Almonds, Faintly

The forty-fourth floor still had the original carpet.

Arden had not thought about the original carpet in thirty years. It was a dense, oatmeal-coloured wool with a fleck of navy through it, the sort of carpet a 1990s interior designer chose to suggest gravitas without spending on stone. He had ripped it up in 2014 and replaced it with a herringbone walnut that had cost, per square metre, more than the carpet had cost per floor.

Walking across the oatmeal carpet in Daniel's shoes, he understood, with a small unpleasant clarity, that he had become, in middle age, the kind of man who cared about the price of his own floors.

"He's just on a call," said Karen, who would retire in 2019 with a pension Arden had personally topped up, and who would, at her retirement party, hug him and call him a good boy. She was forty-eight here. Her hair was still its own colour. "Sit, sweetheart. Coffee?"

"No thank you, ma'am."

"Daniel, isn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She smiled at him over her bifocals. "You don't have to be nervous. He's a lamb, mostly."

Arden, who was the lamb in question, sat down in the visitor's chair and folded Daniel's hands in Daniel's lap and tried to remember what a twenty-three-year-old looked like when he was scared.

It was, it turned out, not difficult. He was scared. Not of himself, which would have been a more interesting kind of fear, but of how easy it was going to be to play this. He had sat in the Chairman's office ten thousand times. He had been the Chairman in that office for eighteen years. He had decorated it. He had thrown a glass at the wall behind that lamp once, in 2017, on a bad night nobody now remembered but him.

The door opened.

"Daniel. Come in."

Arden Vale, aged forty-six, stood in the doorway with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and the loose tie of a man whose first meeting of the day had already gone poorly. His hair was darker than Arden remembered and his shoulders were not yet rounded by the weight a chairman acquires from carrying meetings nobody else can. He looked, Arden realised with something close to nausea, like a man who could still be reasoned with.

"Sir," Arden said, and stood, and bowed the half inch.

"Sit, sit. This is informal. Karen, hold my calls."

Karen held the calls. The door clicked. The Chairman of Vale Industries sat down in the chair Arden Vale had sat in for the better part of two decades, and Arden Vale sat in the visitor's chair across from him and looked at his own face from the wrong side of the desk.

It was, briefly, more than he could stand. He looked at the lamp.

"Marguerite sent me your memo," said the Chairman.

"Sir?"

"The mailroom thing. The reorg." His own younger voice, lighter than he remembered, faintly amused. "She said, and I quote, the new intern just saved us three hundred grand a year on his first day and he doesn't know it."

"I didn't, sir. I just, the FedEx contract has a tier ratchet at sixty thousand parcels. We're at fifty-eight."

"And you knew that because?"

"Page eleven of the master service agreement, sir. In the appendix."

The Chairman looked at him.

The original Daniel, Arden remembered, had been hired for a polite manner and a Wharton transcript. He had not been hired for the ability to quote, by page, the appendix of a contract he had been given access to that morning.

Arden watched himself notice this, and watched himself decide, with the small reflex of a man who had spent decades hiring people, to be intrigued rather than alarmed. It was the first mistake he was watching himself make, and it was, he understood, the first of many, and he had to bite the inside of Daniel's cheek to keep from laughing.

"You read fast," said the Chairman.

"I had coffee, sir."

A flicker. Not a smile, quite. "Where did you go to school again?"

"State, sir. Accounting."

"Not Wharton?"

"No, sir."

"Hm." He leaned back. The chair creaked the way Arden remembered, in the same place. He had never replaced that chair. It had been replaced for him after he'd been carried out. "Marguerite also mentioned the Halverson recommendation. The Midwest carrier."

"Yes, sir."

"You're aware Halverson is privately held."

"Yes, sir."

"You're aware their stock isn't on any exchange."

It was not. It would not be until late 2012, when their CEO would take them public to raise the cash for the routing acquisition that would, in turn, make them attractive to Vale. Arden had bought, that morning over a payphone, a hundred and twelve shares of a different company entirely. Halverson Trucking, of Reno, Nevada. A near-namesake. Different routes, different CEO, no future, no acquisition. The shares were worth, approximately, the price of a good dinner.

