Indecent Proposal - What Happens In Vegas Ch. 02

Gay Erotica, +18, Gay Cuckold, Voyeur, Dub-Con

February had settled over Greenwich Village with the gray determination of a season that refused to leave gracefully. Through the folding glass doors at the far end of the kitchen, the townhouse’s small walled garden sat bare and frosted, the ivy clinging to the brick in brittle brown tangles, a terra-cotta pot on the table outside wearing a thin crown of ice. The sky beyond the rooftops was the color of old pewter, a flat, sunless thing that made you grateful for heated floors and strong coffee.

The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, and Evan’s favorite. It ran the full depth of the townhouse in a luminous stretch of white cabinetry and calacatta marble, the island a thick slab of the same stone with waterfall edges that caught the glow of three brass-and-glass globe pendants hanging above. The floors were pale herringbone, warm underfoot even in February, and the whole space opened at the back through those wide folding doors that, in summer, erased the line between kitchen and garden entirely. In winter, they just framed the cold and made the warmth feel earned.

Evan sat at the island on one of the upholstered bar stools, halfway through a breakfast of shakshuka baked in a small cast-iron skillet and a torn piece of sourdough for dipping. A flat white in a ceramic cup sat beside his elbow, the foam still holding its shape. He was scrolling through the latest issue of Artforum on his iPad, only half-reading a piece on a Zurich retrospective he’d probably attend, his head nodding absently to the low pulse of Frank Ocean drifting from the small Sonos Roam speaker perched on the counter. Behind him, Kai was already at work.

Kai Rivera was nothing like what Evan had pictured when he and Mike first decided to hire a full-time cook. Evan had harbored a very specific vision: someone French, wearing one of those tall pleated chef hats — toque blanche, Evan had informed Mike with studied nonchalance, as if he hadn’t Googled the term forty-five seconds earlier — and who would threaten to poison Evan if he ever dared suggest a substitution. A tyrant who treated a kitchen like a fiefdom and a dinner menu like holy scripture.

Kai could not have been further from that fantasy. Filipino-American, twenty-seven, he worked in sweatpants and whatever band shirt happened to be clean that morning. He filmed TikTok videos between prep courses, slipping into that conspiratorial tone his half-million followers loved: “What I cooked today in my job as a private chef in Manhattan,” he’d begin, then guide the camera through whatever he was building that day, his hands moving with easy precision as he chopped, stirred, and broke down the chemistry behind a proper emulsion. Evan had discovered him one yeas ago, when Kai was running a wildly popular underground supper-club pop-up out of a friend’s Bushwick loft. One bite of Kai’s slow-braised short-rib adobo with charred scallion chimichurri and Evan had offered him the job before dessert arrived. Above it, the little television mounted over the counter was tuned to C-SPAN, the volume turned down to a murmur.

“Kai, please, do not lissen to music vhile Mr. Hargrove is having his breakfast,” came the voice from the kitchen entryway.

Evan lifted his eyes from the iPad to see Ingrid Becker crossing the threshold, her low heels clicking a metronomic rhythm against the herringbone. Unlike Kai, Frau Becker was everything Evan had ever imagined a housekeeper would be. A tall, square-shouldered German woman in her early sixties, silver hair pinned in an immaculate chignon that hadn’t moved a millimeter since 2003, dressed in a pressed charcoal dress and a cream cardigan buttoned to the throat as if informality were a communicable disease. She was the living embodiment of German efficiency and order: punctual to the second, ruthless about dust, and quietly convinced that any deviation from her system would cause the entire household to collapse into chaos. She ran the townhouse the way the Bundesbank ran monetary policy.

