed his knees from her lungs when he did, she surely would have hit the earth hard enough to plunge six feet into the soil.
He had been upset over a failed business acquisition.
Janeal transferred her designer bag to the other shoulder and checked her posture.
The elevator dinged, and its doors parted onto a gray ocean of cubicles. Her corner office was farther than any other from the elevator, and getting to it would be nothing short of a fifteen-hundred-meter gauntlet. At seven o’clock on Friday evening, the floor should have been fairly empty, populated only with workaholics and a few less dedicated who simply didn’t have a life outside the office.
Like her. Especially now that Milan would no longer be a part of it. Maybe she should have gone home after making her appearance at the mayor’s cocktail party. How predictable of her to return to the office.
Indeed, she was faced with a crowd of people who seemed to know they could find her here now, people who mistakenly believed that she was more readily available during this late end-of-the-week hour than at any other time.
Mandy, the art director, headed toward her with several sheets of paper in hand, as if she’d been waiting for the elevator light. In another cubicle, the managing editor stood, wearing a resigned expression for having been beaten out of the starting gate. His eyes turned toward the clock mounted on the far end of the room before he sat again.
Janeal exited, placing her full weight on her right leg to avoid limping, in spite of her swollen kneecap. The phone in her office was ringing as if it hadn’t stopped since she left at four.
She saw her assistant’s straw-haired head bobbing above cubicle walls, coming toward her. Alan Greenbrook cut Mandy off as Janeal reached her own glass-boxed office on the other side of the room. He held Janeal’s black coffee in one hand and extended the other to take Mandy’s designs.
“I’ll call you when she’s ready,” Janeal heard him say as she took the more circuitous route to her own door.
She had occupied the corner office in Milan’s high-rise for four years now as editor in chief of All Angles, an acclaimed social-interest magazine that had been described as “an everyman’s rendering of the less accessible giants.” The publication was simply worded without being simpleminded. It was, in truth, as liberal as many newsstand bestsellers, but its name and its reputation mandated that its pages be shared equally with complementary conservative viewpoints. Not because Janeal believed in it, but because there was money in it.
Conservatives had as many dollars to spend as the liberals did, but fewer options to spend it on when it came to printed material. Until Milan Finch conceived of All Angles sometime during his undergrad years. His business plan, which started out as a senior thesis and then morphed into an MBA venture, had little to do with ideology and much to do with capital return. He delivered what people wanted to hear, included conservatives and liberals and those who avoided labels in one big happy audience where all agreed to disagree, called it objective and balanced, and accepted their money for articulating their positions without assessing them or forcing them into head-to-head debates.
All Angles never broke stories, just talked about them. The magazine exposed nothing and investigated little. There was nothing hard-hitting about it. Only an appeal to the individual rather than the collective whole. A promise of representation. Milan had been the self-appointed publisher since the magazine’s inception, but in the four years since he had promoted Janeal to editor in chief, its circulation had quadrupled. In the last two years, the interactive online site had rivaled YouTube in traffic.
It was all the result of Janeal’s long-plotted ten-year plan, based on her clear sense that all people wanted these days was to be heard rather than to listen. That very fact was what had allowed her to fly under Milan’s radar for so long; he was no different from the average Joe. The moment Janeal had realized this, she saved herself from becoming the average Jane: she recognized and put a stop to her journey of becoming someone who wanted others to hear the pain of her beating heart. Her transparency in those days sickened herself. It was why Salazar Sanso had wooed her all those years ago. It was why Milan Finch started her off in this line of work as a department head.
“You understand my readers better than anyone else,” he had said.
Yes. Milan Finch was right about that much at least. But he was wrong to believe she had not changed. That was one of his many mistakes.
Janeal felt the onset of her nightly migraine. The thought that Milan might have ever been right about anything inflamed her brain cells.
“Ms. Johnson.” Alan tucked the stack of papers between his elbow and ribs and held her door open. How he managed to get there in time to open it for her impressed her without fail each week. As always, he would be grinning. Grinning in spite of her.
“Alan.”
His failure to ever be publicly unhappy, especially on a Friday night, both inspired and annoyed her. Alan was neither a workaholic nor a social outcast. He never said he could be spending these evenings with his cute girlfriend at his brother’s nightclub, no matter how late Janeal kept him.
