Saturday, October 8, 2016 — Manhattan
* * *
I woke up angry.
Not the productive kind of angry — the kind that makes you close a trade before the stop-loss triggers, the kind that gets channelled into something useful.
This was the other kind.
The kind that sits between your ribs like a stone and makes you breathe wrong.
I’d dreamt about him.
Not a sex dream — worse.
A conversation dream, the kind where you’re talking to someone and every word matters and you can’t remember any of it when you wake up, just the feeling that you said the wrong thing and he knew.
I threw off the duvet and walked barefoot across the cold hardwood to the bathroom.
My brownstone on East 71st had Carrara marble floors in the bathroom and they were freezing in October and I never wore slippers because I was stubborn and because my feet were one of my best features and I didn’t like covering them, even alone.
Long, narrow, high arches, toes that looked good in open-toed sandals — my mother’s feet, my mother’s legs, my mother’s whole lower half.
I brushed my teeth.
Washed my face with the Cetaphil I’d used since Wharton because every dermatologist said the same thing and I didn’t have time to argue with dermatologists.
Stared at myself in the mirror.
My hair was wrecked from sleep — a tangled blonde cloud, the waves from last night’s blowout crushed flat on one side and wild on the other.
I pulled it up and held it and looked at my face without the distraction of hair.
High cheekbones, my father’s jaw, my mother’s nose.
Blue-grey eyes that looked tired because I’d slept four hours and spent three of the other four staring at the ceiling thinking about a man named Lukas who didn’t have a last name.
The two creases at the corner of my right eye.
Still there.
Faint, traitorous, unchanged by the eighty-dollar night cream I’d been using since March.
I dropped my hair and stepped back.
I was wearing a white cotton T-shirt and nothing else.
In the full-length mirror, the shirt hit me mid-thigh.
I pulled it off and stood there.
My breasts were full and round and sat high on my chest without a bra — the advantage of being twenty-eight and having genetics that worked in your favour.
The nipples were pink and hard from the cold bathroom air.
My waist pulled in from my ribcage, my hips flared, and in the bright morning light every line was honest.
My ass — I turned, checked over my shoulder — still firm, still high, the cheeks round and tight, the kind of ass that made construction workers on Madison Avenue lose the ability to speak.
My legs were long and bare and the four-day overdue wax was starting to show at the bikini line — fine blonde hairs at the edges of the neat strip I kept trimmed.
He’d known about the wax.
Four days overdue.
How?
I turned back around and looked at myself and thought: I am Eliana Roth and I run four hundred million dollars and I have been hunted by a man whose last name I do not know, and I am standing naked in my bathroom at seven in the morning trying to figure out how he knew I was overdue for a wax.
I put on a robe — ivory silk, La Perla, the kind that cost nine hundred dollars and felt like being touched by someone who wanted you — and went downstairs to make coffee.
My phone was on the kitchen counter where I’d left it after the car.
I picked it up and scrolled through the search history from last night.
Lukas investor.
Lukas Manhattan.
Lukas hedge fund.
Lukas biotech.
Nothing.
I’d added Lukas gala Pierre 2016 before bed.
Also nothing.
I called Helen Harrington’s office at nine.
“Helen, it’s Eliana Roth.
Wonderful event last night.
I wanted to follow up on the foundation pledge — and a quick question.
Your guest list for last night.
Was there a Lukas on it?
Tall, dark hair, grey-green eyes, probably came alone.”
Helen’s assistant put me on hold.
Three minutes.
Classical music.
I stood at my kitchen window looking out at the brownstones across the street and thought about how he’d crossed the entire ballroom without a single person stopping him.
“Ms.
Roth?
I’ve checked the guest list — we had four hundred and twelve confirmed attendees last night.
There’s no Lukas on the list.
First or last name.”
“He was there.
He was at the second bar around nine-thirty.”
“I can check with the venue, but our list is the list.
If he wasn’t on it, he was someone’s plus-one.”
“Can you find out whose?”
“I’ll ask around.
Shall I call you back?”
“Please.”
I hung up and stared at my phone.
Not on the guest list.
Not on the guest list at a thousand-dollar-a-plate event at the Pierre that had security at the door and had security at the door and a seating chart and a coat check.
He’d walked in, talked to me, and walked out, and nobody knew who he was.
I called the Pierre directly.
Asked for the events manager.
Explained I was trying to identify a guest from the previous evening — tall, dark hair, tuxedo, left through the main elevator around nine forty-five.
“I’m sorry, Ms.
Roth, we don’t share security footage.
You’d need to speak with the Harrington Foundation directly.”
“Is there a sign-in log?
A valet record?”
“Ma’am, I really can’t—”
“I pledged twenty-five thousand dollars to that foundation last night.
I’m asking for a name.”
A pause.
The events manager came back two minutes later with nothing.
No valet record — he hadn’t driven.
No coat check — he’d arrived without one, which in October meant he’d walked or been dropped off and came in through the lobby and up the elevator and nobody stopped him because he looked like he belonged.
Nobody had stopped him.
I sat at my kitchen island with my coffee going cold and opened my Bloomberg terminal on my laptop.
Eliana Roth did not lose.
Eliana Roth did not get walked away from.