Her eternal mission, as far as Evan could tell, was to civilize Kai Rivera. She viewed his sweatpants, his TikTok filming, his music, and his general American sloppiness as a personal affront to Western civilization, and she waged her campaign through a steady artillery of typed, single-spaced notes left on the kitchen island like dispatches from the front: Real trousers are required in my kitchen. Music volume is for concerts, not food preparation. Phones are for calling, not dancing while chopping onions. Kai left notes in return. His were scrawled on Post-its in a looping hand, stuck to the fridge or the range hood or, once, memorably, to the inside of Frau Becker’s immaculate coat closet: Left you extra crispy pork belly, Frau Becker. Live dangerously. She had eaten it, Evan knew, because the Tupperware came back washed, dried, and placed precisely in its assigned cabinet without a word.

Kai glanced up from whatever was simmering on the La Cornue stove and looked at Evan, gauging. He was the boss, after all, though some days it was an open question whether Evan ran the household or merely occupied it at Frau Becker’s discretion. When he saw that Evan wasn’t remotely bothered by Frank Ocean at low volume, Kai turned back to the stove.

“Ev doesn’t mind it,” he said.

Evan had to shove a forkful of shakshuka into his mouth to keep from laughing. Kai wasn’t formal: he called Evan “boss man” and Mike “big guy” without a hint of deference, but he had never once called him Ev. He was doing it to watch Frau Becker’s left eye twitch, which it did, right on schedule.

She crossed the kitchen in purposeful strides, chin raised, and for one genuinely alarming moment Evan was convinced she was about to snatch the wooden spoon from the counter and crack it across the back of Kai’s skull like a Bavarian grandmother disciplining a wayward grandchild. He swallowed his shakshuka quickly, mouth opening to intervene — “I really don’t mind the —”

But Frau Becker simply reached past Kai, one finger extended with the lethal precision and tapped the Sonos Roam into silence. Frank Ocean died mid-syllable. The kitchen went quiet except for the low bubble of whatever was simmering on the La Cornue.

“Mr. Hargrove has a long day ahead of him,” she said, straightening to her full height, “and he deserves his peace und quiet vhile he eats.”

Kai looked at her for a second. He must have seen the same Evan had seen, the promise of Germanic annihilation flickering behind those pale blue eyes, because he just turned back to the stove without another word.

Frau Becker settled onto the stool beside Evan, produced a leather-bound planner from somewhere on her person, and spent the next ten minutes running through the household’s weekly logistics with the brisk efficiency of a NATO briefing. The dry cleaning needed collecting from the place on Bleecker, but not the one on Hudson because they’d scorched the collar of Mike’s Tom Ford last month and were dead to her now. The bathroom on the second floor had a slow drain she’d already scheduled a plumber for, Thursday between two and four, and she needed Evan to confirm someone would be home. A case of the Barolo that Mike favored had arrived damaged, three bottles cracked in transit, and she’d filed the complaint and expected a replacement by Friday. The window cleaners were due next Tuesday, weather permitting, and she wanted to know if Evan preferred they come while he was at the office or if he was comfortable with strangers on ladders while he worked from home. Evan answered each item with nods and murmurs, the domestic machinery of their life clicking along on Frau Becker’s rails the way it always did.

When they reached the question of dinner, Kai was building something around a miso-glazed black cod, Evan gathered from the smell of white miso and ginger already blooming from the stove, and his voice floated over from the La Cornue.

“Big Mike coming to dinner too?”

The silence that followed lasted exactly one second, but it carried the weight of a diplomatic incident.

“I think you mean Mr. Hargrove, Kai,” Frau Becker said.

Kai glanced over his shoulder, spatula in hand, grin already forming. “Mr. Hargrove is sitting right there. If I meant him, I’d have asked if he’s coming to dinner, wouldn’t I?”

“Vell, obviously, zhere are two Mr. Hargroves in zhis household,” Frau Becker said, her posture stiffening by a vertebra.

Kai’s grin stretched wider. “Exactly. Your system doesn’t work, Frau Becker. We can’t be saying Mr. Hargrove all day and not know who we’re talking about. My way is better.”

Evan could practically feel the outrage radiating off her in waves, because telling Ingrid Becker that her system didn’t work was probably worse than suggesting that Bavaria wasn’t a real country or that store-bought strudel was perfectly fine.

