Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
Natasha
Luna Rodriguez calls at eight forty-two AM and the first thing she says is,
"I need you to listen before you respond. I'm not publishing it. I want that stated clearly before I tell you what it is."
I set down my coffee, my senses alert. I have been at my desk since seven, running Q4 projections with the focused blankness of a woman who went home at five AM from a man's apartment and has since been using spreadsheets as a tourniquet. "Tell me."
"Viktor Astrovsky leaked a legal document to three outlets this morning.
A filing from Nikolai Astrovsky's attorney.
An IP claim against Sterling-Kane Records, framed as current and active.
" A pause. "There are also internal memos.
Communications from Astrovsky's early planning phase, sourced from inside his organization.
Two outlets are running the story. You have four hours until it goes mainstream. "
I write down three numbers. The outlets. The timeline. The approximate scope of damage. I do this while Luna is still talking because my hands need something to do and because a documented crisis is a crisis I can navigate.
"Thank you," I tell her. "You didn't have to call."
"I know," she says, simply.
She rings off. I look at the numbers on my notepad for ten seconds. Then I pick up my phone and I call Alex.
The Sterling-Kane war room is a glass-walled conference space on the ninth floor that has seen four hostile negotiations, two label acquisitions, and one incident involving Brandy and a projector that none of us have discussed publicly.
This morning it contains four people, one pot of coffee going cold in the center of the table, and a silence with the density of something structural.
Alex sits at the head of the table. Victoria is on his right, facing me.
Brandy has his laptop open and has not looked up from it since I summarized the situation twelve minutes ago.
The two published articles are on the screen behind him, side by side, both running the filing front and center above headlines that use the word ongoing.
"Walk me through the document itself," Alex says. He’s using his quiet voice, the one that is more thorough than the loud one.
"It's an IP contingency filing," I say. "Prepared by Astrovsky's legal team and structured to be held until activated. The memos are from his early campaign planning, obtained by someone inside his organization who shared them with Viktor Astrovsky, who in turn transmitted them to the press."
"And the framing," Brandy adds, still looking at his screen, "is that the campaign is current."
"The framing is misleading," I say. "The filing predates several significant developments."
"Misleading is a generous characterization of a document with his attorney's letterhead and last month's date on one of the exhibits," Alex says. His voice isn’t harsh in the slightest, just precise, which on its own carries a lot of weight.
.. "We need to know if this is ongoing, Natasha. Operationally. Right now."
"It is not ongoing," I say without thinking about it because I know it to be true. For some reason, I trust Nik. And I dislike that I do.
Brandy looks up for the first time. Victoria's eyes move to my face and stay there.
"How are you so sure?" Alex asks.
The conference room is very quiet. The projector hums. Through the glass wall, two junior analysts are walking past with their heads down, as if they could perceive that a serious conversation was happening in the room.
I cannot explain how I know without explaining everything I know, and I won’t explain everything I know in a room with a glass wall and three people who are also my colleagues and two of whom are also my employers.
"I have reason to believe the legal action has been formally withdrawn," I say.
Alex studies me. He has the evaluating quality of a man who has spent years learning the distance between what people say and what they mean, and he is currently closing that distance rapidly. "Reason to believe isn't documentation."
"I can get documentation."
"Then get it," he says.
I take out my phone under the table. One word. I send it to Nik without looking at his name on the screen.
Documentation.
The response arrives in four minutes. A forwarded email from his attorney's office, timestamped, formal letterhead, confirmation of withdrawal filed with the relevant court. I forward it to Alex without a covering note.
His phone buzzes. He reads it. He sets the phone face down on the table with the slow, deliberate placement of a man organizing his thoughts before he speaks.
"Two days ago," he says.
"Yes."
"The filing was active two days ago and is withdrawn now." He looks at me with steady attention, choosing his next words with the care they require. "That is not confidence-inspiring, Natasha."
"No," I agree. "It isn't."
Nobody fills the silence. Brandy closes his laptop. Victoria has not moved.
"We need to get ahead of the press cycle," Brandy says, eventually.
"I'll draft a statement. Something clean, factual, no elaboration.
" He stands, and Alex stands with him, and the two of them move toward the door with the efficient momentum of men who have identified the next solvable problem and are going to go solve it.
Victoria does not move.
The door closes. She waits until the footsteps have faded down the corridor. Then she stands and crosses to the door and closes the blinds on the glass wall, which she never usually does. She comes back to the table. She does not sit across from me. She sits beside me.
"How long has this been going on?" she asks.
I look at the cold coffee pot. "Since the auction in Chicago six weeks ago."
"You told me it was a one-night situation."
"It was. And then it wasn't."
"When did it become wasn't?"
"The gala," I say. "In Malibu. When I found out his name."
