Chapter Ten
Sterling
I mind. I mind in a way I’ve organized my life around not showing.
Gil Halloran catches me after the meeting.
He wants to argue about the allocation framework again, which is what Halloran does.
He pushes back, makes me defend my numbers, and he does it because he respects the work enough to want it right.
I’ve known him for six years. He’s the only person on the board who tells me I’m wrong without calculating what it’ll cost him.
“The European exposure is too heavy,” Halloran says. “You’re overweighting sovereign risk.”
“I’m weighting it exactly where the data says to weight it.”
“The data says a lot of things. Some of them contradict each other. That’s what data does when the ECB is being unpredictable.”
“The ECB is always unpredictable. That’s baked into the model.”
“Your model, Sterling. Not mine.” He grins. “My model says you’re going to lose eight basis points by March.”
“Your model can buy me dinner when I don’t.”
He laughs. I almost laugh. Halloran is the closest thing I have to a friend in this building, and he earned it by being right often enough that ignoring him is more expensive than listening.
When the Prescott acquisition was wobbling two years ago, Halloran told me the structure was wrong. I disagreed. He was right. I restructured the position, and the fund made $40 million on the correction. I thanked him once, privately. He told me to stop thanking people and start listening faster.
I like Halloran.
Dana Whitlock catches me before I reach the elevator.
She has a question about the Singapore rebalance that takes seven minutes to answer, and while I’m answering it, I’m also aware that Dana has been running the operations floor for years, that the firm functions because she functions, and that I’ve never told her this.
Complimenting competence implies you previously doubted it.
Martin Yoon stops me in the hall on my way out. He has something he wants me to sign. I tell him to send it to my office. He says my name with the tone he reserves for Richard. I keep walking.
The penthouse is clean, dark, and unchanged from this morning.
I run five miles on the treadmill because running is what I do at night instead of the things I used to do at night, which involved a woman who made terrible pasta, laughed at her own cooking, and fell asleep on my shoulder watching documentaries about whales.
The treadmill is a substitute. It isn’t a good one. It keeps my heart rate up and my mind occupied. Both matter when the alternative is sitting in a penthouse that briefly held two happy people and has held one going through the motions for four years.
I eat a dinner I don’t taste. I answer emails.
My mother calls at 9:15, which is when she usually calls.
“Darling, the Cormant luncheon is Saturday. I’ve put you down for a table.”
“I have a board call Saturday.”
“Move it. Rebecca Kaplan will be there. She’s recently single, and her mother tells me she’s been asking about you.” She pauses. “She went to Duke, Sterling. Lovely girl. Very appropriate.”
I’ve stopped keeping track of the names. Emily, Stephanie, Rachel, or Rebecca... It doesn’t matter.
“I’m not interested, Mother.”
“You haven’t been interested in four years, Sterling. At some point that stops being preference and becomes avoidance.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.”
“You could at least file for divorce. Martin has raised it. I know he has.”
“Goodnight, Mother.”
I hang up. She’s been doing this for four years.
She calls twice a week, mentions names I don’t remember, women from families she approves of, women who went to the right schools and have the right last names and who would never, in Gretchen’s estimation, embarrass the family at a charity gala or burn garlic bread or wear a dress from a shop on South Boulevard.
She’s never once mentioned Casey in four years.
Casey’s name has been erased from Mother’s vocabulary as cleanly as if it were never there.
I’ve let her erase it, because arguing with her about Casey would require admitting that I still think about my wife.
Admitting that would require admitting why I threw her out.
That examination leads to a topic I avoid like a religion.
Martin has raised the divorce three times in four years. I changed the subject three times, and he let me, because he knows when to back off.
I haven’t filed for divorce. I tell myself it’s inertia. It’s paperwork, logistics, and the complication of dividing assets, though they were never commingled because Casey never let me put her name on anything. It’s simpler to leave it.
The truth, which I’ve only examined once at 3 a.m. on a night I couldn’t sleep, is that filing for divorce would mean admitting the marriage is over.
Admitting it’s over would mean looking at why.
Looking at why leads to a living room where I told my wife to leave because she chested on me. That betrayal is still raw.
I haven’t dated once. I tell myself it’s discipline. The truth is simpler and uglier. Every woman I’ve met since Casey left sounds wrong. Their voices are wrong. Their opinions are wrong. They laugh at things that aren’t funny, or they don’t laugh at all.
The ones who get the laugh right still don’t sound like the one I’m listening for, because that laugh belongs to a woman who burned garlic bread, served it anyway, and grinned about it.
She left. I told her to. The discipline isn’t discipline at all.
It’s self-flagellation for still wanting a cheater.
I don’t examine this. I run five miles on the treadmill instead.
THE LETTER ARRIVES at my office on a Thursday via registered mail from an attorney’s office in Asheville, North Carolina.
The receptionist calls me to come down, and I sign for it at the front desk. Martin is in a meeting. Dana is on a call. I take it to my office and close the door.
The letter is four sentences long. It identifies itself as correspondence from the office of Danielle Pratt, attorney at law, on behalf of Casey Weaver.
It requests HLA typing from Sterling Hollingsford as a contingency donor evaluation in connection with the medical treatment of a child identified as his biological daughter.
It names the child as Sienna Weaver, age four, and provides the contact information for the transplant center’s donor coordinator.