“Mike is probably coming to dinner, yes,” Evan said quickly, before the cold war between the two of them escalated into something that required UN mediation. “The deposition shouldn’t go much longer. Then he’ll fly home.”

All three pairs of eyes turned to the small television on the counter in unison, where the feed from C-SPAN had been running on mute all morning. Senator Barbara Caldwell of Pennsylvania occupied the screen, leaning into her microphone with practiced gravity, someone who’d been asking uncomfortable questions on Capitol Hill for two decades. Behind her, aides shuffled papers. The chyron at the bottom read: SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE — CONTINUED HEARING ON FEDERAL ANTITRUST ENFORCEMENT.

“How is Mr. Hargrove doing?” asked Frau Becker, eyes on the screen.

Senator Caldwell was still speaking, her reading glasses perched low on her nose as she consulted her notes, her voice inaudible beneath the muted chyron scrolling updates about merger review timelines and market concentration thresholds. She finished her question, removed the glasses, and looked up.

The camera cut to Mike.

Even on a nine-inch screen propped between the olive oil and the pepper mill, even in the flat, unflattering wash of Senate hearing room lighting, Mike Hargrove filled a frame. He sat behind the witness table in a dark Zegna suit, his shoulders squared the back of the chair like load-bearing walls. His jaw was clean-shaved, his brown eyes steady and focused, the nameplate in front of him reading MR. MICHAEL HARGROVE, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS, STEEL VANGUARD CONSTRUCTION in small black letters that didn’t do the man behind them justice.

Kai picked up his phone from the counter and tapped the TV’s volume on. Mike’s voice filled the kitchen mid-sentence, that familiar gravel smoothed just enough for the microphone, authoritative without being combative.

“---and with respect, Senator, the premise of that question assumes consolidation in the Northeast construction corridor reduces competition. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. In many cases, it allows firms to build the capacity needed for federal-scale projects that smaller regional companies can’t realistically bid on. Over the past five years, SVC’s growth has created eleven hundred new union jobs across three states. That looks less like a monopoly and a hell lot more like an economic driver.”

Senator Caldwell leaned into her microphone, one finger tapping the stack of papers in front of her. “Mr. Hargrove, I appreciate the passion, I do. But those eleven hundred union jobs don’t mean much to the small contractors in my state who can’t compete for bids because your firm keeps swallowing their competitors. At what point does the engine, as you call it, run everyone else off the road?”

Mike tilted his head, the ghost of a grin tugging at one corner of his mouth.

“Senator, I grew up on a construction site in Newark. Started hauling rebar when I was nineteen years old. My first foreman is sitting at home in Elizabeth right now, probably watching this and yelling at his television.”

A low rumble of laughter moved through the chamber, a couple of the committee staffers ducking their heads to hide their smiles. Mike let it settle, his timing instinctive — he knew exactly when to land a line and when to give it space.

“So believe me when I tell you, I understand the small contractor. I was the small contractor. And I’m not interested in running anyone off the road. I’m interested in building roads that are wide enough for all of us.”

Kai whistled low from the stove. “Big Mike is cooking up there.”

Even Frau Becker didn’t correct him this time. She was watching the screen with her hands folded in her lap, chin lifted slightly, the faintest trace of approval ghosting her features, the closest Ingrid Becker ever came to visible pride

Snickering, Evan returned his attention to the Artforum article and both Frau Becker and Kai took that as their signal to resume, Kai back to his miso glaze, Frau Becker to whatever corner of the household required her attention next. The hearing droned on from the small screen, Mike’s voice a confident murmur beneath Evan’s reading.

Michael Hargrove had never been a man who arrived somewhere and stayed. It wasn’t in his wiring. Regional Operations Director had lasted two years before the restlessness set. He’d taken the VP of Operations title at thirty-nine, the youngest in SVC’s history, and for about three months Evan had watched him settle into it with something resembling satisfaction: the corner office, the direct line to the board, the authority to greenlight projects that reshaped skylines. Then, inevitably, Mike’s eyes had drifted upward again, past the VP floor to the suite above it, to the letters that gleamed on the door he passed every morning on his way to Henderson’s briefings: Chief Operating Officer.