"You knew who he was at the gala."
"Yes."
"And yet you continued."
"Yes."
Victoria absorbs this with the expression she uses when she is separating the two versions of herself - the CEO and the best friend - into the distinct operating compartments they require. She is running both right now simultaneously and neither of them looks comfortable.
"I am going to say something to you as your CEO," she says, "and I need you to hear it without the filter you apply to things you find professionally inconvenient."
"Go ahead."
"You have been conducting a personal relationship with the man who had an active legal filing against this company," she says.
"While serving as our CFO. Whatever the timeline of withdrawal, whatever the development of your relationship with him, that is the structural fact of the situation and it is the fact that will matter to a board, to press, and to anyone assessing your position here. "
"I know," I say.
"The filing was two days ago, Tasha."
The use of my name in that register - not warm, not cold, simply factual - does what she intends it to do. I sit with it.
"You're going to ask me to step back from the rooms," I say.
"I'm telling you," she says gently, "that I cannot have you in those rooms until this is resolved. Not managed. Resolved. There is a difference and you know what it is." She looks at me for a long, steady moment.
"I am not firing you, or building a case against you. I am also not pretending this does not exist because you are my best friend and I love you." Her voice holds the tension of a woman carrying both things at once and refusing to drop either.
"You are the most brilliant financial mind I have access to and you are also a woman who has been making decisions adjacent to a serious conflict of interest. I need you to understand that both of those things are true simultaneously."
I nod because she’s right.
"Go home," she says, which is not something Victoria has said to me in nine years of shared professional history. "ou need to think, and you cannot think here."
I stand, and smooth my jacket. I pick up my notepad with the three numbers still written on it in my own handwriting from an hour ago that feels like a geological era.
"Victoria," I say, at the door.
She looks at me.
"I know," I say again, because there is nothing else available that is both true and useful.
My office is on the eleventh floor and has a view of the Chicago River that I have spent four years looking at without seeing it. I sit at my desk now and I look at it and I actually see it - the gunmetal water moving under the grey November sky, indifferent and continuous.
My phone is on the desk. Nik's name appears on the screen as it begins to ring. The call lasts four seconds before I press decline.
I touch my left knee. Not the injury. The place just below it, on the inside, where his mouth pressed when he was being careful because I told him I mattered to him and he agreed.
My hand finds it without instruction, the body's own filing system, and I remove my hand from my knee and I put it flat on the desk.
I don’t move for a long time.
At home that evening, I sit on the edge of the bathtub.
I slide down to the floor. The tiles are cold through my trousers.
Beethoven appears in the doorway with the authority of a creature who has been summoned by some frequency the rest of us cannot hear.
He walks across the bathroom and climbs into my lap, which he has done exactly once before in three years, and he stays there.
I stroke him. My hand moves back and forth without rhythm or intention — the mechanical comfort of doing something with my hands while my brain runs a calculation it would rather not complete.
Here is what I know about myself: I am not going to call Nik because I am lonely.
I have been lonely since I was seventeen years old and I have never once made a decision based on it.
I am not going to forgive him quickly because the alternative is an empty apartment and three cats and a gap in my schedule where something warm used to be.
I have lived in this apartment for four years and I chose every piece of furniture in it myself and it has always been sufficient and it will continue to be sufficient.
I am not my mother. My mother stayed in spaces that were not built for her and grew quiet inside them and spent her last twelve years humming Chopin under her breath because it was the only form of largeness she was still permitted.
She loved a man who had turned himself to stone and she loved him faithfully and the faithfulness hollowed her.
I’m not going to do that. I established this as policy at twenty-two years old and I have maintained it with the consistency of a structural principle.
But I’m also thirteen weeks pregnant. I’ve just been told I cannot sit in my own company's conference rooms until I resolve a situation that is not cleanly resolvable because it involves another human being who makes his own decisions and I cannot audit those decisions in advance.
And Victoria looked at me with both faces at once and said not managed, resolved, and I do not know what resolution looks like from here.
And I’ve always known what the next step was. This is the organizing principle of my adult life. The fifteen-minute blocks, the portioned meals, the forty-seven-tab binders. There is always a next step and it is always identifiable and it is always mine to execute.
Right now, I don’t know what the next step is.
Beethoven presses harder against my stomach. My hand keeps moving across his fur. Back and forth. The only thing in this bathroom currently operating on schedule.
I’ve always been alone, I tell myself. I’ve very good at it.
The statement lands differently tonight than it has on every previous night I have deployed it.
I sit on the bathroom floor until the tiles stop feeling cold, which takes longer than it should. Then I lift Beethoven off my lap with the care of a creature who showed up when he was needed and asked nothing in return. I get up. I turn off the bathroom light. I go to bed.
But I don’t sleep; I can’t.