Chapter 6 The Wife

• Chapter Six: The Wife
• She came to the Thursday lunch uninvited.
• I knew the moment she walked in because Daniel’s posture changed before he’d consciously registered the door opening, that particular recalibration men do when a domestic authority enters a professional space.
• He stood, smoothed his jacket, said her name with the careful warmth of someone who had learned to perform it.
• “Taska.”
• “I was in the neighborhood.”
• She kissed his cheek and turned to me with a smile that had clearly been assembled on the way across the restaurant. “You must be Celeste. I’ve heard so much.”
• She was prettier in person than in photographs. Contrary to my initial thought, though it wasn’t much.
• Photographs caught the surface of her well, the symmetry, the grooming, the way she held herself like someone who had worked out early that being looked at was a resource.
• What photographs missed was the intelligence behind it. The way her eyes moved while her smile stayed fixed.
• I stood and shook her hand.
• “All good things I hope,” I said.
• “Of course.” She sat down without being invited to, which told me everything about how she operated at home and nothing I hadn’t already suspected. “Daniel never stops talking about Vayne Capital.”
• “He’s been very generous with his time.”
• She looked at me when I said that but it wasn’t a long look. It lasts exactly as long as it needs to and then moves away before it can be called a look.
• Daniel ordered her a coffee she didn’t ask for and she accepted it without breaking the conversation, which was about nothing in particular, the way conversations are about nothing when everyone at the table is actually talking about something else entirely.
• “Where are you based?” she asked.
• “Zurich primarily.”
• “And before that?”
• “Various places.” I picked up my water glass. “I move around.”
• “It must be lonely.”
• “I find it clarifying.”
• She smiled at that. Something in it shifted very slightly from the assembled version.The involuntary kind.
• I had done my research on Taska Ellison née Taska Crane the same way I had done my research on everything connected to Daniel.
• Thoroughly and without sentiment. She had joined Ellison Capital as an associate four years before I died, been promoted once in her first year, twice in her second, and had married Daniel eleven months after Mara Ellison’s quiet, documented death from a hiking accident in upstate New York.
• The death certificate had been straightforward. The investigation cursory. A woman who had gone walking alone and not come back, whose husband had reported her missing with appropriate devastation and whose body had never been recovered.
• That last part had been a miscalculation on Daniel’s part.
• It had also been, eventually, my advantage.
• Taska had not married a grieving man. She had married a man in the middle of consolidating something, and she was smart enough to know the difference even if she had chosen not to examine it too closely at the time.
• I didn’t hold that against her particularly.
• People made choices about what to look at and what to leave in the peripheral.
• What she was doing now, however, was looking directly.
• “How did you two find each other?” she asked.
• The question aimed at both of us, landing mostly on me.
• “Ms. Vayne approached us,” Daniel said.
• “I identified an opportunity,” I said.
• “Mm.” She turned her coffee cup a quarter rotation. “What drew you to Ellison specifically? There are a lot of firms.”
• “Daniel’s reputation for moving quickly. I needed a partner who didn’t require a lot of convincing once the numbers were clear.”
• “And are they? Clear?”
• “Getting there.”
• She looked at me again. Longer this time, past the point where it could be called casual.
• I looked back with the pleasant, impenetrable expression I had spent three years perfecting, the one that gave nothing and implied everything was fine and made people feel faintly that they had been the one to look away first.
• She looked away first.
• Daniel said something about the quarterly projections. She asked a question about it that was slightly too informed for someone who had introduced herself as just passing through, and I watched him answer it with the faint discomfort of a man being reminded that the domestic and professional spaces he preferred to keep separate had just merged without his permission.
• They had a dynamic and I could see the shape of it.
• She knew more about the business than he acknowledged and he relied on her for more than he admitted and there was a negotiation happening between them constantly, under every conversation, about who held what and what it was worth.
• She was not stupid…
• …Like I once was.
• That was the thing I needed to keep in front of me. I had not built any part of this assuming she was stupid and I was not going to start now.
• She left twenty minutes later, another cheek kiss, another full-wattage smile directed at me over Daniel’s shoulder as she pulled on her coat.
• “It was so lovely to finally meet you,” she said.
• “We should all have dinner.”
• “I’d like that,” I said.
• She held my gaze for one beat past comfortable then she left.
• Daniel watched her go and then turned back to me with an expression that was trying to be apologetic and landing closer to exposed.
• “She likes to be involved,” he said.
• “She seems sharp.”
• “She is.” Something moved through his face.
• “She’s very sharp.”
• I picked up my fork and returned to the food I’d barely touched and let the silence sit there between us until he filled it, which he did within fifteen seconds because Daniel Ellison had never once in his life let a silence exist without deciding it was about him.
• “You’re not bothered,” he said.
• “Should I be?”
• He looked at me for a long moment.
• “No,” he said. “I suppose not.”
• I smiled and changed the subject and we finished the lunch and he picked up the bill and walked me to the door and we said our goodbyes and I stepped out into the afternoon and I did not take a full breath until I had turned the corner.
• Taska Ellison was going to be a problem.
• The question was whether she became my problem or his first.