Page 58 of Return Billionaire to Sender

“You are amazing with people,” she says.

“Innegotiations.I’m amazing with people in negotiations. It’s a strategy. It’s not reality,” I say.

“Maybe it is reality,” she says. “Maybe the real you emerges in the negotiation room.”

“Is this something like, maybe the thing you dreamed last night is real life? And all of this waking life is a dream?” I say. “Spoiler alert—it’s not.”

She shrugs.

“Or maybe, the Hitler who was really nice to his German shepherd is the real Hitler? And the rest of the time he wasn’t the real Hitler?”

“What?” She turns to me, face lit with shock. “You can’t compare yourself to somebody like that. You are not like that. Just…don’t.” She shakes her head, as if to shake out the idea. “You can’t talk about yourself like that. God!”

Her passionate protest has my pulse racing. I don’t know what to make of this woman taking my side like this. As if she thinks I need a champion or something. Who does that?

“It was an analogy; not a comparison,” I say lightly.

“Oh my god!” she says, still staring out the window.

I want her back. I want her to be back looking at me. “The first meeting should only take an hour or so,” I say.

“An hour?” She turns back to me. “I don’t understand. What do I do while you’re in these meetings?”

“Enjoy yourself,” I say. “Have the driver take you to a nearby bakery or a deli. My treat. Walk in the park. Go out boozing and blow off the lesson completely. You have my permission.”

She snorts at this last option, and I wonder suddenly what it would look like—her blowing off her duties to indulge herself. What would she do, left completely to her own devices?

“Or maybe you could use the time to think up more postal carrier quizzes. You know how I enjoy them. Or maybe there’s a hedgehog-themed boutique nearby.”

For a split second, she looks surprised. Then she shakes her head. “We need to start,” she declares.

I grab a sparkling water and take one for her, setting it in her cup holder, because Lord knows she wouldn’t take it for herself.

Elle puts down the bolster between us and sets up her little iPad on the pull-down surface in front of us. She sips her water as the residents of 341 West 45th ramble endlessly—I’ve never seen a group more focused on the smallest details of an apartment complex and each other’s lives.

Now and then she gets the sense that I’m not paying attention, and she seems stunned and surprised. “Malcolm!” she’ll say and she’ll give the screen a stern nod.

There’s really nothing quite like the sound of my name on her lips. When she pushes against my resistance, she transforms in a way that is endlessly hot. Or maybe it’s more like her real character is revealed. She keeps her bravery hidden like a squirrel with a nut, burying it deep. Sometimes I think she keeps her bravery hidden even from herself.

On screen the most insufferable painting party of the century drags on.

“Will we also be watching the paint dry?” I ask. “Is that something I should be looking forward to?”

She looks over with narrowed eyes. “Do I have to stop the video?”

“I’m just saying, a few hours of paint drying would certainly go with the style of this documentary…or whatever you want to call it.”

“Shut the bruschetta hole,” she says.

I stifle a grin. “What did you just say?”

She points at the screen. There’s some historical footage from the 1990s. After that, the woman who sometimes wears the delivery cat costume complains at length about pizza with caramelized onions. The building definitely has a lot of women in their twenties and thirties, and there’s a kind of fondness that comes over Elle’s face when they carry on about whatever they carry on about. Is she getting attached to these women who keep appearing on the screen? Is she the one developing empathy? Is she being hoisted with her own petard?

I’d googled her address in Newark, New Jersey back when I went to school on her background, and I studied her Instagram, too. You can never know too much about a person. Elle lives in a small, drab, dark basement apartment. I can’t imagine she likes it. With sixty thousand dollars, she could move somewhere nicer. Why not take it?

What does this woman want out of life?

I’m thinking back to what she said about moving to a more populous area, her desire to be around women her age where things were happening. I’m assuming she found that in her neighborhood in New Jersey—maybe that’s why she tolerates the shitty apartment. The building in her video program seems to be right up her alley. Too bad I’m knocking it down in a couple of months.

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