Chapter 6

Derek left the showroom differently than he had entered it. He left with his hand not on Priya's arm but in his own pockets, his shoulders no longer set in that confident, purchased line, his eyes fixed on the marble floor as though the pattern of the stone was suddenly the most interesting thing in the world. Priya walked ahead of him, her heels clicking on the marble, her back a straight line of controlled distance. Neither of them looked back.

The glass doors closed behind them with a soft hydraulic hiss, and the showroom was quiet again, filled only with the low hum of the ceiling lights and the distant murmur of traffic from the street. The coins still lay on the floor. Nobody had picked them up.

Cora stood with the fob in her hand, looking at the spot where Derek had been. She felt the anger — the clean, cold anger that had carried her through the past hour — begin to subside, leaving behind something emptier and more complicated. She had wanted to see how far they would go. They had gone farther than she had expected. She had wanted to know what Derek would do when he learned who she was. She had not expected it to hurt this much to watch him break.

Arman cleared his throat. He was standing near the platform, his hands clasped in front of him, his face the careful blank of a man who has just realized how badly he has misread a room. "Ms. Weiss," he said, and the name came out differently now, weighted, formal. "I want to apologize. I didn't — I didn't know who you were."

"No," Cora said. "You didn't. But that wasn't the problem, Arman." She looked at him, and her voice was quiet but not unkind. "The problem is that you would have let him do it to anyone. You saw coins thrown at a woman's feet in your showroom, and you chose the sale over the person. That's a pattern, not a one-off. And patterns are what I look for when I decide who works in my family's showrooms."

Arman's face went very still. He was a stocky man, and for a moment he looked smaller, deflated, the burgundy tie suddenly too bright against his gray expression. "You're going to fire me."

"I don't know yet," Cora said, and she was surprised to find that she meant it. She had expected to feel only anger at the salesman who had judged her by her coat, but standing here, in the aftermath, she felt something more complicated. "I'm going to think about it. I'm going to think about the way J. Mercer — " she looked toward the far desk, where J. Mercer was standing very still, " — saw what was happening and did not step over the coins. He didn't know who I was either. But he noticed. He asked if I was okay. He offered to call security. He didn't assume I was the problem."