The Fidelity Files (Jennifer Hunter #1)(75)

As I stepped timidly into her corner office Miranda looked up from her computer screen, pushed her glasses onto the top of her head, and offered me a pleasant but reserved smile.

I smiled back.

"Close the door please, Jennifer."

Definitely not good news.

I closed the door behind me and took a seat in one of the chairs across from her.

"Thanks for coming in," she said as she leaned back in her black leather executive chair and studied me from across the desk.

"Sure."

"Well," she began, folding her hands in her lap. "I just wanted to call you in here to thank you personally for what you did."

I nodded, mentally rummaging through all the e-mails I had sent out in the past twenty-four hours that would have somehow ended up in Miranda's in-box. "You mean the, um... the, uh, DVD market analysis thing?" I ventured.

Miranda smiled, almost endearingly, but not quite. "No, Jennifer. I mean the 'my husband analysis' thing."

I frowned in confusion. I certainly didn't remember any requests relating to her husband. Had one of those recent data inquiries been initiated by him for some reason? Had he been using the bank's internal resources for some research of his own?

"I'm sorry," I said, trying not to sound completely clueless, but rather as if that specific analysis had merely slipped my mind momentarily, and a simple keyword would surely trigger the correct memory center of my brain and put me right on track with the conversation. "Which request was that?"

"The one from last night," she stated candidly.

This completely threw me off. And now I most definitely appeared even more out of the loop than before. I hadn't even been in the office last night. I was at a bar with a bunch of people from the office. Investment bankers were notorious for working late nights, even all night. In fact, last night we were out celebrating the first pre-seven P.M. departure in what had felt like months.

"I'm sorry," I began again, now convinced that I sounded like a complete moron, but at this point not really caring that much. I just wanted to know what the hell she was talking about and kindly let her know that she was obviously confusing me with someone else. "I wasn't working last night."

"Well, not in your normal capacity, anyway," she joked to herself. "But you definitely helped me out."

I sat in silence, waiting for an explanation. I wasn't about to continue to look at her dumbfounded, saying inept things like "Huh?" or "What?" or "I'm sorry" over and over again like an incompetent idiot.

"You hit on my husband last night...at the bar."

My mouth dropped. I blinked nearly two dozen times, completely flabbergasted. I could feel my face getting hot. Twenty straight hours in the blazing afternoon sun would have been no match to the deep red color my skin was now exhibiting for all to see. I didn't know what to say. And if I had been afraid of sounding like an idiot just a few seconds ago, it was surely nothing compared to the babbling sounds that were involuntarily coming out of my mouth at this moment.

"Uh...um...but...the thing is...I...um...I didn't know he was your..."

"Of course you didn't!" she exclaimed, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "If you did, there was no way you would have ever gone through with it!" She chuckled lightly, somewhat amused by the whole thing. In my mind she was starting to look a lot like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers, sadistically plotting the destruction of the planet unless someone agreed to pay her one hundred billion dollars.

"You mean...?"

She nodded her head sadly. "I'm afraid so. I'm very sorry to have brought you into this whole mess. I know it's not any of your business. And certainly not your problem. But I had to confirm my suspicions."

I felt like I had just been knocked in the head with a sledgehammer but miraculously lived to tell about it. I just couldn't believe that the entire thing had been a setup, which would mean that Hilary and Tina had been in on it from the beginning. And that whole Truth or Dare game had just been a ruse to get me to that final challenge, the one that apparently had been Miranda's idea all along. Although, honestly, it didn't surprise me that Hilary and Tina had gone behind my back in order to satisfy one of Miranda's requests. Analysts will do just about anything to kiss up to high-level VPs.

I didn't know how to respond or what to say to her. What kind of response do you even begin to formulate in a situation like this? It's not like there's a section about this kind of thing in any proper social etiquette handbook, and my college class in business relationships certainly hadn't covered it.

And if I was speechless then, you can imagine my reaction when I got a phone call a few weeks later from a woman who introduced herself as "a close friend of Miranda Keyton's," asking if she could pay me to provide her with the same invaluable service I had afforded Miranda.

"I need to know the truth," she explained to my stunned silence on the other end of the phone. "I need to confirm my suspicions so I can stop wondering and move on." Her words poked at a deep wound inside of me. One that I never thought could ever be fully healed. But for the first time in months, after seeing my mother mourn the loss of so many years of happiness due to a lifetime of blissful innocence, I felt a twinge of restitution.

I couldn't turn back time and erase the choice that had deprived my mother of her right to know. But maybe I could at least help this woman uncover hers.