The error was deliberate. It was the kind of error a Wharton boy would not make and a State College accounting major absolutely would, and it sat in his brokerage account like a fingerprint on a glass nobody had thought to dust.

"Halverson Trucking, sir," Arden said, the faintest blush in Daniel's cheeks. "Different company. I think I, in the memo I called it Halverson Logistics, but it's, the right one is. Trucking."

The Chairman's eyes moved across his face the way Arden's eyes had moved across the faces of a thousand junior people who'd come into this room hoping to be noticed.

He was being noticed.

"All right," said the Chairman, slowly. "Daniel. I'm going to do something I don't normally do, which is take an intern out of rotation. Marguerite can have you until Thursday. After Thursday I'd like you on a small project of mine. Two months. We'll see."

"Sir, I, the rotation is, I was supposed to do Finance and then Ops, and Marguerite said the program is, um."

"The program will survive."

"Yes, sir."

The Chairman stood. Arden stood. The Chairman walked him to the door, and at the door, with his hand on Arden's shoulder (his own hand, on his own shoulder, the weight of it familiar and unbearable), the Chairman said:

"You don't seem twenty-three, son."

It was meant kindly. It was the small, generous remark of a man who had once enjoyed finding people. Arden, who had said this to twenty different juniors in twenty different years and meant it almost every time, felt the cold travel up Daniel's spine.

He looked his younger self in the eye for the first time, and he let one small thing slip, because he was tired and because the body was tired and because the lamp had been thrown at the wall in a year that hadn't happened yet.

"Nobody is, sir," he said. "At twenty-three. It's a costume the company gives you."

The Chairman's hand stilled on his shoulder.

It was a quarter-second. Less. Arden felt it because Arden had been, for eighteen years, the hand on other people's shoulders, and he knew exactly the small recoil of a man who has just heard, from the wrong mouth, a sentence he might one day have said.

The Chairman recovered. The hand patted, twice, the way a man pats a horse he intends to ride later.

"Thursday, then," he said. His voice was lighter than it had been a moment ago, and Arden, who had practised that lightness in mirrors, knew exactly what it cost.

"Thursday, sir."

Arden stepped into the outer office, and the door closed behind him, and Karen looked up from her keyboard with the indulgent eyes of a woman whose boss had clearly been charmed, and then the elevator at the end of the corridor pinged.

The doors slid open.

A woman stepped out carrying a garment bag over one arm and a slim leather portfolio under the other. She was twenty-nine. Her hair was the dark, expensive red of a woman who has just discovered she can afford the salon on Madison. Her grandmother's pen was clipped, as it always was, to the inside flap of the portfolio, gold against oxblood leather, the nib she would in fifteen years use to sign him out of his own company.

Vivienne.

Not his Vivienne. Not yet. Not the woman who would, on a Tuesday in October, look across a notary's desk and ask him very politely to initial each page. This Vivienne had not met him yet. This Vivienne was here, Arden remembered with a small swimming sensation, because the Chairman's wife had asked her to drop off his tuxedo for the Friday gala, and because Vivienne, then, did errands like this for the wives of older men, and was paid in introductions.

She walked past him without looking. Her perfume was the one she had worn for the first six years of their marriage and then stopped wearing for reasons she had never explained and he had never asked. Cardamom. Something green.

She stopped at Karen's desk.

"Hi, Karen. From Mrs. Vale. He's expecting it."

"Oh, you're a darling. Set it on the chair, love."

Vivienne set the garment bag on the chair Arden had been sitting in ninety seconds ago. The warmth of Daniel's body would still be in the cushion. She did not notice. She turned, professional, brisk, twenty-nine years old and entirely whole, and her eyes moved across Arden's face the way eyes move across a piece of office furniture they have no reason to remember.

For one long second Arden Vale, who was Daniel Pak, who was the man she would marry and the man she would help kill, stood in the doorway of the office he had ruled and watched his wife not know him.

She smiled, the polite smile she gave to strangers, the one he had forgotten she had ever owned.

"Excuse me," she said, and stepped around him toward the elevator.

The doors closed on her. The cardamom hung in the corridor.

Arden stood very still and discovered, with the quiet astonishment of a man who has spent the morning pricing his own grave, that his hands were shaking after all.