Chapter 6 #2
"I knew she would." Julian rubbed his eyes, tired in a way the hour didn't account for. "I did it anyway."
"Why?"
It was a fair question, and Julian didn't have a fast answer for it, which was new — he'd spent his whole career having fast answers for everything, that was half the job, and here he was sitting in his own office at nine at night without one.
"Because doing something felt better than doing nothing," he said eventually.
"Even if the something was wrong. Even if I knew it would get thrown back at me the second she found it.
I couldn't just — sit here. Knowing what I did to her, and not trying anything. "
"That's not actually a reason. That's just you needing to feel like you're not helpless."
"Maybe."
"You are helpless, though. That's the part you haven't figured out yet.
" Theo said it gently, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd been cruel about it.
"There's no lever here, Julian. You've spent your whole life finding the lever — the number that fixes the deal, the favor that fixes the relationship, the check that fixes the mess.
There isn't one this time. You broke something you can't buy back, and the only thing that's ever going to work is time, and staying still, and being exactly the same decent person for exactly as long as it takes whether she's watching or not. "
Julian didn't say anything for a while. Outside his window the city carried on the way it always did, indifferent to the quiet devastation happening on the forty-first floor.
"I don't know how to be a person nobody's watching," he said finally, quiet, almost too quiet for Theo to catch. "I've spent twenty years building a version of myself for rooms. I don't actually know what's left if I take the audience away."
Theo didn't have an answer for that one either, and to his credit, he didn't pretend to. He just sat with him a while longer, the deal memo forgotten between them, two men in an empty office at nine-thirty at night, and let the silence be honest instead of useful.
Julian's attorney had been circling it for a week. He brought it up again at ten-forty that night on the phone, in the reasonable voice men use when they're proposing something ugly.
"The trust is your strongest position," Ledger said.
"It's already funded, it's already irrevocable, and right now she doesn't know it exists.
That's an enormous amount of goodwill sitting in a drawer.
If we disclose it inside a package — mutual confidentiality, a reasonable non-disparagement clause, nothing aggressive — you'd be surprised what comes back. "
"No."
"Julian. I'm not suggesting we hold it hostage. I'm suggesting we time it. There's a version of this where that document does an enormous amount of work for you."
"That's exactly what I'm saying no to."
A pause on the line. "May I ask why?"
Julian stood in the kitchen with the light on, the one he'd left on every night for six years and had never explained to her, because the truth was that it was from the year after his father died and he had not been able to walk into a dark room, and she had never asked, and he had never offered, and somewhere in there was the whole marriage in miniature.
"Because if I use it, it becomes a payment," he said.
"And I'm not paying her. I'm not settling.
There's no number that makes it even, and the second I attach one condition to it I've turned the only clean thing I've done in fourteen months into another negotiation.
" He heard his own voice and didn't recognize the flatness in it.
"Send it to her counsel. Unconditional. No clauses, no confidentiality, nothing attached. Tomorrow."
"She may simply take it and proceed exactly as she was."
"Yes."
"You understand you'll get nothing for it."
"I understand that's what makes it worth doing," Julian said, and hung up before Ledger could talk him into being sensible.
He stood in the kitchen a while longer. Then he sat down at the counter, in the light, in an apartment that was far too large for one person, and for the first time since this had all started he let himself simply feel the size of what he'd lost without immediately trying to buy his way out of feeling it.
Nobody saw him do it. That was, in its own way, the whole point.
Elena didn't know any of that. She only knew, standing in her nearly finished studio ten days before the soft launch, that the flowers had stopped, the cars had stopped, the anonymous payments had stopped, and that a strange, wary quiet had settled over the space where Julian used to be constantly, loudly, expensively trying.
She didn't trust the quiet. She'd learned enough in six weeks not to mistake absence for change. Priti had told her to brace for something bigger and louder, and Elena had braced, and what had come instead was nothing at all, and she had no framework for that.
"It's a tactic," she told Dana on the phone that night, hanging the last mirror one-handed.
"Maybe."
"It's absolutely a tactic."
"Okay," Dana said, in the voice she used when she was declining to argue with something she'd be proven right about later.
Elena set the level against the mirror, adjusted it a quarter inch, and stepped back to look at a room that was, finally, almost entirely her own.
Her phone lit up on the floor by the outlet. Priti, at nine-forty at night, which Priti never did.
Something came in from his side today. It's not what either of us expected. Don't read anything into it until I've had it looked at — I want it in front of two other people before it goes in front of you.
Elena stood alone in the bright, cold, finished room and read it three times.
Should I be worried? she typed.
No, Priti wrote back. That's what's bothering me.