Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
Natasha
The whiteboard beside my desk has been updated.
Every fifteen-minute block accounted for, Monday through Sunday, color-coded by category.
The lunch containers are back in their labeled stack in the refrigerator.
Chicken and rice at twelve-thirty, same measured portions, same temperature, same containers.
The evening meal at seven. The ginger tea at five-fifty.
The prenatal vitamins at breakfast, the iron supplement at dinner, both logged in a tracking spreadsheet I built on a Wednesday night when I needed something to build.
Everything is running at optimal calibration.
The dance studio booking was cancelled three weeks ago. The cancellation confirmation is in a folder I have not opened since I moved it there.
Nik's risotto is still in my freezer. Second shelf, behind the backup chicken. I have not thrown it out. I have also not touched it. It exists in a category I have decided not to make a decision about yet, which is its own category of decision and I am aware of this.
I know he sits in the café every morning.
Victoria told me on a Tuesday, in the corridor outside the ninth-floor conference room, in the tone she uses when she is delivering information she has assessed as necessary. "He is at the café on Wabash every morning from seven to nine. He has been there for two weeks. I thought you should know."
I haven’t gone to the café.
I sit in Dr. Markov’s examination chair at twelve weeks and four days and she runs through the standard check with the brisk, warm efficiency I have come to rely on precisely because it does not require me to feel things on a schedule.
Then she looks at the chart. Then she looks at me.
"You've lost two pounds since last visit," she says.
"I've been eating consistently," I say.
"I didn't ask about consistency," she says, with the directness I appreciate because it mirrors my own and therefore cannot be deflected using my standard techniques. "The baby is measuring normally. Everything presents well. You, however, are not fine."
"I am functioning at a high level."
"That's a different metric than fine," she says, simply "Whatever you are doing with your stress, find a different place to put it. The baby doesn't have the option of redistributing the load."
I look at my hands in my lap. My cuticles are raw on the left hand. I did not notice until this moment.
"Understood," I say.
"Natasha." Her voice shifts by a small, deliberate degree. "You can be extremely competent and still need something. Those two things are not in competition."
I nod. After thanking her, I leave.
Victoria arrives at my apartment on Sunday at ten AM with decaf in a thermos and the expression she wears when she has made a decision and is here to execute it rather than negotiate about it.
She is visibly pregnant now and has stopped trying to conceal, the navy dress doing nothing to disguise the clean, confident curve of her.
She looks radiant in the way of a woman who has decided that this fact about her body is not going to be managed.
I let her in.
She sits on the couch. She pours decaf into the thermos lid and hands it to me. She looks around my apartment.
The piano lid is closed. I register her noticing it.
"You have to stop," she says.
"I'm functioning perfectly."
"You're performing," she says, and sets her thermos down. "Brilliantly, as always. The schedule is back on the whiteboard. I know this because you look like yourself again, which is what you look like when you are running very hard in a very small circle."
"I did this. After Crawford died,” she continues, “After the merger, after I understood what Crawford had been.
I rebuilt every system and called it recovery.
But I was in denial, thinking I had processed something I had not remotely processed.
" Her voice is level and factual, not gentle. "I recognize every move."
"I'm protecting myself," I say.
"You're punishing yourself," she says. "There is a difference."
"I disagree."
"I know you do. From where you are standing, they look identical. That's the problem." She meets my gaze. "You are over thirteen weeks pregnant. You told me you cancelled the dance studio. The risotto is still in your freezer because throwing it out would require admitting it meant something."
"I know you, Tasha." She says it without triumph.
I stand up. I go to the open-plan kitchen because the kitchen gives me something to do with my hands. I put the kettle on. I take out cups. I arrange them with more attention than the task requires.
"He built a machine," I say, from the kitchen, with my back to her.
"A comprehensive, funded, three-year-old machine designed to dismantle this company.
He held one component in reserve in case I turned out to be insufficient reason to stop.
" The kettle runs. I pour water I do not want into cups I do not need.
"I was a contingency. Not the reason. A contingency. A hedge against his own feelings."
Victoria is quiet for a moment.
"The filing was cowardice," she says finally. "Not strategy."
"In this company," I say, turning around, "there is no difference."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she does something I have seen her do exactly twice in nine years: she slides off the couch and sits on my floor. Not dramatically. Simply as though this conversation requires a different posture and she is choosing it without apology.
She sits cross-legged on my apartment floor with her decaf thermos and her visibly pregnant self and her expression that has given up the CEO register entirely and is running only the best-friend one.
This is significant. Victoria Sterling-Thompson does not sit on floors.
"You know what Crawford taught us," she says, looking up at me from the floor.
"Both of us, in different rooms and different years using the same curriculum.
He taught us that love is leverage. That tenderness is a position someone takes rather than a feeling someone has.
That if you look for the angle long enough you will always find one.
" She inclines her head, talking from experience.
"You are looking at a man sitting in a café every morning for two weeks and seeing a tactic. A maneuver. Positioning."
"What if it is?"
"Then it's a remarkably inefficient one," she says, "for a man who built a four-billion-dollar company on operational efficiency.
He is sitting in a café in November doing nothing because he understands, apparently better than you are currently willing to credit him, that doing nothing is the only proof that has any value.
" She tilts her head slightly. "What if it isn't a tactic? "
"I cannot afford to assume it isn't," I insist.
"That's Crawford talking," she says, without heat or accusation, simply as identification.
"That sentence. The risk calculus applied to the question of whether someone means what they show.
Crawford built that instinct into both of us because a woman who cannot be reached cannot be leveraged, and he preferred the people around him unreachable.
" She adjusts slightly for the pregnancy.
"You are doing his work for him, Tasha. From inside your own chest."
I look at the cups on the counter.
"What if it is a tactic," I say again, quietly, because the question requires repeating until I find the answer that does not terrify me, "and I open the door and I find out it was, and I am over thirteen weeks pregnant and I have already lost standing in my own conference rooms and I have nothing left to absorb another hit with. "
Victoria says nothing for a moment.
"Then you would survive it," she says. "You have survived everything.
Every piece of the life you were handed - the knee, your father, your mother, Crawford's overbearing influence of calling your wounds credentials.
You have survived all of it with your spine straight and your mind intact and your cats inexplicably devoted to you despite your insistence that feeding them is organizational rather than emotional. " She pauses.
"But Tasha." Her voice drops into the register she reserves for things she needs me to actually hear.
"Surviving is not the same as living. I almost chose surviving over my relationship with Alex.
I had a very airtight case for it. The risk assessment was thorough.
The conclusion was correct by every metric I trusted. " She looks at me steadily.
"I would have regretted it every day for the rest of my life and I would never have admitted that. I would have been excellent at my job and very alone and I would have told myself that was fine."
The apartment is very quiet.
“This isn’t the same thing.” My voice is quiet. “It’s not.”
"No," she agrees. "It never is. It is always its own version, with its own history and its own complications. That is not a reason. That is a description."
She does not push further. We drink the decaf and we talk about other things - the baby, her plan for a slow return after the birth, a label situation Brandy has been handling that developed a subplot nobody anticipated. When she leaves she squeezes my hand twice. I squeeze back. The door closes.
I go to the piano.
I sit on the bench and I lift the lid and I look at the keys in the afternoon light. White and black in their precise, repeating order, every note in its correct position, available, waiting.
I put my hands on the keys, but I don’t play.
My fingers rest against the ivory, feeling the cool smoothness of it, the faint give of the keys under the weight of my hands without enough pressure to produce sound.
The Chopin is there in my muscle memory, the opening phrase of the nocturne sitting in my hands like a sentence waiting to be spoken.