Rafael is the one who got me up here tonight, through the service elevator, past the men who were told to keep me out.”
Adrienne knew Rafael a little.
He was the rare one who learned the cleaning staff’s names, who held elevators, who said thank you.
If Rafael was risking his career on this, then it was not a family squabble.
It was something with real teeth.
She thought about what it must have cost him to do it.
Rafael was not a wealthy man with a soft place to land; he was an assistant, one signature away from being replaced, in a job market that does not forgive people who accuse their employer’s fiancée of espionage and turn out to be wrong.
If he had brought the folder to Corbin directly and Camilla had spun it — and she would have spun it, brilliantly, tearfully — Rafael would have been gone by lunch, blacklisted, unhireable, a cautionary tale.
He had known all of that, and he had gone looking for Marguerite anyway, and smuggled a banished old woman up a service elevator on the biggest night of his boss’s year, because he had decided that some things mattered more than his own safety.
Adrienne understood that kind of choice better than most.
It was, she thought, the same choice her daughter had made without even knowing it was a choice: to see someone in trouble and refuse to look away, whatever it might cost.
On the leather chair, Taylor swung her legs, entirely unbothered by corporate espionage and yet, in her way, seeing to the center of it faster than any of them.
“I’m going to go get the gentleman now,” she announced.
Chapter 8 — Taylor’s Mission