Chapter 34
Ali
Kathy Delaney was as straightforward as they came.
She worked at GlennGlobal in compliance—which, as far as Misha and I could tell, was a department that GlennGlobal had on payroll to appease investor relations and legal concerns.
Whenever the company received a complaint or was being questioned in the media, they’d respond with, “We’ll send that through compliance. ”
While the department was a farce, I never thought Kathy was.
She seemed na?ve but didn’t have a corrupt bone in her body.
She was tucked away in a windowless corner of the eighth floor.
I’d gone to her office just once, and the buzzing of the fluorescent lights gave me a rash.
But Kathy showed up in pearls and a pantsuit and did her job.
She was marched out as the public face, armed with jargon that shut down or confused most lines of questioning.
She had a very specific process for filing a “red flag” that required her expert investigation.
It was in the form of a memorandum. We were all quite sure she never got to see those memorandums because our managers and department heads had to approve them before we could submit them. They were mostly a waste of time.
Whenever GlennGlobal started to feel the heat of an ethics question or negligence on behalf of the company, they’d let Kathy out of her hidey-hole to “clarify our position” or “walk through the language.” To the outside world, “Kathy in compliance” was GlennGlobal’s conscience.
But really, she was plausible deniability for the bigwigs.
To us, it seemed Kathy never even realized she was being used.
Then again, neither did I.
“What’s going on?” We were sitting in the café in a huddle.
I had so many questions, so many feelings swirling around my body.
But that question was the most pressing.
The one that seemed to sum up all the rest. Adding the word fuck would have been the only other appropriate thing to include: What the fuck was going on?
“Your boyfriend was very helpful. Extremely fit too. Good for you,” Kathy said. An attempt to lighten the mood.
Dad was his usual buttoned-up, stoic self. Not a soft spot to find along his rigid silhouette.
“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?” Kathy looked to Dad for agreement.
They were working together. They knew about the environmental violations and how GlennGlobal was covering them up. They knew and they were trying to do something about them. They were collecting evidence. Connecting dots.
Dad was involved at the board and executive level. Capturing all the outside influences and negligent parties.
Kathy worked on the inside.
When I’d stumbled upon the reports and started to create the memo to send up the chain, I complicated things.
So Kathy had casually warned Cary Glenn.
He took matters into his own hands from there.
Kathy and Dad knew he would find a way to not only force me out of the company but also discredit me in the process so anything I may have tried to say in public had no teeth.
Dad felt he needed to cut me off as the final nudge to get me out of Chicago. He’d coaxed Mom into encouraging me to escape to Lakeside. It was all predestined. I’d walked right into it and did exactly as they predicted.
They finished telling me their story, with Kathy’s reassurance: “It was done for your own good.”
After a beat, I found my voice.
“You set it up to all play out like this?” I asked.
I was looking to my dad with the question. Kathy answered instead.
“Yes—well, all except what happened after you came to Lakeside. You’ve been a thorn in GlennGlobal’s side for weeks. The PR department was scrambling. You certainly know how to make ripples, Ali.”
Ripples. As if I did it all just to piss off GlennGlobal rather than to honor Lakeside.
“Why not just tell me what was going on? Why not spare me the humiliation and rejection?” Again I glared at Dad. Willing him to provide me with an answer to justify the hurt.
“Ali, I think it was—” Kathy started, but I cut her off.
“Dad. Why?”
He looked back at me. His expression was . . . well, I’m not actually sure what it was. It betrayed no visible feeling. His expression was unfeeling. That expression was extremely well practiced. Made stronger over time.
“Alison. Let’s not get emotional about this. It was business. Their errors and cover-ups were costing millions. My millions. We needed to execute this plan with precision. No complications.”
“So I was a complication to your plan to rescue millions of dollars? Not people. Not communities. Not nature. Dollars.”
“What he is trying to say is—” Kathy again.
I cut her off again and directed my question straight at my father. I didn’t want to be rude to Kathy, but this issue—his actions, his motivations—I needed to understand. I wanted to understand. It had to be more than money at stake to make dismissing me worth it.
“Why didn’t you invite me in? Maybe I could have helped. You could have made me an asset instead of a complication.”
He cleared his throat. The only sign his composure had shifted.
“That wasn’t a practical option a couple of months ago,” he said.
“But we think it could be now.” Kathy was directing the conversation, meant to lead me onto a new path. I clocked it. Then buried it. This wasn’t the way to win my dad over. There was no appealing to his emotions. James Bennet didn’t have time for my sensitivity.
The way back into my dad’s circle was to be useful to him. I switched my gaze to Kathy for the first time since we sat down at the café.
“What did you have in mind?”
Kathy pulled out a folder from her leather Loewe briefcase and removed a sheet of paper. It was the memo I’d been drafting when Ryan came into my office with his sob story asking me to back him up because of his screwup. I had forgotten all about it, given the turn of events immediately after that.
“I’m not sure if you realize the significance of what you found. These violations are distressing. And they’re illegal. Very, very illegal.”
She began riffling through another stack of paper. I recognized my highlighter marks. It was the environmental impact report I’d found.
“Falsified emissions data.
“Manipulated impact assessments.
“Soil and water contamination.
“And hush money. Lots of hush money,” Kathy added dramatically.
“Your dad has reams of printed communications between execs suggesting knowledge of all this and intent to cover it up. It’s astonishing to me how narcissism makes people like this feel infallible.
“You were right, Ali. But you were too early. We”—she indicated between her and Dad—“weren’t ready yet. With the help of the legal department, I convinced Cary to push you out of the company. Admittedly, I knew it would be harsh.”
They knew it would be harsh . . .
“Then, instead of just hiding out, you rebranded Lakeside—one of GlennGlobal’s future project sites.
The attention and acclaim you conjured were extremely disruptive.
Your success here made it harder for them to get away with their level of corruption.
It didn’t seem to impact our plan, however, so we let it ride. ”
They let it ride.
“Until Ryan’s tiny brain stumbled onto its first good idea: hijack the momentum you’d built to clean up the company’s image.
“So they twisted the narrative again. Using you to their benefit—again.
This time, instead of positioning you as the crazy, emotional Fatal Attraction archetype, they decided to make you the hero.
But only so far as it served them. Believe me, they had every intention of setting you up for a massive fall from grace whenever it suited them . . . again.
“Honestly, their patriarchal arrogance is laughable, and it’s ultimately what will help finally take them down,” Kathy finished.
I didn’t say anything for a breathless moment. Stunned.
“We could use your help now, though,” my dad added. His only words.
I lifted my head to his like a flower seeking light, even if it was from an artificial lamp in a room with no windows.
I craved his warmth and light. In any form I could get.
I was little-girl Ali doing silly flips in a puffy pink tutu at his feet.
I was teen Ali organizing my boarding school dorm floor sneak-out for a moon goddess ritual.
I was college Ali hosting a drag show rave party at an abandoned church.
I was twentysomething Ali trying to cross international borders without proper identification and facing down dangerous weapons and men.
Demanding-impulsive-chaotic-careless-reckless Ali.
Finally being invited in. Even if this too teetered on transactional—it felt like winning.
“What did you have in mind?”