Eliana Roth found what she was looking for — she was, by every metric that Wall Street cared about, the best researcher of her generation, and she had just been presented with a problem that had no ticker symbol and no SEC filing and no quarterly report, and the problem was six foot three with a jaw that could cut glass and eyes that had read her like a position she was about to get squeezed on.
I ran a search.
Every Lukas in the Bloomberg database who was connected to biotech, healthcare, private equity, venture, anything that would put a man in a Tom Ford tuxedo at a charity gala.
Forty-seven results.
I scrolled through profiles.
Lukas Brenner, 54, Munich — too old.
Lukas Chen, 31, San Francisco — wrong ethnicity.
Lukas Van Houten, 40, Amsterdam — hedge fund, but three inches too short.
None of them were him.
I tried LinkedIn.
Typed Lukas and filtered for New York, finance, science, biotech.
Got two hundred results and spent an hour clicking through profiles.
I checked each photo against the memory branded into my retinas: the jaw, the cropped dark hair, shoulders broad enough to make the Tom Ford look tailored, the dull grey band on his left ring finger that looked like nothing I’d seen in a jewellery store.
Zero matches.
I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling.
My robe had fallen open and I was sitting in my kitchen with one breast half-exposed to nobody, my laptop open to a dead-end LinkedIn search, my coffee cold, my Saturday morning gone.
He’d known my trades.
My timing.
My sizing.
My quarterly letter.
My skincare routine.
My wax schedule.
He’d known things that required access — real access, not public-filing access, not a Google search.
Somebody had given him my LP letters.
Somebody had briefed him or he’d done homework that went deeper than anything I’d encountered from a potential investor, a competitor, a regulator, or a man trying to get in my bed.
And then he’d said Enjoy the gala, Eliana and he’d walked away.
My phone buzzed.
Helen Harrington’s assistant.
“Ms.
Roth, I checked with everyone on the host committee.
Nobody brought a Lukas as a plus-one.
Nobody remembers a man matching that description.
We checked the security log at the elevator — the only solo male entry between nine and nine-thirty was logged as a walk-in, no name recorded.
The doorman says he had an invitation but she doesn’t remember the name on it.”
“So he walked in with paper he shouldn’t have had.”
“It appears so.
Shall I involve the Pierre’s security team?”
“No.
Thank you, Helen.”
I hung up.
A ghost.
A man who walked into a charity gala with an invitation that didn’t belong to him, talked to one person, and vanished.
Who knew more about me than my own COO.
Who looked at me like I was a company he’d already valued and the acquisition was just a matter of timing.
I closed my laptop and walked upstairs.
I showered — hot, too hot, the way I shower when I’m thinking, the water punishing my shoulders and the backs of my thighs while my brain runs.
I shampooed my hair twice.
Conditioned.
Stood under the water with my palms flat against the tile and my forehead resting on the marble and thought about the way he’d said You won’t when I told him I might switch to scotch.
The certainty in it.
Not arrogance — arrogance is insecurity wearing a suit.
This was something else.
This was a man who had already run the numbers and the outcome was decided and the conversation was just the execution.
I turned off the water and stood there dripping.
My phone.
I’d left it downstairs.
I wanted to search again.
I wanted to find him.
I wanted to walk into a room and say Lukas and watch his face when I was the one who knew something.
But I didn’t know anything.
I toweled off.
Blow-dried my hair straight — forty-five minutes, because my hair was thick and long and I was vain about it.
Put on high-waisted wide-leg Brunello Cucinelli trousers in oatmeal, a black silk Cami NYC camisole that dipped low enough to show the tops of my breasts, and a cream Loro Piana cashmere blazer I’d bought in Milan last spring.
Flat sandals — tan Hermès Oran slides, because I wasn’t going anywhere that required heels and I wanted to feel the sidewalk.
I looked at myself in the hall mirror.
Five ten barefoot, the trousers making my legs look endless, the camisole showing cleavage, the blazer sharp over my shoulders.
My hair fell in a straight blonde curtain past my shoulders.
My eyes were cold and clear.
I looked like a woman in control.
I did not feel like a woman in control.
I went out.
I walked up Madison Avenue and bought a matcha at a place I never went to because I needed to go somewhere I didn’t usually go and think.
I sat at a small marble table with my matcha and my phone and I thought about what I knew.
Lukas.
No surname.
Knew my fund, my trades, my body.
Tom Ford tuxedo, custom fit.
A grey ring on his left hand.
Not married — no wedding band, and the ring was on the wrong finger anyway, ring finger but the wrong metal, the wrong everything.
He’d ordered water at a charity gala.
He’d been at the event for less than an hour.
He’d spoken to me and only me.
I watched twenty-seven people that night.
You’re the only one I’m sitting with.
He hadn’t said that.
He hadn’t said anything like that.
But the implication had been there, in the way he’d walked past two hundred people to stand at the bar where I would walk, in the way he’d already known what I was drinking and why, in the way his voice had been unhurried and low and precisely aimed, like a trade he’d been planning for weeks.
I put my phone face-down on the table.
He would come back.
I didn’t know how I knew that.
But I knew it the way I knew when a position was going to move — not from the data, but from the shape of the data, the pattern underneath, the structure I could feel but not yet name.
He would come back because he’d left without finishing.
And when he did, I was going to be ready.