It started at a dinner party. Evan had organized the evening himself, a “salon dinner,” he’d called it, thirty guests gathered in the townhouse for an evening ostensibly celebrating SVC’s partnership with the Municipal Art Society on a public sculpture initiative Mike had championed. The invitations were printed on heavy cream stock. The menu was Kai’s — lamb shoulder with pomegranate molasses, hand-rolled couscous, a saffron panna cotta that made the wife of a city councilman actually close her eyes mid-bite. The conversation was lively, the wine was a 2015 Brunello that Evan had selected for its ability to make powerful people feel generous, and the guest list was carefully curated to look eclectic while being anything but.

Because the real prize, the only guest who actually mattered, was Rupert Courtnay.

Courtnay was chairman of SVC’s board of directors, a seventy-one-year-old construction dynasty heir who’d inherited his seat the way European monarchs inherited thrones: by bloodline, by tradition, and with the unspoken understanding that the kingdom would burn before the crown passed to anyone outside the family. He spoke softly, drank moderately, and had the unsettling habit of listening to a full three minutes of conversation before offering a single sentence that made everyone realize he’d understood more than all of them combined. After dinner was served and the guests had loosened past their second glasses into the expansive state Evan had been engineering all evening, Mike caught Courtnay’s eye across the table and asked if the chairman cared for a cigar. Courtnay inclined his white head and Mike walked the old man up to the private balcony on the third floor, the one that overlooked the garden and the rooftops beyond, where no one could hear them and the October cold would keep the conversation short.

Mike had asked Courtnay directly. No preamble, no flattery, no circling. That wasn’t Mike’s game and Courtnay would have smelled it from a mile away. He’d simply said: “Mr. Courtnay, I want the COO seat. Tell me what I need to do to earn it.”

Courtnay, as Mike suspected, appreciated the directness, probably because he was cut from the same cloth. He’d told Mike he was doing fine as VP of Operations. More than fine. That the Hudson Yards sustainable housing complex, forty-two stories of mixed-income units built to net-zero standards, delivered three months ahead of schedule and twelve million under budget, had turned heads across the industry. That the LaGuardia Terminal C renovation, which Mike had wrestled from three competing bids and brought home through a nightmare of union negotiations and FAA red tape, had been the kind of project that made boards remember a name. That, with time, Mike would get to COO and beyond.

Mike had answered that he didn’t want time. He wanted the job now.

Courtnay had looked at him then, one of those long, assessing silences the chairman deployed like a surgeon deploys a scalpel. Then he’d said that if Mike wanted the seat without waiting for it, he needed something big. Not another building, not another renovation. Something that made a splash in the business world, the kind of move that put your name in Bloomberg and made Washington take notice because the scale of it demanded their attention. Something that announced to the industry that Steel Vanguard Construction was no longer a regional powerhouse but a national force, and that Michael Hargrove was the man who’d made it happen.

Courtnay had tapped his cigar against the railing, and added, almost as an afterthought, that it was a similar move that had gotten David Henderson the CEO chair back in his day. Henderson had swallowed a struggling Midwest firm in the nineties, doubled SVC’s footprint overnight, and ridden the momentum straight to the top. So Mike only needed to follow the blueprint.

By the end of that same night, cross-legged on the bedroom floor with his laptop balanced on one knee and a bourbon sweating rings onto the hardwood, Mike had found it.

Helix Infrastructure Group.

Philadelphia-based, founded in 1987, with deep roots in the mid-Atlantic corridor and a portfolio that read like a love letter to American ambition: bridges across the Delaware, transit hubs in Baltimore, a half-billion-dollar waterfront redevelopment in Philly that had transformed thirty acres of rusting dockyard into luxury condominiums and public parkland. Helix was the crown jewel of the northeast construction world, a firm with the engineering talent, the government contracts, and the union relationships that SVC had spent decades trying to build organically. Bringing them into the fold would expand Steel Vanguard’s footprint and fundamentally reshape the playing field.

