18. Nolan
NOLAN
The room at the end of the hall in the penthouse used to be a home office that I used three times.
By the second week of February it is a half-built nursery, and I am the one half-building it, which is a sentence I would not have predicted about myself at any point in the previous thirty-seven years.
The walls are the soft, warm white Arielle picked off a paint chip on a Sunday morning while eating a piece of toast over the sink.
The crib is in three large boxes against the far wall because the man who was supposed to deliver it assembled mentioned he had a bad shoulder, and I told him to leave the boxes and go.
The instructions are spread out on the floor in a fan. There is an Allen wrench in my hand.
I have, by this point, fired four people, two of them through Claire, in a single calendar week. None of them are the Allen wrench.
"You look ridiculous," Devon says from the doorway.
He has let himself in, because Devon has let himself in to every apartment I have lived in since 2009, and because Malcolm is downstairs and Malcolm knows him.
"Nash. You are sitting on the floor in a six-thousand-dollar suit reading a Swedish pictogram.
I would like a photograph for the archives. "
"You touch your phone and I will end your retainer."
"You will not. I am the only attorney on the eastern seaboard who tells you the truth, and you know it, and that is why you keep me.
" He drops onto the small upholstered bench under the window, the only finished piece of furniture in the room, and surveys the wreckage.
"Talk to me. Walk me through what we are doing in here on a Tuesday at noon when there is a board call you are missing. "
"I am not missing it. I am attending it remotely through Claire, who is reading my notes off a legal pad I emailed her at six. The board does not need me in the room to approve a procurement budget I drafted myself in October."
"That is a great answer for the board. It is a worse answer for me, because it tells me you cleared your calendar to put a crib together with your hands at noon on a Tuesday. Which is not, in any version of you I have known, normal behavior. Which brings me to the part I came to say."
I do not look up from the diagram. "Then say it, Devon."
"You are managing this like an acquisition."
"What is this?"
"Her. The baby. The nursery. The Donnelly article.
The Crain's editor you scared into a retraction last Thursday.
The two investors you quietly told to find another corridor before the consortium meeting on the sixth.
The alderman you put on the phone with the city's deputy chief of staff at four in the morning on a Wednesday three weeks ago.
The senior partner at Holcomb's firm you had Phillip call to suggest reassignment.
The reporter in Atlanta who was three days into a piece on Arielle's pregnancy who suddenly received an extremely interesting tip about her own publisher's tax filings. Should I keep going?"
"I would prefer that you didn't."
"I have eleven more, Nash. I have been keeping a list. Not because I am keeping a list on you.
Because you keep mentioning them to me one at a time over dinner, like you are walking a friend through a clean closing, and you are missing the part where some of these are not closings.
They are people. And the woman they are happening to is not on the cap table. "
"She isn't asking me to stop."
“She isn’t asking you to stop because she has no idea how much of it is you.
That’s why I’m here. You’ve been quietly taking over her professional life since New Year’s, and you’ve done it with your usual precision, and in the next four weeks she will figure it out — because she’s the sharpest person you’ve ever held a conversation with.
And when she does, she won’t thank you. She’ll be furious.
And her fury won’t look anything like what you saw in the glass office in October. It’ll be the kind that closes a door.”
I set the Allen wrench down on the diagram. I look at him.
"I'm protecting her, Devon."
"I know you think that."
"They were going to push her out of the restoration phase.
Two of those investors had already drafted the recommendation.
Holcomb had it on his desk. The city deputy chief of staff was going to back it because his cousin's firm wanted the cantilever contract.
Donnelly was three days from running a hit piece that named her Crain's article as a quote-source in another four outlets.
The Atlanta reporter was about to publish her grandmother's address.
I did not invent any of that. I am not making problems up.
I am eliminating problems that already exist. There is a difference. "
"There is a difference, Nash, and you of all people should know it does not survive contact with the person you are doing it for.
The instant she sees it, the difference disappears.
All she will see is that you handled her career behind her back.
She will not see the math underneath. She will not see the alderman.
She will not see Atlanta. She will see a man who used his last name to make sure she won, and she will spend the rest of her life wondering which of her wins were hers. "
"She would have won anyway."
"Then let her. Let her have the wins she would have had.
Let Donnelly publish a worse article and survive it.
Let Holcomb take a swing and lose it on the floor.
She is good enough to win those fights, and she will believe she won them, which is the entire point of letting her have them.
You do not get to keep the trophy and the receipt, Nash. Pick one."
I do not say anything. The diagram on the floor between us has a small smiling cartoon of a baby holding what is apparently a finished crib in one hand, like a hat.
