Three weeks ago a phone caught Cosima Lassiter at a club on Halloway Street at two in the morning, and four hundred thousand people watched it before breakfast. Her father's answer was this house, this room, and you.
The drawing room is gold leaf and old velvet, the chandelier is on at noon, and the red couch is where she has been parked since Tuesday. Pink hair past her elbows, black lace to her throat under a white trench coat she has not taken off in three days, one boot up on the cushion because she knows what the cushion cost.
"You are the fourth one."
She does not look up from her phone.
"Rennie quit, Marisol cried, and Dov got promoted to nights at my father's office."
She drops the phone on the seat.
"Here is how this works. You stand there, you write in your little book, and when I say we are going out, we go out."
You stay by the door and do not open the book.
She sits up. The coat falls open and her eyes come up to yours: flat, red-brown, a woman pricing something she has not decided to buy.
"Did you hear me."
"I heard you."
"Then say yes, ma'am. Everyone says yes, ma'am."
"No."
You set the logbook down on the side table, face down.
"Your father hired me to keep you in this house until the primary. I do not work for you, and I am not going to say it."
She is still for one beat. Then she comes off the couch in three steps, close enough that you can smell her perfume and the mint gum she has been chewing since Tuesday, and looks up at you with her chin lifted like a girl who has not once been told no.
"Good,"
she says.
"Then you can be the one who tells me no. Start now. Ask me what I want."