7. Arielle
ARIELLE
The trouble with hiding a pregnancy in October in Chicago is that everyone keeps telling you you look pale.
I've been getting it since Monday. From the receptionist on the way in.
From the senior partner in the elevator who is forty-eight and divorced and has never once in nine years asked me how I'm doing without a billable reason attached.
From Terry, twice, in the same morning, until I told him if he asked me one more time I was going to start charging him by the hour.
The trick, I have decided, is concealer two shades warmer than my actual skin and a blazer cut loose enough at the waist that nobody is going to look twice.
I am twelve weeks today. According to Dr. Ellis I am supposed to be radiant.
According to the mirror in the women's bathroom on the eighteenth floor, I look like a woman who has been losing an argument with her own digestive system since Labor Day.
“Sutton.” Don Garvey leans into my office without knocking — the way he’s been doing since the Bush administration.
Sixty-one, white hair he treats like a credential, and one of three senior architects on the team who’s spent the last nine months addressing me like we’re in uniform.
“City review’s at two. Carla wants the deck twenty minutes early. You set?”
"I've been ready since Friday, Don."
"You sure? Because the elevation on slide fourteen still has the bakery cantilever, and I thought we agreed at Monday's review to simplify the corner."
"We did not agree to simplify the corner. You suggested simplifying the corner and I said no, and then Terry said no, and then Carla said no, and then you said we'll see, which is the phrase a man uses when he means I'll bring it up again on Thursday and hope you forgot."
Don laughs the way men laugh when they are not actually amused. "Tough crowd this morning."
"It's almost two. I'm focused."
"You look tired."
"I am tired. I have been working on this deck for six weeks. You can leave the door open on your way out, Don, I'm expecting Terry."
He goes. I sit at my desk with my hand pressed flat against my stomach under the lip of the keyboard tray, where nobody can see me do it, and I breathe through my teeth the way Dr. Ellis taught me on Tuesday. In through the nose. Out slow. Don't fight the nausea. Let it be a passenger.
I am not letting any of this be a passenger. I am driving.
The presentation goes well. Better than well.
I stand at the head of a long conference table in the city planning office with a laser pointer in my hand and walk three commissioners and a deputy chief of staff through fourteen slides on how to land a forty-million-dollar mixed-use tower on that site without taking out the corner of Sixteenth Street.
And Vega — who hasn’t backed a single project from this firm in four years — leans forward on slide nine and doesn’t settle back until slide thirteen.
"Miss Sutton," she says, when I've finished, "if the rest of this corridor is going to look anything like the work on this deck, I want you in front of my board every quarter for the next three years."
"That's the plan, Commissioner."
"Good. Tell your developer I said hello."
I do not say which one. We are between developers, technically.
The Marquesa gala client sold to Ashford Urban Development on August twenty-second, and the integration paperwork is still being negotiated by people whose names I refuse to learn.
I smile the kind of smile that gets carved into bronze at retirement parties and tell her I'll pass it along.
Terry catches up to me in the corridor outside the chamber, already on his phone. "Carla wants you on the line. Now. She watched the live feed."
"Tell her I'll call her from the car."
"She also wants you to know there's a request from Ashford's Chicago office for the marked-up south elevations. The colored ones. With your handwritten margin notes."
I stop walking. "The colored ones. With my handwriting on them."
"Their request. Came in this morning. Claire Ashford, EVP of acquisitions, copied direct."
"Send the clean elevations. The CAD exports. Not the marked-up set."
"Ari, the request was specific. They asked for?—"
"I heard what they asked for, Terry. Send the clean set. If they want the marked-up version they can put it in writing to Carla and explain why an EVP of acquisitions needs an architect's hand notes on a drawing she has the final version of."
He looks at me. Twenty-six, sharp, and seasoned enough to know when I’m setting a boundary I won’t unpack in a hallway. He nods once, logs whatever he needs to on his phone, and leaves the rest alone.
Bianca takes me to dinner that night at a wine bar on Randolph where she is friends with the chef, and she orders me sparkling water with grapefruit before I have sat down, because she has been doing this every Thursday since the test.
"You're hiding," she says, the second the server is out of earshot.
"Don't fight me on it, Ari, I've watched you do this since we were nine.
Your shoulders are up by your ears. You presented to Vega today.
I have been watching your phone vibrate for an hour.
Your phone never vibrates because nobody bothers you anymore, because you have trained the entire city to email. "
"It's Carla. Carla has been calling because Ashford's people requested the marked-up elevations and I said no."
"They what?"
"They asked for my hand-marked drawings. The ones with my notes on them. From the Pullman Row file, the ones I keep on tracing paper because I'm an old soul. Don't make a face at me."
Bianca puts her wineglass down. "Ari. Ari. You need to tell him."
"I know what you're going to say."
"You're going to let me say it anyway because I have earned it." She leans forward on her forearms, her braids falling over one shoulder, her face doing the soft Bianca thing she only ever does in private. "I am not telling you to forgive him. I am not telling you to date him.I’m not telling you to take a dime of his money. I’m telling you that you are twelve weeks pregnant by a man whose company just bought the corridor you’re designing, and the longer you sit on it, the more it looks like you were hiding it — and the more it looks like you were hiding it, the more ammunition he has to be furious when he finds out.
And Ari, he is going to find out.You drew the building.
Your name is on the appendix. He has a copy of the appendix.
Somebody in his office has a copy of the appendix. "
"He doesn't even know I'm pregnant, Bee. He has no reason to be looking at me. We had one night. He has had a thousand nights."
"You're underestimating him."
"I am protecting myself. There is a difference."
"There is a difference, and there is also a Venn diagram, and you are sitting in the overlap."
I drink my grapefruit water. The bar is loud around us. A man at the next table is telling a woman about his boat. Somewhere in the kitchen a pan hisses and somebody laughs.
"He would either take over my entire life," I tell her, quieter, "or he would walk.
And I do not have the energy for either one, Bianca.
I am building a building. I am building a person.
I am doing both of those things on four hours of sleep and a saltine.
I cannot also build a co-parenting arrangement with a man who closes drawers like they are doors. "
"Closes what?"
"Nothing. Forget it."
She watches me. She does not push. She lets me have the saltine and the silence and a small piece of dark chocolate the chef sends out at the end with a note that says for the lady with the grapefruit water.
The ownership announcement meeting is Friday morning at ten in the firm's largest conference room.
I dress for it the way I dress for everything important — black slacks that still fit, a cream silk blouse that does not, technically, but I am wearing a blazer over it, a single gold cuff above my elbow that I have not worn since July and put on this morning out of something close to spite.
My hair is pulled back. My eyeliner is steady.
I drink half a ginger ale at my desk before I walk down the hall.
Carla is at the head of the table. Don is there.
Terry is there. Two of the senior partners are there.
The Ashford team is supposed to come in via the side door from the elevator bank — Claire Ashford, the EVP I have been emailing for six weeks, and her two coordinators. That's it. That's the meeting.
I sit. I open my notebook. I write the date at the top of a clean page.
The side door opens.
Claire walks in first, gray at the temples, in the kind of suit a woman wears when she is older than every man she manages.
She sets a binder down at the foot of the table and turns to hold the door for the person behind her, which is, by every brief I have been emailed about this meeting, supposed to be a junior coordinator named Lewis.
It is not Lewis.
Nolan Ashford steps into my conference room in a charcoal suit I have not seen and a tie the color of slate, and his eyes find mine across the table before the door has finished closing behind him, and the small, careful life I have built in the last ten weeks tilts sideways under my chair.