"I am asking you to tell me how to stop," I say, after a minute. "Devon. Tell me how to stop. I have been doing it since October. I do not know how to stop in the middle. I have never stopped a campaign halfway in my entire career."
"Then start with the next phone call you have not made yet. Don't make it. That is the first one. The next twelve will be easier."
Malcolm taps on the doorframe with the back of one knuckle. He is in a gray jacket and there is snow on the shoulders of it. He does not come in.
"Mr. Ashford. I would not interrupt. I have something."
"Go ahead."
“There’s a photographer on that site as of yesterday afternoon. He’s been parking in the adjacent lot and has taken, by my count, seventy-two shots of Miss Sutton entering and leaving the trailer in the last twenty hours. He’s freelance. He sold a set last night to a paparazzi service in New York.
There’s a second man at the doctor’s office on Michigan Avenue who’s been there since Monday morning.
He’s not freelance. He’s on retainer with an outlet I won’t name in writing in this room.
I have stills. I have plates. I have a name for the second one.
I haven’t acted yet. I wanted to know what you wanted me to do. ”
I do not look at Devon. Devon is looking at me.
"Pull the plates on the photographer at the parcel.
Send them to legal. Have legal call his agency by close of business.
Tell them their freelancer is going to face a trespass complaint if he is on the lot tomorrow morning.
As to the second man, get me the name of the editor on the retainer, not the reporter, and have Phillip call the editor before five.
The editor is going to receive an extremely friendly call about the long-term commercial implications of harassing the architect of record on a hundred-and-twelve-million-dollar restoration project.
Friendly, Malcolm. Not threatening. Friendly. "
"Understood, sir."
"Have the second man followed home tonight. I want to know where he sleeps."
"Understood."
He leaves. Devon does not move from the bench.
"Nash."
"Don't."
"Nash. That was not stopping. That was the opposite of stopping. That was a press call, two retainers, and a man being followed home before dinner."
"They were at her doctor's office, Devon."
"I know they were. I am not arguing with you about the men.
I am observing that ninety seconds ago you asked me how to stop, and inside two minutes you escalated to the most aggressive set of moves I have heard you authorize since the Wabash deal in 2018.
Sit with that. Do not say anything to me yet. Sit with that."
I sit with it. I keep my mouth shut. I lift the Allen wrench from the diagram and roll it between my fingers, suddenly conscious of every call I’ve made in the last hundred and twenty seconds, conscious of the grinning cartoon baby staring up at me, conscious of the hallway behind me where, in the months ahead, a daughter I don’t yet know will be carried past this door.
Arielle's key turns in the lock at the end of the hall at five-forty.
I hear her drop her bag. I hear her toe her boots off at the rack by the door.
I hear her say something soft to Malcolm in the kitchen that is probably thank you, because she has started saying thank you to Malcolm in a way that has, slowly, made Malcolm her man more than mine.
I hear her walk down the hallway in stocking feet. The footsteps stop at the nursery door.
She leans her shoulder against the frame. She is in the gray turtleneck dress she wore to her one-thirty appointment and the wool coat she has stopped bothering to button. Her hair is back. Her eyes are tired, in the specific way they go tired at twenty-seven weeks.
She looks at the Allen wrench. She looks at the diagram on the floor. She looks at Devon, who is still on the bench.
"Devon."
"Arielle. Pleasure as always."
"Are you helping or witnessing?"
"Witnessing, increasingly."
She does not laugh, but her mouth moves at the corner. She steps over the diagram and bends down — slow, careful, one hand on the small of her own back — and picks up a half-assembled crib leg from the floor.
"This goes on the other side," she says, holding it up. "You have the left and the right reversed in the diagram. I drew enough cribs in school to know."
"Of course you did."
"Did Holcomb's firm pull their motion this morning, by the way? Terry said it came off the docket overnight and nobody can figure out who killed it. Carla thinks Vega made a phone call. I think Vega does not make phone calls she does not have to make."
I look at her. She is watching me with the small attentive expression she gets in meetings, the one she uses when she is reading a room and pretending not to be reading it. Devon, on the bench, does not move. He does not have to.
"I don't know, sweetheart," I tell her.
It is the first sentence I have said to her since October that I am not entirely sure is true.
She holds my eyes for a beat. Then she sets the crib leg down on the diagram, between Devon's foot and mine, and she straightens.
"Right," she says. "Dinner in twenty. Wash up."
She walks out. Devon, on the bench, exhales through his nose like a man who has just watched a bridge be built and decided not to walk on it yet.
"Nash."
"I heard you the first time, Devon."
"I'm going to need to hear you say it back."
I don’t say it back. I pick up the Allen wrench, and the diagram, and the crib leg, and I turn the leg the way Arielle showed me, and I finally start building the right side of the thing instead of the wrong one.