The logic was elegant in its boldness. SVC plus Helix would create the largest construction and infrastructure firm on the Eastern Seaboard, a combined entity with the capacity to bid on federal-scale projects that neither company could touch alone. High-speed rail corridors. Interstate bridge replacements. Generational infrastructure work that the current administration was pouring billions into and that required a contractor big enough to absorb the risk and deliver on the timeline. It would give SVC Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the entire mid-Atlantic corridor in a single stroke, vaulting the company from regional heavyweight to national colossus.

Henderson’s old Midwest acquisition would look like a lemonade stand by comparison.

Mike had laid it all out for Evan that night in a torrent of numbers and projections and barely contained electricity, pacing the bedroom in his boxers, hands carving the future from the air, his voice climbing with that combustible fusion of ambition and certainty that Evan had fallen in love with at eighteen and never developed an immunity to. The Helix revenue streams, the combined market share, the union consolidation savings, it all poured out of him in a flood that Evan absorbed from the bed, chin in hand, watching his husband build an empire in real time.

By the time Mike got to the projected EBITDA of the merged entity, he was so wired, so incandescent with the scale of what he was proposing, that the energy tipped over from ambition into something more primal. He stopped mid-sentence, looked at Evan, and whatever he saw on Evan’s face short-circuited the presentation entirely. He crossed the room, hauled Evan up by the waist, and carried him downstairs to the dining room, where he bent him over the same table where Rupert Courtnay had been eating lamb shoulder three hours earlier and fucked him so hard the Brunello glasses still drying on the sideboard rattled in their stems.

That had been four months ago.

Now Evan set his fork down on the empty skillet, the last of the shakshuka scraped clean, and drained the flat white in a lon pull that left a crescent of foam on his upper lip.

“Frau Becker, would you let Jonny know I’m ready to go? I’ll be down in ten.”

“Of course, Mr. Hargrove.” She was already reaching for her phone, the request logged and actioned before the words had fully left his mouth. Evan sometimes wondered if the woman operated on a slight time delay ahead of the rest of reality, processing requests before they were made, like a German-engineered form of precognition.

She was halfway to the door when Kai’s voice drifted from the stove, casual, almost innocent.

“Hey, Frau B, you want me to save you a plate of the black cod tonight? I know you like my fish.”

Frau Becker turned very slowly.

“I don’ know vho you are talking to, Kai,” she said, each syllable a small, precision-cut ice cube. “It zertainly can’t be me. My neim iss Frau Becker. Not Frau B.”

Frau Becker held his gaze for one more second, a look of such concentrated disgust that lesser men would have reconsidered their life choices, then gave him her back and walked out of the kitchen, heels clicking their immaculate retreat down the hallway.

“Don’t worry, I’ll save you a plate!” Kai called after her.

“You know,” Evan said, watching the doorway where Frau Becker had vanished, “someday that woman is going to kill you and no jury in the world will convict her.”

“They will after you give your very emotional testimony about what a marvelous young man I was,” Kai said, not looking up from his miso glazed. Evan was sure he had never once in his life considered the possibility that he might not be universally adored.

“Me?” Evan snorted and pushed off the stool. “Dude, I’ll help her hide the body.”

Kai made a sound of theatrical outrage, hand flying to his chest, but the wide smirk plastered across his face gave him away completely. Evan clasped his shoulder on the way past, wished him a good day, then paused. Kai’s phone was propped against the olive oil bottle on its little tripod, the camera recording, the red dot blinking its silent witness to the morning’s domestic warfare. Evan stooped to camera level, gave a wave and his most dazzling smile to the lens, and kept walking. He hoped he’d make the cut. The last time he’d appeared in one of Kai’s TikToks, a five-second cameo passing through the kitchen in a navy blazer, coffee in hand, completely unaware he was being filmed, ninety percent of the comments had been about how hot Kai’s boss was. Evan had pretended to be mortified, but he’d watched it eleven times.

