Entry #5-Hate the Game, Not the Player
Plum took me to a restaurant with no prices on the menu.
That should have told me everything.
The kind of place with white tablecloths, low voices, and waiters who moved like they had been trained not to cast shadows. The kind of place where the bread arrived warm and the water was poured before you noticed your glass was empty. The kind of place where I immediately knew my blazer was wrong, my shoes were wrong, and my carefully constructed professional polish was a costume someone else had designed for me.
Plum looked perfect there.
Of course she did.
“Congratulations,” she said, raising her glass.
I lifted mine. “To the closing.”
“To the beginning.”
I drank.
The wine was expensive. I could taste it. Not because I know much about wine, but because expensive things have a way of making you aware of your own lack. I set the glass down carefully.
“You look unsettled,” Plum said.
“I’m tired.”
“No. You’re thinking.”
“Same thing, lately.”
She smiled. “You want to ask me something.”
I had been trying not to. That made it worse.
“What do you do?” I asked.
“For a living?”
“Yes.”
She considered the question as if it were a dish she might send back.
“I trade in secrets,” she said.
I laughed nervously. “That’s not an occupation.”
“It is if you’re good at it.”
I waited.
Plum set down her glass.
“I’m an entrepreneur of sorts,” she said. “I run a private temp agency. Very discreet. Very selective. We supply secretaries, clerks, maids, chauffeurs—household staff and office support for the wealthy and well-to-do.”
I frowned. “That sounds almost normal.”
“Almost.”
“What’s the rest?”
“The rest is placement.”
She said the word as if it meant more than employment.
“My employees are quietly efficient,” she continued. “They know how to enter a room without being noticed. How to pour coffee while conversations happen. How to drive a car while the person in the back seat forgets they exist. They blend into the background of their contracted employers’ homes and businesses. They become part of the furniture.”
I watched her face.
“It’s amazing how many tidbits of information a well-placed employee can pick up,” she said. “A wife who mentions a divorce before the husband knows it’s coming. A business partner who uses a private number for calls he doesn’t want recorded. A family that needs to sell a property quickly because the money is gone. A will that hasn’t been filed. A deed that hasn’t been corrected. A house that has been empty longer than anyone admits.”
My stomach tightened.
“Insider trading here,” Plum said, as if describing the weather. “A little blackmail there. A well-timed introduction. A quiet word in the right ear. And voila.”
She spread her hands.
“I am a very wealthy young woman.”
I stared at her.
The restaurant continued around us. Soft music. Silverware. The murmur of people who had never needed to pawn anything.
“You’re telling me this,” I said slowly, “because you want me to know?”
“I’m telling you because you asked.”
“No. You could have lied.”
Plum smiled. “I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because lying is useful, but recognition is rarer.”
I did not know what to say to that.
She leaned forward slightly.
“You have access, Patricia.”
“I’m a real estate broker.”
“Exactly.”
She said it like a door opening.
“You know which houses are empty. Which owners are desperate. Which estates are tangled. Which families are selling because of death, debt, divorce, or disgrace. You see the land records. You see the deeds. You see the contracts. You know when a property is vulnerable before the rest of the world does.”
I put down my fork.
“Is this a job offer?”
“It’s an acknowledgment of your existing skill set.”
“I sell houses.”
“You open doors.”
The waiter came and went. I barely noticed. Plum’s eyes held mine with that calm, patient attention. She was not pressuring me. That was the frightening part. She did not need to.
“I don’t understand what you want from me,” I said.
“I think you do.”
“I’m not involved in blackmail.”
“Not yet.”
The words landed softly.
Too softly.
I looked at her across the table, beautiful and composed and utterly unreadable, and something inside me finally shifted.
She had not been confusing.
She had been recruiting.
The coffee shop. The Hollis estate. The site unseen offer. The closing documents. The page I could not remember reading. The way my hand had moved before I decided to move it. The way she had appeared in that rundown place at two in the morning, dressed like money, asking about a house no one wanted.
None of it had been accidental.
I should have been horrified.
I was horrified.
But beneath the horror was something worse.
Relief.
Because if Plum had chosen me, then I was not merely desperate. I was useful. If Plum had chosen me, then all the years of smiling in empty houses and pretending I was not drowning had not been wasted. They had been preparation.
Plum watched me realize it.
She did not gloat.
She simply reached for her wine and took a slow sip.
“Eat,” she said. “You look like you haven’t had a good meal in months.”
I picked up my fork.
I ate.
I let her pay.
I let her see that I was hungry.
That is the part I confess first.
4:00 PM