He swept into the room behind her, graceful as a dancer, doing everything simultaneously and without appearing frantic: shut the door, place the coffee on the coaster, lay the papers on the blotter, pick up the ringing phone and nestle the receiver between his jaw and shoulder, reach out to take her coat before she fully shrugged it off.
“Jane Johnson’s office,” he said.
Janeal loved Alan like she imagined she’d love a son if she had one. Not that he needed to know it. At age thirty-two, she had plenty of years left to think of sons, provided Milan was not their father.
“Yes, sir, the interview will appear in Monday’s edition.”
Provided Milan was not their father. She clutched her bag, a seven-hundred-dollar tote gifted to her by its designer, and brushed past her personal assistant, mentally reviewing what she had spent the day deciding to do. Her time had come.
Alan continued to talk. To Senator Lynch, she presumed. “Nothing is printed without her approval, sir.”
Someone had delivered a gift basket, which sat on the credenza behind her desk, under the exterior window. New York’s version of stars—checkerboard squares of illuminated high-rise offices—dotted an otherwise black cityscape. She looked at the note. It was from a physician at St. Luke’s involved in the misadministered-drugs scandal of last month, thanking her for her fair representation and blah blah blah.
“I’ll pass along your message. Thank you.” Alan hung up the phone, probably before the caller had stopped speaking, and placed her coat on the door hook.
Champagne. Dark chocolate. Imported grapes. Caviar. She threw the caviar in the trash.
“Senator Lynch would like to review a copy of the article before we go to press.”
“Why doesn’t his assistant already have it?” She turned back to her desk, champagne bottle in hand.
Alan pointed to three sheets on her blotter. “Mandy had to redesign. Apex Electronics pulled their ad.”
“Why?”
“Something to do with Mr. Finch’s pending acquisi—”
“Angelo didn’t find a replacement?”
“He’s working on it.”
“Call Templeton & Wallace. They’ll come through.”
“They don’t want to be on the same page with Lynch.”
“We don’t really care if they see eye-to-eye with the senator, do we?”
“Of course not.”
“All Angles is about representing all angles, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“And I’m scheduled to attend their fund-raiser next month, am I not?”
“You are.”
“So Angelo can call them again.”
“I’ll let him know.”
Janeal extended the bottle to Alan. “Take that home to your girlfriend tonight.”
His lips parted. “This is a four-hundred-dollar bo—”
“Trust me, the expensive stuff is rarely worth the fanfare. What’s next?”
Alan didn’t seem to know what to do with the expensive bubbly but settled on leaning forward and placing it in front of him on the wide cherry desk.
“Mr. Finch asked me to pass along a message.”
“Like a boy without the guts to call me himself,” she murmured. Alan’s smile neither confirmed nor denied he had heard her. In truth, Milan had left three messages on her cell since leaving her loft apartment last night, and she had ignored them all. “And?”
“The meeting with the board has been moved up to eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
A Saturday board meeting. As if that move would work against her. It wouldn’t, though the change would make her course of action slightly trickier.
“The presentation packets will have to be ready before you leave, then.”
“They’re ready now.”
Alan was a good boy, he was. Barely twenty-two and indefatigable.
“Fine. Get Thomas Sanders on the phone for me. I need a private meeting with him. Now.”
Milan never spent Friday evenings at the office. Tonight, though, he might be motivated to come in.
“If he can’t, perhaps we—”
“I don’t need to know all the possible contingencies, Alan. Just make it happen.”
Alan picked up her phone again and dialed a number. Outside her office, two people stood at the glass door waiting for permission to come in.
“You know, Ms. Johnson”—Alan held the phone between his ear and his shoulder—“our lives around here would be considerably easier if they’d make you president of the board.”
Janeal bent over her handbag in search of the PDA to prevent Alan from seeing her smile. He was the only person in the office she would allow to speak to her that way, mostly because he was the only one who had the guts to do it.
“Not president.” She kept her tone flat. “Publisher.” She straightened and twisted her torso to look at him across her desk. “But then you wouldn’t be rid of me, would you?”