Chapter 19 #2
All this time, I've been lugging around the terror that Hamish's identity would swallow mine. That every yes would erase me a little more. That I'd wake up one morning and find my name had been legally changed to Mrs. McCormick, Hamish's Wife, Mother of Baby, Property of the McCormick Brand Empire.
But I can put that fearbag down.
"No, James."
A shadow fills my doorway. Kristin from two offices down, holding a pink bakery box, leans against the doorjamb with the relaxed posture of a woman who was on her way somewhere and just found something much more interesting.
She catches James's tone, raises her eyebrows, and extends a donut toward me like a sword.
I wave her off. Not yet. I'm busy.
"Let me be blunt," James says, and the silk falls off his voice like a bathrobe hitting the floor.
"You have the position you hold at this company because of your family connections.
Shannon married my son. You benefited from that.
The opportunities you've received here are not unrelated to your last name. "
Kristin's jaw unhinges. She mouths the word NO and makes a face at the phone so appalled, you'd think James had just announced he's joining an ashram.
I inhale slowly. My ribs expand. My daughter presses against them from the inside, bracing.
"James," I say, and my voice is calm, the most dangerous version of my voice, the one I used to talk down a CEO who wanted to tweet his way through a securities investigation.
The one I used when Hamish's old coach tried to lowball his severance.
The one my sisters call the Velvet Woodchipper.
"If we're going to play that game, then the only reason you have a relationship with your sons is because of Shannon and Amanda. "
Silence.
Silence from James, but not from me. I continue.
"Your daughters-in-law built every bridge you were too proud and too busy and too convinced of your own brilliance to build yourself.
They help heal the wounds you gave your sons.
They organize the holidays that include you.
They mediate the arguments you provoke. They translated your silence and absence into something your grandchildren can try to understand as love, because God knows you aren't going to do it. "
Kristin is gripping the donut box so hard, the cardboard is buckling.
"You are extraordinary at business, James. Truly. Your instincts are sharp and your timing is impeccable. Congratulations. But you are lousy at people. You treat your family like chess pieces. You move us where we serve your strategy and when we don't serve it, you threaten us."
"Now, you listen here—"
I talk over him.
"But it is the fastest way to become a lonely old man with nowhere to go on Christmas.
No family around the table except the in-laws who tolerate you because they're kind.
So you find younger and younger women to hang on your arm at the kind of resorts you build, because the resorts are gorgeous and the women are gorgeous and if everything around you is gorgeous enough, maybe nobody notices that the man in the middle of it all is completely, devastatingly empty. "
The speakerphone transmits nothing but James McCormick's breathing and what I imagine is the sound of his rising blood pressure contracting with a private assassin to put out a hit on me.
Kristin has gone statue-still. Behind her, I register movement. Heads in the hallway. Two junior associates. Priya from legal, hand over her mouth. And behind them, our COO Gregory, whose expression suggests he has swallowed something that requires an ER trip.
"You're fired," James says, flat and bitter.
The words slide right off my calm.
I look at Kristin. At Priya. At the two associates whose eyes are the size of the donuts in Kristin's box. At Gregory, who is growing a hiatal hernia in real time.
"You can't fire me, James," I say, "because I quit. See you at Mom and Dad's Fourth of July barbecue. It's your turn to bring the watermelon."
I press the button and the line dies.
The hallway detonates. The two Gen Z employees clap, actual applause, as if I just landed a dismount at the Olympics.
Priya whispers, "Holy shit," which is the most emotion I've ever seen from legal, ever.
Kristin looks at me like I've just walked out of a burning building carrying a baby and a flag.
I mean, I am carrying a baby. And my blood feels like a flag, bright and snapping in the wind.
Gregory retreats down the hall with the urgency of a man who needs to make several phone calls and order a case of Pepto-Bismol.
My phone buzzes on the desk.
I look down.
Hamish. From London.
I love you
No context. No question. No follow-up. No seventeen emojis. No Gaelic endearment. No football metaphor, no innuendo, no request for video of my leg press or a sexy boob shot.
Just, I love you.
Sent across an ocean at the exact moment I needed it, because Hamish McCormick's real gift has never been his face or his feet or his ability to make forty thousand people scream his name, and I don't mean the women he's slept with.
It's his timing.
I pick up my phone, my bag, whatever's left of my professional reputation, and I walk toward Kristin. My legs are steady. My back doesn't hurt. I'm thirty-four weeks pregnant and I just quit my job on speakerphone in front of the entire floor and I feel—
Light.
Not weightless. I'm carrying a baby who currently has her head lodged in my pelvis like she's playing the longest-ever game of hide-and-seek.
But the other weight, the invisible one, the one I've been hauling around since the first time someone introduced me as Hamish McCormick's wife and I smiled and said nothing?
That one's gone.
Fear is renewable, Coyote told me. There's an unlimited supply. And she was right. I'll be terrified again by dinner, maybe sooner. The second I sit in my car and realize I'm unemployed and pregnant and married to a man who is currently on another continent learning how to smile for cameras.
But right now, in this office, with Kristin holding donuts and Priya still whispering profanities in the hallway and my daughter doing a slow, contented kick inside me, I'm not afraid.
I reach into the pink box and take a donut. It's glazed, a bit crusty, a donut that doesn't ask what your last name is or who you married or whether your career is a subset of someone else's brand strategy.
I bite into it. The sugar hits my bloodstream, the glaze sticks to my fingers, and Kristin stares at me, waiting for the panic or the tears or the spreadsheet.
"Oh, my God, Amy," she whispers. "What did you just do?"
The donut is perfect. Warm and absurd and perfect.
I take another bite.
"Whatever I wanted," I say.
And it tastes like the answer to Vince's question.