“What are we listening to this morning, boss?” asked Jonny, holding the rear door of the Mercedes Maybach open as Evan stepped out of the townhouse into the February cold. Jonathan Miller was twenty-four, built like a middleweight boxer, and had been Evan’s driver for the past year.

“Up to you, Mr. DJ.”

It was their little ritual. Every morning, during the drive from the Village up to Hudson Horizon’s offices in Hudson Yards, Evan and Jonny listened to music together. Usually, Evan chose, he was dead set on bringing some culture to the boy, who left to his own devices listened exclusively to Machine Gun Kelly and someone called Saint Meridian whose music sounded, to Evan’s ears, like a panic attack set to autotune. But some mornings he’d let Jonny set the playlist, mostly because Evan liked being able to casually drop a reference at dinner that made Mike look at him sideways. “Have you heard the new Bxrnt track?” he’d said last week, buttering his bread with studied nonchalance, and Mike had stared at him as if he’d started speaking Mandarin.

Jonny’s selection settled into the speakers as they pulled away from Charles Street, a singer whose name, no matter how many times Jonny repeated it and even spelled it out for him once on his phone screen, Evan could not reproduce with his mouth. But the music itself wasn’t bad, a warm, drifting falsetto over spare guitar that filled the car like weather and left space for thinking. Evan leaned back, answered a couple of emails on his phone — a collector in Dubai confirming a studio visit next month, Jordan forwarding a provenance document from Buenos Aires with three question marks and no other text — and watched the city scroll past as the Maybach glided from the cobblestone of the West Village onto Seventh Avenue, heading north toward Hudson Yards.

Evan’s morning began at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation wing, where the board of the Hargrove-Yip Arts Foundation, the small but increasingly influential nonprofit Evan had co-founded with Thomas Yip three years ago, held its quarterly meeting in a private reading room overlooking Fifth Avenue. By eleven he was crosstown, stepping through the unmarked door on East 66th Street that led to the Chesterfield, a members-only social club so discreet it didn’t have a website, a sign, or, as far as Evan could tell, any interest in being known by anyone who wasn’t already inside it. Lunch was at the Lotos Club on East 66th with City Councilwoman Diane Bailey, a sharp woman in her early fifties who represented the district that included Hudson Yards and who had been courting Evan for months about joining the mayor’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Council. He told her he’d think about it, which they both understood meant no, and they parted on the sidewalk with a kiss on each cheek and a promise to have Mike and Diane’s wife over for dinner in March.

The afternoon was looser. He had his hair trimmed at the small salon on Crosby Street where he’d been going for a decade , the same chair, the same stylist, a quiet Italian woman named Lina who never asked him how he wanted it because she’d known for years. He stopped at the McNally Jackson on Prince Street and spent forty minutes in the art section, leaving with a monograph on Lee Krasner he hadn’t been looking for and a novel someone on the staff had recommended with a handwritten note tucked inside the cover. He walked through Washington Square Park on the way back to the car despite the cold, hands deep in his coat pockets, watching the chess players hunched over their boards in fingerless gloves, the students crossing with their heads bowed against the wind, the city going about its February business with the grim endurance New Yorkers wore like a uniform.

By six-thirty, the Maybach was heading north again, Jonny navigating the snarl of midtown traffic toward Hudson Yards while Evan answered a text from Mike — deposition wrapped, home by 9 — and another from Jordan, shorter: Landing JFK 6:15. Vermeer safe. Coming straight to office. You better be there.

