Chapter 22 #2
"He used to say he couldn't stand to watch it die slowly," she said. "That's the part I've never gotten past. He couldn't stand the waiting. So he went out and got the loss early, while it could still be on his terms."
The bar was loud, and the jukebox was wrong for the hour. I could still hear my mother over the din.
We'd been at her kitchen table three days before my arrest. She'd been folding laundry, and she didn't stop while she said it, which was how I knew she'd thought about it for a long time before saying it.
"You do it before they can," she'd said. "Whatever it is you fear losing. You wreck it first, so at least you're the one holding the box of matches."
I'd told her she was wrong. I'd been so sure of that at twenty-two. I wasn't afraid of anything. I was being realistic. I knew what I was capable of, and I wouldn't pretend otherwise for anyone's comfort.
Three days later I was in county. A year later, she was gone. I'd spent the years since turning that conversation into evidence.
See, I'd tell myself. I told you what I was. I told you I'm the type who lets things go wrong. That's not fear. That's honesty.
It had always felt like clarity. Sitting in a bar in Millbrook, listening to a stranger describe her ex-partner, it sounded like Russ running the numbers.
"Hey." Jess was watching me. "You went somewhere."
"Sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Be useful." She angled toward me on her stool. "Whoever they're squeezing in your town. Is there someone who put that look on your face?"
I didn't insult her by asking what look. "Yeah."
"Is she fighting?"
"Harder than anyone. She pulled the local operators into a collective. She documents everything. She's..." I didn't have the end of the sentence, so I told the truth instead. "She's carrying it."
"Alone?"
The word sat there. The honest answer was that she had a town, a family, a collective, people who'd walk through walls for her. The honest answer was also yes, in the one way I could have changed.
"That's on me," I said.
She said nothing. She didn't have to. We'd both been listening to the same story.
Somewhere down the coast, Nadia would be in her apartment with the labeled shelves and the quarterly schedule, running her system, checking things off, doing what she did when the feelings got too big for the space available.
I wondered if she was okay. I wondered whether the photo from the church hall was still on her corkboard, and decided I didn't want to know the answer tonight.
"Okay." Jess straightened. "Two things, and then I'm going home, because some of us pour wine for tourists at ten a.m."
I waited.
"One. There's a group chat. Operators that Elevate rolled or tried to roll. Boulder, Durango, us, a couple from towns they tested and left. We call it the alumni. It's mostly gallows humor and casserole recipes. But I've had three years to compare notes, so hear this part properly."
She held up a finger. "Every market where somebody got a lawyer and made a noise in daylight, Elevate withdrew.
Durango, they pulled every complaint inside six weeks and never came back.
Half of Boulder went the same way. The play needs the dark, and it needs you alone.
The moment it gets expensive and visible, they fold and drive to the next town.
They have never once let any of it reach a courtroom.
Their margins can't survive their methods. You understand what I'm telling you?"
"They fold."
"They fold every single time someone makes them. The only markets they've ever won are the ones where somebody on the inside decided the loss in advance." She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to.
"Two. Give me your number. There's a woman named Pippa in Durango who kept receipts like other people keep grudges.
Filings, correspondence, recordings of two phone calls her lawyer got extremely happy about.
He had a name for what they do. Tortious something.
She'll talk your ear off, and your someone is going to want every word. "
I gave her my number. She typed, hit send, and my phone buzzed against my leg with the weight of a contact card.
She finished her beer and set the glass down.
"You didn't drive forty minutes for the scenery," she said.
"No." There was no point dressing it up for her. "I came out here to be somebody I used to be. For a night."
"How'd that go?"
"He doesn't fit anymore."
She nodded like I'd confirmed something she'd worked out an hour ago. Then she stood and pulled her jacket on.
"One more thing, free of charge." She picked her phone up off the bar and looked at it rather than me, and her voice lost some of its polish.
"Whatever you end up holding, put it in her hands yourself.
Across a table, in your own voice. The thing that finished Russ and me wasn't selling the company.
" She pocketed the phone. "It was me finding out how much got decided in rooms I wasn't in. "
She settled her collar and gave me a nod, this woman with her flattened beer label and her alumni and a town she'd landed in rather than lived in.
"Make it count," she said. "The group chat doesn't need new members."
She walked toward the door without looking back, and I sat there with my beer going warm in my hand and Pippa from Durango in my phone and the clarity that arrives when you've been trying to outrun something and you finally stop moving long enough for it to catch up.
I texted Pippa from Sofia's driveway, apologized for the hour, and asked when she had time to talk. The typing dots appeared before I'd finished locking the truck.
Anytime, the reply said. Durango's been waiting two years for this call.