The call from HR came at 9 a.m., four hours after Ivy had finally fallen asleep on the bus and missed her stop.
"Ivy, can you come in." Denise from Bright Clean Services didn't ask it like a question. Denise never asked anything like a question when her voice had that particular flatness to it, the one Ivy had only heard once before, right before they let Marisol go for showing up late three times in one month.
Ivy hadn't been late once in eighteen months. She said so.
"This isn't about being late." Denise wouldn't look at her over the desk. "The client called this morning. Vane Corp wants you removed from the Tower contract. Effective immediately."
The floor seemed to tilt very slightly under Ivy's feet.
"Removed how? Fired removed, or reassigned removed?"
"I don't know yet. I'm trying to find out." Denise finally looked up, and there was something almost apologetic in it, buried under twenty years of not being able to afford to care too much about any one employee. "What happened last night?"
Ivy thought about the bill she'd left on her cart. She thought about the exact number of shifts she needed this month to cover the difference between what her mother's insurance paid and what the hospital actually charged, a gap that grew every week her mother stayed in that bed instead of getting better. She thought about telling Denise the truth, that she'd told one of the richest men in the city to get off her wet floor, and decided that particular sentence was not going to help her case.
"Nothing," she said. "I did my job. I don't know why they'd want me gone."
Denise's phone rang before she could answer. She picked it up, said "Bright Clean, this is Denise," and then went very quiet in a way that made Ivy's stomach fold in on itself.
"Yes. Yes, she's right here." Denise held the phone out like it might bite her. "It's Vane Corp. They want to speak to you directly."
Ivy took the phone with a hand that wasn't quite steady.
"This is Ivy."
"Ms. Calloway." A woman's voice, crisp, the kind of voice that had never once had to worry about a heating bill. "This is Reagan Ashford, Mr. Vane's chief of staff. Mr. Vane would like to see you at the Tower at eleven this morning. There's a car being sent."
"I don't have anything to say to Mr. Vane." Ivy tried to keep her voice level. "If this is about losing my contract, I'd like to know why before I show up somewhere."
A pause, brief and surgical. "It would be in your best interest to come, Ms. Calloway. Eleven o'clock. The car will be outside your building at ten forty-five."
The line went dead before Ivy could ask how they knew where her building was.
**
The car that pulled up outside her apartment at ten forty-five was blacker and quieter than any vehicle had a right to be, and the driver didn't say a word the entire ride, which suited Ivy fine, because she spent the whole twenty minutes rehearsing versions of an apology she had no intention of giving.
Sterling Vane's office took up the entire top floor, and it did not look like the office of a man who'd been falling apart in an elevator twelve hours earlier. He stood at the window when she walked in, back to the door, and didn't turn around right away, and Ivy had a full three seconds to notice that in daylight, in his own building, surrounded by glass and height and the particular silence that only real money could buy, he looked even less like someone she should have talked to the way she had.
She was not going to apologize first.
"Ms. Calloway." Reagan Ashford stood off to the side, tablet in hand, watching Ivy the way a jeweler watches a stone she's deciding whether to cut. "Please, sit."
"I'll stand." Ivy kept her chin up. "I'd like to know why I've been pulled off my contract."
Sterling finally turned around. He looked at her for a long moment, and whatever he was searching for, Ivy couldn't tell if he found it.
"You haven't been fired," he said.
"Then what was last night?"
"Last night," he said, "you told me to get off your floor."
"You were standing in wet mop water."
"You didn't know who I was."
"I still don't understand why that matters." Ivy's voice came out sharper than she meant it to, but she was tired, and scared about her mother, and standing in a room that cost more to decorate than she'd make in ten years, and something about all of that together made her reckless. "You want to fire me because I didn't fall over myself. Fine. Just say that instead of sending a car."
Reagan made a small sound that might have been a laugh, quickly swallowed.
Sterling didn't smile. But something in his face shifted, the same way it had shifted in the lobby, like she'd said something that landed differently on him than it would on anyone else.
"I don't want to fire you," he said. "I want to hire you."
"I have a job."
"Not cleaning floors."
Ivy laughed before she could stop herself, short and disbelieving. "What, exactly, do you think I'm qualified to do in this building?"
"Be seen with me." Sterling said it flatly, like a business term, which Ivy would later understand was exactly how he meant it. "Six weeks ago my fiancée left me two days before our engagement party went public, for a man with better hair and worse credit, and every outlet in this city has spent the six weeks since deciding I'm either heartbroken or a monster, sometimes both in the same headline. I need to be photographed with someone who very obviously could not care less about my money. It would end the story in a week."
"You want to pay me to pretend to date you."
"I want to pay you enough that your mother's hospital bill stops being something you calculate at two in the morning while buffing my lobby floor."
The room went very still.
"How do you know about my mother."
Reagan's tablet made a soft sound as she turned it around, and Ivy's stomach dropped clean through the floor when she saw what was on the screen: her own hospital account, her mother's name, the balance, the payment history, all of it laid out in front of two strangers like it was nothing.
"I know a great deal about you, Ms. Calloway," Sterling said, and for the first time since she'd walked in, there was no arrogance in his voice at all, just a kind of quiet, terrible certainty. "Enough to know exactly what number would make you say yes."