Hudson Horizon Fine Arts occupied the thirty-second floor of one of the sleek glass towers that had risen over the rail yards like a crop of mirrors, all open plan, white walls, enormous windows that framed the Hudson River and the Jersey skyline beyond in a panorama that made every client meeting feel like a pitch for the city itself. Evan and Jordan had designed the space together: as clean and minimal as possible to let the art do the talking. A rotating selection of pieces from their represented artists lined the main gallery wall, and the offices in back were modest by design, glass-walled, no corner suites. They’d both had enough of hierarchy at Harrison & Hale.

When Evan stepped off the elevator, the celebration was already underway.

A cluster of Hudson Horizon’s staff had gathered in the open gallery space around a table hastily arranged with champagne, paper cups, and a sheet cake from the bakery on Tenth Avenue that someone had decorated with a frosting Vermeer that looked more like a smeared Rorschach test. Jordan stood at the center of it, holding court with the luminous energy of a man who’d just pulled off the impossible. And he had. The Vermeer was real. Unsigned, undocumented, missing from the historical record for over a century, but real, authenticated through three independent analyses that Jordan had overseen personally in Buenos Aires, the provenance chain painstakingly reconstructed from estate archives, auction records, and a handwritten letter from a nineteenth-century Argentine diplomat that Jordan had found folded inside a family Bible in a Recoleta apartment. It was, by any measure, the kind of discovery that happened once in a career. The kind that made the front page of the Art Newspaper and turned a boutique consultancy into a name that collectors and museums remembered.

Evan hung back near the elevator bank and let Jordan have it. He watched his young partner, thirty-two now, still boyish in the face but carrying himself with a new authority that Buenos Aires had cemented. Evan knew. He’d known from the moment Jordan sent the first blurry phone photo of the painting from that Recoleta apartment, the canvas propped against a wall between a grandfather clock and a stack of yellowed newspapers, and Evan had enlarged the image on his laptop and felt his hands go still. He’d built Hudson Horizon to be the kind of place where a kid who’d been bullied and undermined by a man like Henry Harrison could walk through the door and become this. Watching it happen in real time was better than any Vermeer.

He caught Jordan’s eye across the room and raised his paper cup. Jordan grinned at him like a kid who’d just shown his dad the A on his report card.

Evan let the celebration run its course and slipped into his office around six, closing the glass door softly behind him. The staff was filtering out, Jordan still holding court with the last stragglers, and Evan had an hour’s worth of emails to clear before heading home. Mike’s private jet would land at LaGuardia around nine, and Evan wanted to be there when he walked through the door. He worked through the inbox methodically, signing off on a loan agreement for the spring exhibition, reviewing proofs for the new catalogue, answering a note from Adrienne Soames who had, predictably, already heard about the Vermeer and wanted to know if it was for sale. It wasn’t, not yet, but Evan typed a reply that kept the door open, because that was what you did with a woman who owned nine Rothkos.

He was reaching for his coat when Mason appeared in the doorway.

Mason Aldridge was twenty-five, Evan’s assistant for the past year, a nervous and eager Wesleyan graduate with tortoiseshell glasses and an encyclopedic knowledge of postwar American art that compensated, most days, for his tendency to forget things that weren’t paintings. He stood in the doorway now with his iPad clutched to his chest and the expression of someone who had just remembered something he should have remembered six hours ago.

“Evan, I’m — God, I’m so sorry, I completely — with the Vermeer party and Jordan coming back, it just —”

“Mason.” Evan held up a hand. “Breathe, son. What is it?”

“You have a meeting. You had a meeting. I mean — it was scheduled for six-thirty and I just — I forgot to put it on your calendar this morning and I’m —”

“It’s almost seven, Mason. Can we reschedule?” Evan was already pulling on his coat, one arm through the sleeve. “Call them tomorrow, apologize, offer them —”

“He’s here.” Mason swallowed. “He’s in the lobby. He’s been waiting.”

Evan stopped, coat half on. “He’s been waiting for half an our and you’re telling me now?”

Mason’s face was the color of the sheet cake. “I know. I know. I’m so —”

“Who is it?”

Mason looked down at his iPad. Then back up.

“It’s a Mr. David Henderson,” said Mason. “You know who that is?”