8. Vanessa, Up Close
Eight
Vanessa, Up Close
The Whitfield deal required proximity. That was the plain business fact of it, the one I kept repeating to myself like a man reciting terms of a contract he was no longer sure he’d read closely enough before signing.
Vanessa ran strategic partnerships. I ran the fund acquiring her family’s company. For six weeks, that meant meetings — long ones, the kind that stretched past dinner, that required follow-up calls and revised term sheets and, twice now, a late flight to Boston to meet with Whitfield’s board.
“You don’t have to come to these,” Daniel told me, more than once. “I can run point on Whitfield. You’ve got forty other things that need you more.”
“I built this deal,” I said. “I’m seeing it through.”
He didn’t argue, but I saw the look he gave me — the one that said he understood exactly what I wasn’t saying, and had decided, for now, to let me lie to both of us in peace.
The truth was I didn’t fully understand why I kept scheduling myself into rooms with Vanessa Whitfield. I told myself it was diligence. Sometimes, in the honest hours, I let myself consider that it might be something closer to picking at a wound to see if it still hurt.
It did. Just not in the way I expected.
“You’ve gotten quieter,” Vanessa said, on the Boston flight, in the seat beside me because the airline had put us there and neither of us had thought to ask for a change. “You used to talk more. God, you used to talk constantly. I remember thinking I’d never get a word in for the rest of my life.”
“I run a company now. Not much room for constant talking.”
“You ran a company at twenty-eight too. You just cared about different things then.”
I didn’t have a response to that, so I looked out the window instead, at the gray stretch of clouds below us, and let the silence sit there until she filled it with something easier.
She told me about her twenties — the years after she’d broken our engagement, the ones I’d spent building Cole Capital out of stubbornness and something that might have been grief dressed up as ambition.
She’d moved to London for a while. Worked for a hospitality group there, then came home when her father’s health started declining, took over more of the family business than she’d ever wanted.
“I used to think about calling you,” she said, somewhere over Connecticut. “After I left. I’d have these moments — bad days, mostly — where I’d think, Sebastian would understand this. And then I’d remember I gave that up. On purpose. For reasons that made sense at the time.”
“Did they? Still make sense?”
She was quiet for a moment. “Some of them. Not all of them.”
I didn’t ask which ones didn’t. I told myself it was because it wasn’t relevant to the deal.
That wasn’t entirely true, and some part of me knew it even then.
It was the ease that unsettled me most. Not attraction, exactly — or not only that, though I won’t pretend there wasn’t some old, familiar current running underneath every conversation, the particular gravity of a person who’d known you before you became who you currently were.
It was the ease of not having to explain anything.
Vanessa had known me at twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven — before Cole Capital was anything but a business plan and a stubborn refusal to fail.
She remembered the version of me that existed before every year added another layer of armor.
Around Claire, lately, I’d felt the weight of nine years of accumulated responsibility, of being the person who held everything up.
Around Vanessa, for a few dangerous hours at a time, I felt twenty-six again — before the weight, before the company, before I’d learned to measure every decision by its cost.
I told myself these were two separate things, unconnected, one about a deal and one about a marriage. I’d find out later how wrong that was.
Over the six weeks the deal ran, it kept happening.
A dinner after a late negotiation session that stretched two hours longer than it needed to.
A phone call about term sheets that drifted, near the end, into something more personal.
A moment in a Boston hotel bar where she’d laughed at something I said and I’d felt, for one unguarded second, entirely unburdened — and then immediately, sickly guilty for feeling it.
“You’re staring,” Vanessa said, near the end of one of those weeks, amused, as our flight began its descent.
“Sorry. Long week.”
“You always say that.” She smiled, and there was something knowing in it, something that had always been able to see past whatever I was pretending. “You used to tell me everything, Sebastian. Now you tell me it’s been a long week.”
I didn’t answer. I looked back out the window, at the city coming up gray and glittering beneath the clouds, and I thought, not for the first time that week, about Claire’s voice in our kitchen — okay — steady and terrible and nothing at all like the ease sitting beside me now.
I told myself the two things weren’t connected.
I was wrong about that, though it would take me several more weeks to understand exactly how.