Chapter 6 #2
On weekdays in the summer—when we were out of school and all the other kids were getting bug bites in camp cabins or swimming in community pools—my parents had taken me to museums. But Delia took me to restaurant patios where I watched fashionable businesswomen hurrying past on their lunch breaks.
With mobile phones pressed to one ear and their eyes fixed on the path ahead, they stalked the city streets like predators.
They were alive with purpose. They were in control.
After seeing how quickly a life could collapse, I wanted all the control I could find. So I aspired to be exactly like them. Powerful. Assertive. A little aloof. Ambition would be my ticket to freedom.
My parents had raised me to be voracious for information, to be fastidious and mature.
So I asked Delia for a subscription to The Wall Street Journal.
I became a hybrid model of my two lives—sapient protégée of my parents and Delia’s barfly companion.
After graduating from Tulane with a double degree in business and economics, I bolted for California.
Determined to shed my orphan persona for good with a designer wardrobe, a corner office, and fuck-you money.
And when I landed my job with Simon, the first thing I did was get highlights and buy a skirt from The Row off The RealReal.
Now, I worked long days in head-to-toe designer clothes—some I still bought on consignment in Venice. And my life had become an endless loop of meetings, negotiations, and late nights.
I took a few deep breaths, and then my cellphone rang from somewhere on my desk.
“Where are you right now?” Gemma Klein said as I picked up.
Back then, Gemma was the barback at Greenleaf, the one place in Venice everyone frequented—from start-up bros to actors to venture capitalists sipping mescal cocktails.
We began as casual acquaintances, but Delia had taught me that the right bartender could be your fairy godmother—not as a conduit for drinks, but as one for intel, introductions, and discreet little assists when you needed them most. A year prior, when Simon was seeking inside information on a property he was trying to acquire, Gemma knew the realtor.
While I made it a habit not to rely on anyone—razors’ edges being what they were—Gemma had found a way to slip into my inner circle. And right around this point in my life, she was my friend who was on a mission to set me up.
“Where am I ever?” I laughed. “I’m at work.”
“Well, leave. Some club rugby team just walked into the bar. This place is nothing but accents, tree-trunk legs, and square jawlines.”
“Sounds…Irish.”
“No, Este,” Gemma insisted. “It’s hot. And you’re coming. We’re breaking your dry spell and my bad-date streak with one rugby ball.”
I let out an exaggerated sigh. “I can’t tonight,” I said. “I’m buried in something for Simon.”
This earned me a full-throated “Booo!” Then she said, “Call me tomorrow,” and hung up.
I watched the screen go dark and sat there for a second longer than I meant to, thumb hovering over the call button to redial her as the quiet of the office at night got a little loud. This is the time of my life with the fewest responsibilities I’ll ever have—or so I had thought at the time.
Shouldn’t I want to be at a bar with my friend and a rugby team?
Maybe. But I wanted Simon’s approval more.
That’s when the light from the hallway was briefly eclipsed, and I looked up to find Simon in my doorway, his tall frame leaning casually and a half smile tugging on one corner of his mouth.
His dark hair was always perfectly styled, like he’d just run a hand through it, and his sharp, intelligent eyes could size up a room in seconds.
Simon carried himself like he belonged everywhere, possessing the quiet confidence that came from knowing he’d already won.
In his late thirties, he already had the kind of success people dreamed of. Redwood was a household name, and our annual revenue reports practically printed money. Shareholders, the board, absolutely everyone loved him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him, then skimmed the calendar I kept open on one of my three monitors. “You’re supposed to be sipping overpriced tequila at Gjelina.”
Simon smiled. “I blew it off. Couldn’t wait to get a download of the Silverbridge Group meeting.”
He blew it off.
It felt meaningful. But I reminded myself the meaning was rooted in the presentation he had missed.
The Silverbridge Group had the ability to pump an eight-figure round into Redwood’s next phase of growth.
His was the first plane out when the snow finally lifted, but he had still missed them by an hour or two.
Now, the look behind Simon’s eyes was loaded with anticipation.
“They’re in,” I said, unable to keep my smile small.
“Yeah?” He grinned with quiet satisfaction. “Well done, Este.”
This was our ritual—me delivering good news, him rewarding it with attention. As if I was some kind of barely domesticated animal, leaving dead mice on its owner’s kitchen mat. I liked the hunt, in part, because I knew I would be able to show off what I had snared to Simon.
Sometimes that meant I won his praise. Sometimes it meant something else. I liked both. Maybe more than I should have.
Because the thing I didn’t tell Gemma, the thing nobody knew, was that I was sleeping with my boss. By that point, I had been sleeping with Simon for about six months.
“You want to get out of here?” he asked, with a touch of flirtation in his eyes. “Go work on that presentation?”
This was our code. When Simon or I used the word “presentation” in the vaguest sense with each other, it was an invitation to meet at his place.
I wasn’t in love with him. I was in love with my career. And sleeping with Simon made me feel like those women I used to admire—poised, important, a little untouchable.
One stuffy afternoon in high school, buried in some New England library, I read that Oscar Wilde once said, “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” I didn’t get it at the time. But I did once I met Simon.
Our relationship didn’t start out so close.
But one night—about three years into my job—we were at Simon’s house working on an actual presentation, and my arm brushed against his.
Maybe it was the static in the air or the scent of his cologne that set things into motion.
But one minute, we were going over a meeting agenda, and the next, he kissed me.
In the following days, Simon panicked, saying he had never done anything like that before.
He asked if I wanted to leave Redwood and offered to help me find something new. But I told him I didn’t want that.