20. Nolan
NOLAN
The browser history on my study laptop has my name on it because Arielle and I share the household tablets and the desktop in the kitchen but not, by any agreement I remember making, the laptop in my study, and yet at six-thirteen on Friday morning I sit down at my own desk with a fresh cup of coffee and there it is — a row of tabs along the top of the screen, all opened between two-eighteen and three-forty-one in the morning, all on the city's procurement portal and the Cook County clerk's docket search and one open archive of Crain's mastheads going back eighteen months.
She closed her own laptop and used mine because hers is on the firm's network and mine is on a household VPN that does not log her. She did not delete the tabs because she wanted me to find them. That is the part I sit with first, before the coffee, before anything.
I shut the lid. I take the coffee into the bedroom. She is sitting up against the pillows with her hand resting on the curve of her stomach and her hair pulled back, and she does not look surprised to see me, which is, in its own quiet way, the first hit.
"Doctor's at ten," I tell her, because I have to say something. "Malcolm's downstairs at nine-thirty. I have a board call at one and a Patel sit-down at four. Do you want eggs."
"I'm not hungry yet. Eggs at eight."
"Eggs at eight."
I nearly ask about the tabs. The question reaches the edge of my mouth before the campaign-trained part of me slams the door on it. I walk out with my coffee, the tabs untouched, and a hot, acidic burn climbing my throat that isn’t from the coffee.
Devon meets me at a diner on Wabash at seven because Devon does not let me have these conversations in my own office, where there are three other people on the floor by seven-fifteen and at least one of them is paid to listen.
He is in a navy peacoat and the unimpressed glasses, and he has ordered me dry rye toast and a black coffee before I have sat down, because Devon has been ordering dry rye toast at me since 2014.
"She found it," I tell him, before he has lifted his cup.
"What did she find?"
"Procurement portal. Docket search. Crain's mastheads. Last night, between two and four. On my laptop in the study, after I had gone to bed. She did not close the tabs."
Devon sets the cup down. He laces his fingers around it.
“Nash. Listen to me. I’m saying this with the full weight of nine years of telling you things you didn’t want to hear.
Drive home from this diner. Bring her into the study. Tell her everything — every call, every retainer, every editor. Atlanta. The alderman. The reissue. The Cleveland seat. All of it. Say it in your own words before she says it in hers.
Do it before the doctor’s appointment; that is not a room you want her entering angry.
And do it without a lawyer present — including me — because the moment she sees counsel, she’ll read it as a deposition.
Take the hit, Nash. It’s coming either way. The only choice you have left is who delivers it.”
"She's seven and a half months pregnant, Devon."
"Which is precisely why you do it today, not next week.
Because she is seven and a half months pregnant, and her body is doing work you cannot help with, and the one thing in her life she has been allowed to feel like she is winning on her own is the south parcel.
You let her keep believing she won that fight on her own for one more week, and then she finds out from a leaked email or a city aide or the next reporter who replaces Donnelly, and at that point you are not a man who manipulated a few approvals out of love.
You are a man who lied to her for seven months while she carried your child.
Do you hear the difference between those two sentences. "
"I hear it."
"Then go home, Nash."
"After the consortium meeting on the sixth.
Once the funding is closed. The minute the gavel comes down on that, I sit her down.
There are six investors in that room on Monday afternoon and the entire eleven-point-two million in restoration capital is contingent on the four of them I have been quietly steering since New Year's, and if I walk into that meeting having had a conversation with Arielle in the car that morning, my face is going to lose us the money.
I cannot lose her the money. The money is what makes the cantilever stand.
The cantilever is hers. I am asking for three more days, Devon.
Three days and the meeting, and then she gets every phone call. Every one."
Devon studies me across the table. He picks up the rye toast. He bites it. He chews it the way he does when he is choosing whether to say a sentence out loud.
"You are doing it again, Nash."
"Doing what."
“Buying yourself one more move. There’s always another meeting.
There’s always another close. There’s always another reason to stretch the secret three more days past the last three you swore were the limit.
You’ve been doing it since October. You did it in November when you fired Reggie Boyd’s subcontractor through three layers of paperwork so she wouldn’t see your name.
You did it in December when you bought the building next to her firm and let her think the brokers leaked it.
You’re about to do it again. I’m telling you this so that when it ends, you remember I warned you.
I’m not going to enjoy being right. Eat the toast.”
I do not eat the toast.
The board call at one is on a speakerphone in my office.
The Patel sit-down at four is in a conference room on forty-eight.
Between them Harrison Ashford calls me, twice, and I take the second call because Harrison does not call me twice in one afternoon unless he is preparing to make me sorry he had to.
"Nolan." His voice has the same dry, papery quality it has had since he was sixty. "I had drinks with Walter Holcomb last night."
"You shouldn't have."
“I shouldn’t have many things. Walter mentioned, almost casually, that he found it interesting how quickly the senior-partner reassignment at his firm came together after that motion died on the docket.
He used the word coincidence with the kind of smile a man wears when he means the opposite.
I didn’t laugh. I don’t make a habit of laughing at Walter Holcomb. ”
"Was there a point to this call, Harrison."
"The point of this call, Nolan, is that you have spent ninety days managing the political environment around a thirty-one-year-old architect from Bronzeville the way I spent the seventies managing the political environment around a casino in Atlantic City, and you have done it with my company's name and my company's lawyers, and the difference between us is that I had the wisdom not to fall in love with the casino.
You used to be a builder, Nolan. You are turning into a husband.
The boardroom can smell it on you. Walter Holcomb can smell it on you.
By April it will be in the Journal, and not in the way you want it to be. "
"Is that all?"
"That is all. I'll be in town Tuesday. Don't bring her to dinner."
He hangs up.
I sit at my desk on forty-eight with the phone still in my hand and the lake doing the gray, restless thing it does in March when the ice is starting to break, and I make the decision I should have made at the diner this morning.
Monday afternoon at three o'clock the consortium meeting will close.
By four I will be at the penthouse. By four-fifteen I will have her at the kitchen counter with two glasses of water and the laptop between us, and I will walk her through every phone call I have made since October in the order I made them, and I will not soften any of them, and I will not let her find out one second of it from anyone else.
Three days, Devon. Three days. I'm still repeating it to myself — the way I've repeated every timeline I've ever set, as though saying a number out loud could make the world wait for it — when my assistant taps on the door at five-forty and says Miss Sutton has called from the firm and asked, in a very level voice, whether I'm home for dinner.
I tell her yes.
She tells my assistant that Arielle said good, and that I should not be late.
I have spent five months believing the calendar belonged to me — that I could schedule the truth the way I schedule a closing, three days out, on my terms. It does not, and it never did. I am already too late. I just do not know it yet.