“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Wow.”

“I’m sorry I can’t linger.” I scooted back my chair. “But could we do this again? Sometime soon?”

“Yes. Any time!”

He lurched to his feet, and I stood and kissed him again on both cheeks. “Good night,” I said. “Be good.”

IT WAS ONLY eight, but I told Alice I’d be in for the rest of the night, and she took me home and tucked me in.

As soon as she was gone, I slipped out through the French doors to the rear garden and scanned the back of the building. The after-hours security lights gave a dim glow to every floor of the townhouse except the fifth. The lights were ablaze up there, and I could make out Mark’s silhouette at his living room window. He was speaking to someone out of sight.

I took the outdoor stairs up to the terrace and slipped my keycard through the lock on the back door. Inside, I stopped and listened, and when I heard no one, I stole up the grand staircase to the second-floor conference room.

I shone my cell phone flashlight over the conference table. I suspected that our unpaid interns hadn’t been apprised of the terms of the Chinese wall, and I was right. The CDMI files were supposed to be locked up and password-protected, but here they all were, free for the perusing.

I hurried from stack to stack until I located the files on the Paradis sur Terre asset sales, then I did a quick skim, just long enough to confirm that the sales figures were still artificially inflated. Barrett hadn’t backed off from his scheme. He’d already done his worst, and he was seeing it through to the end.

That was all I needed to know. I turned off the light, and as I crept out into the corridor, Mark’s voice drifted down the stairs from the fifth-floor landing. I couldn’t make out his words, but I knew that tone. He was laughing with the little edge of naughtiness that he seemed to delight in. I wondered what young woman he was entertaining tonight. I wondered if Phoebe minded when it wasn’t her.

Then the second voice sounded, and it wasn’t a woman at all. It was a man, speaking in a deep laconic drawl, and I knew that voice instantly. I knew because I’d listened to it for two hours straight that very morning. It was Nelson Ledbetter, CEO of Northstar, the man who knew nothing.

I smiled as I crept my way back downstairs. If my long game was on a chessboard, I’d just seen—or, rather, heard—my path to checkmate.

SO, THREE WEEKS in, this was my new life. I had a prestigious position, a luxurious apartment, a fabulous wardrobe, and fifty thousand dollars in GoFundMe cash. What a contrast from my life in Valhalla. In hindsight my time there felt like only a lull in the action. The interval in a two-act play. Now Act Two was under way, and it was time to pick up the pace. I felt like a circus performer who’d hoisted a dozen plates into the air, and they were all spinning on their poles in gyroscopic swirls. I lay awake in bed that night, my mind churning with how to bring each one down and set it carefully into place on my imaginary table.