Chapter 19 – DAMON
DAMON
Ihadn't slept properly in four days, and the follow-up event was the night that decided whether the company survived its worst month. It was also the first time I'd be in front of the press since Raina Playne had crashed the gala.
A ballroom of our biggest investors. A livestream to every employee on every floor. Press in the back, the ones we'd chosen to let in, because the story we needed told required witnesses.
I got up and said we'd been attacked, that the independent trial was the answer, that anyone betting against Sterling was betting against the data and the data would win.
I laid out the facts, plain as day. Edward Playne had been on the medication for only a couple of weeks when he'd had his event, and he'd had a history of cardiac distress and plaque build-up that accumulated over decades, not weeks.
That correlation, however unfortunate, did not equal causation and any attempt to pretend it did was not only unscientific but financially motivated by our opposition.
I had the room inside ten minutes and held it for forty, and when I came off the stage the applause had the sound of money deciding to stay another quarter.
Maddie was there, because Maddie was always there.
The designer dress that hugged her beautiful curves, the public smile, working the floor while I worked the podium.
Somewhere under the exhaustion I felt the dull gratitude you feel for a floor holding you up, which is to say none at all. She knew every name in the room.
She made three hundred frightened people feel personally reassured by the Sterling family, without a script, and I'd had eight years of it and never once thanked her in a way that cost me anything. I'd filed my wife under handled, like the catering, like the valet.
I should have seen it coming. Emily and Maddie in the same room on the same bad night, one of them armed and one of them not.
I didn't see it because I wasn't looking at either of them.
I was looking at Diane Meadows, who was three hundred million dollars in a green dress, and money was the only thing I could see by then.
It happened at the bar. Diane, her husband, the features writer I should have kept out of the building, and Maddie in the middle of them with Diane's hand held in both of hers, doing the thing she did. I came up on the tail of it.
"...heartbroken for that poor woman and her father, of course we are," Maddie was saying, warm, certain, the cluster's temperature dropping two degrees the way it always did around her.
"Damon hasn't slept over it. He would never knowingly let a soul come to harm, I promise you. We'll do whatever we can to help."
We'll do whatever we can. On the record. A foot from a reporter's recorder, in the dead center of a lawsuit that hadn't been filed yet but was already loading in a chamber somewhere. I opened my mouth to smooth it.
Emily got there first, and Emily was far too good to do it anywhere it could be printed.
She laid a warm hand on Maddie's arm, the picture of two women who adored each other.
"Maddie has the kindest heart of anyone in this company," she told Diane, smiling, and it landed as a compliment to everyone but the handful of us standing close enough to feel the floor under it.
Then she turned to my wife, gentle, the voice you'd use with a child who'd wandered into the wrong room.
"But you mustn't tie yourself in knots over the legal side, sweetheart.
That's what the rest of us are here for.
Let me steal your husband for two minutes.
There's a small fire only he can put out. "
It was flawless. Diane heard graciousness. The reporter heard nothing worth a line. Only Maddie heard the whole of it, the pat on the head, the rest of us, her husband lifted out of her hands and into Emily's, every bit of it wrapped in a smile no one in the room could have objected to.
And then Emily did what I still see when I close my eyes.
She leaned in to me, close, the easy closeness of a hundred late nights, her mouth near my ear, and under the cover of the same smile she was still giving the room, she said, low, just for me, "She's a liability, and every person here can see it.
Get her off the floor before she hands that man a headline.
Control your wife, Damon. Or I'm going to have to. "
No one but the three of us heard it. Everyone saw it.
The CEO and his head of research with their heads bent together at the bar, that old easy closeness, while his wife stood a foot away holding a glass and not being inside it.
I felt the cluster register the picture even with the words sealed off from prying ears.
Diane's eyes went to Maddie once and came back.
Maddie was looking at me.
She'd gone still. The public smile was holding by a single thread, and she was waiting.
I knew exactly what she was waiting for.
She was waiting for me to step back from Emily, to put eighteen inches of daylight between us where the room could see it, to turn to my wife and say one sentence that made her a person in this again instead of the problem being solved over her head.
It would have cost me nothing. A hand on her arm instead of Emily's hand on hers.
The room was already braced to follow whichever way I leaned.
I wanted to believe I weighed it. I didn't. Four days without sleep, a reporter recording, two thousand jobs in the walls around me, Emily's breath still warm at my ear telling me my wife was a liability everyone could see, and the truth was that in that second I believed her.
I looked at Maddie, warm and lovely and entirely unarmed for the war we were losing, and some cold part of me thought, she's right, she shouldn't be on this floor. She was a liability.
I didn't step toward my wife. I turned the quarter turn back toward Emily and the fire, and I said, in the warm easy voice, "Would you all give us a moment? Emily and I need to make a call."
I felt Maddie wait one more beat. One beat longer than there was any reason to, the last of the thread holding, in case I turned back, in case her husband arrived late. He didn't.
She set her champagne flute down on the bar.
Full. Untouched. "Excuse me," she said to Diane, perfectly pleasant, the hostess to the last. Then she looked at me, and she said, very quietly, under the band and the held breath of the cluster, just for me, "I kept waiting for you to take my side.
I was still waiting just now." A breath. "Thank you for being clear."
She turned and walked toward the doors with her head up, and three hundred people found somewhere else to look.
I almost went after her. I took half a step.
Then the writer had a hand on my sleeve, and Diane's husband had opinions about the share price, and Emily was already at my shoulder, calm, turning the conversation, handing me the next three people I had to focus on.
The livestream light was still burning red, and the room, God help me, was finally calm.
She'd be in the car. I'd find her in ten minutes, the second Meadows was steady. Ten minutes against two thousand jobs. Ten minutes wouldn't matter.