The letter contains four sentences without a plea, an explanation, or any history. Just the medical fact and the request, composed with a restraint I recognize because I use it myself. Casey has learned to ask for things without giving anything away.
I read it three times.
The math is simple. I do it on the first read. She must have been about two months pregnant when she left. I do the math again on the second read because the first answer was unbearable. It comes out the same.
The timeline lands on the week she walked out of our living room with a bag and a sentence that sounds different in hindsight.
If I leave here, it won’t be alone.
I heard another man. I heard her confirming Brittany’s accusation. I heard exactly what I was ready to hear. My father left with someone else. I was already primed for the story where everyone leaves. Casey handed me one sentence, and I loaded it with four years of a wound she didn’t give me.
She was telling me she was pregnant. She was telling me about our daughter.
The air goes out of the room, and I mean that literally.
I can’t get a full breath. My chest is doing a thing I don’t recognize, a pressure that isn’t pain, exactly, but sits where pain would sit, pressing outward against my ribs as though something inside me is trying to expand and there isn’t room.
I’m sitting in my own office, at my own desk, in a building I rebuilt from my father’s wreckage. Casey was telling me she was pregnant. I’m hearing it for the first time. I told her not to come back.
I stand up, sit down, and stand up again. I align the letter with the edge of my desk, then move it to the center, then move it back. The surface is mahogany and I’ve never noticed the grain before.
Sienna Weaver, age four, under the care of pediatric hematology.
My daughter has been alive for four years.
She has a name I didn’t give her and a last name that isn’t mine.
She’s sick in a way that requires a bone marrow transplant.
Her mother, my wife, still legally my wife, because I never filed, because filing would have meant looking at why, built a life in Asheville without me.
She raised a child without me. She fought whatever fight a sick four-year-old requires without me. She did all of it without me, and now she’s asking for my cells in a letter that reads like a subpoena because she’s learned that asking Sterling Hollingsford for anything personal gets you nowhere.
I think about calling Mother just long enough to understand she can’t know about this yet. Not until I know what it means, what I’m going to do, and what the letter changes.
Mother will have opinions and a strategy. Mother will sit in her wing chair and manage this as she manages everything. I can’t let her manage this because this is mine.
I pick up the phone, put it down, and pick it up again. The number I want to dial is Casey’s, but I don’t have it. That I don’t have my own wife’s phone number after four years is a fact I’ve been organizing my life around not confronting.
I call Martin instead. He picks up on the first ring.
My office door is closed. It’s been closed for twenty minutes. I never close my door.
Dana knocks once, leans in. “Sterling, do you need—”
“Not now.”
She looks at me then at the letter on my desk. She doesn’t ask what it is, because Dana Whitlock has worked for me for years and can tell something is wrong. But she pauses before she pulls it shut, and her face is filled with concern.
“I need you to find out everything about Casey Weaver in Asheville,” I tell Martin. “Employment, address, and public records. Everything.”
Martin doesn’t ask why. He’s been my attorney for ten years. He knows the sound of a conversation that isn’t going to include context, and he recognizes her name.
“I’ll make some calls,” he says. “Sterling, are you all right?”
“I need a family attorney.”
“Family attorney.” He pauses. “What kind of family matter?”
“The kind that involves a child I didn’t know existed until ten minutes ago.”
Martin doesn’t answer immediately, which is unusual for him. “I’ll find someone. Sterling—”
“There’s more. The letter mentions a medical request. HLA typing. The child is sick. She needs a transplant.”
“Are you going to comply?”
I look at the letter on my desk. Four sentences. A child named Sienna. Four years old. Gray eyes, probably, if genetics mean anything. My biological daughter.
I’ve been told I have a daughter who’s sick and needs me.
My throat closes. Every instinct I have says to get on a plane, find her, and give whatever they need.
Every instinct says that, and every instinct is overridden by the one thing I’ve been carrying since the night Casey left, which is the certainty that she left with someone else.
That the child might not be mine. That the letter might be a play instead of truth.
Casey Weaver has never leveraged anything in her life.
She packed one bag, drove away, and didn’t ask for a cent.
She didn’t hire an attorney. She didn’t sell a story.
She disappeared into Asheville and raised a daughter without a dollar of Hollingsford money, and the woman who did that isn’t the woman who sends a fraudulent paternity claim in a four-sentence letter.
I know this. I know it by instinct, by the structure, by what’s missing, and the restraint of the thing itself. And I still can’t get past the night she left. Brittany saw her cheating, so paternity is in doubt.
“Before I give anyone anything,” I say, and my voice is hard, “I want a paternity test. I’m not putting a needle in my hip on the strength of a letter.”
The words come out firm and controlled. They’re wrong. I know they’re wrong while I’m saying them.
I’ve been told I have a daughter, and my first move is to demand proof.
Martin doesn’t argue. “I’ll make the calls. Do you want me to fly to Asheville?”
“No.”
“Are you going yourself?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Sterling,” he says, and his voice has the tone it gets when he’s about to say something he knows I won’t want to hear, “If this child is yours, the timeline means Casey was pregnant when she left. You understand what that means.”
“I understand what it means.”
“Do you want me to say it?”
“No.”
He doesn’t say it. He hangs up. I sit at my desk with the letter centered on the mahogany. I straighten it one more time. Then I stop, because straightening it isn’t helping, and I don’t know what would.