Chapter 7 #2
"Feel sorry for her." Dana's voice came through hard and immediate.
"I know you. You're about four minutes from finding it tragic.
Don't. She's not a sad woman with a wound.
She's a grown adult who made a project out of another woman's marriage, and the fact that she wasted her own life doing it is not your problem to hold. "
Elena laughed, once, without much in it. "There she is."
"I have been waiting eight weeks to be useful."
They stayed on the phone a while without saying much. At some point Dana said, carefully, "You know this doesn't get him off."
"I know."
"Because I can hear you doing the math."
"I'm not doing the math." Elena stood, knees stiff, and looked down at the timeline.
"He said yes, Dana. Every single time. Fourteen months of yes, and none of it was under a spell.
She built the room. He walked into it, and then he kept walking into it, and then he came home and asked me how my day was. "
"Okay," Dana said. "Good. I just needed to hear you say it out loud."
"He doesn't get to be a victim of this."
"No."
"But he wasn't the architect of it either." Elena heard herself say it and disliked how much it cost her to be fair. "And I hate that, because it was so much simpler nine hours ago."
She called her mother at seven the next morning, which was four in the morning in Arizona, and her mother picked up on the second ring, as she had every single time Elena had ever called at a strange hour in her entire life.
"I'm fine," Elena said first, because that was the rule.
"You're not, or you'd have called at a normal time." Bedsheets, a lamp switch. "Go on."
So Elena told her. Not the sanitized version she'd been handing out for two months — the whole thing, the phone on the counter, the elevator, the beige apartment, the studio, the retention schedule, the thirteen months.
And the name.
Her mother was quiet for a long moment.
"Sloane Argent," she said.
"You remember her."
"Elena." Her mother's voice did something Elena had not heard in probably twenty years. "I picked you up from that school for three years."
"Mom—"
"I remember the fall you stopped eating lunch.
" Flat, precise, a woman reading from a page she'd kept.
"You told me you had a study period. I called the office in November and found out you didn't have a study period.
And then I hung up the phone and I didn't do anything about it, because you'd have been humiliated if I had, and I have thought about that phone call once a month for seventeen years. "
Elena sat down on the stiff couch.
"I didn't know you knew."
"I knew. I just didn't know what to do that wouldn't make it worse, so I made you a big breakfast every morning for two years instead and hoped it would carry you to three o'clock.
" A breath. "That's the whole of my parenting on the subject and I'd like it on the record that I know it wasn't enough. "
"It carried me to three o'clock," Elena said, and her voice went.
They sat with that a while, four states apart.
"Now you listen to me," her mother said eventually.
"Because I have exactly one useful thing and then I'll go back to being useless.
That woman has organized her entire life around you.
Do you understand what I'm telling you? You went and got a marriage and a business and a whole life, and she spent thirteen months of hers building a pretext to get near you.
She's been in the room with you the entire time and you weren't even in the building. "
"That's not comforting."
"It isn't meant to be comforting, it's meant to be accurate," her mother said. "Don't you dare give her another seventeen. Do whatever you need to do, say whatever you need to say, and then close the door and go run your gym."
Elena laughed, wetly. "Dana said almost exactly the same thing."
"Then Dana's right and you should have called me sooner." A pause, and then, gentler: "And the other one? Julian?"
"I don't know yet."
"Good," her mother said. "The ones who know at two months are the ones who get it wrong. Eat something. I love you. Go to bed."
She slept four hours and went back to Priti's office at nine.
"I want copies of everything," Elena said, still in her coat. "The trust and the retention file. And I want to know what she's exposed to."
Priti sat back. "Legally? Very little. It's ugly, it's not criminal. Her firm might care about the referral route. Her partners might care very much, actually, depending on what she told them about how she landed the account."
"I'm not trying to ruin her."
"Aren't you?"
Elena thought about it honestly, which took a few seconds.
"No," she said, and was mildly surprised that it was true. "If I take her firm apart I'll spend a year thinking about her. I've already given that woman three years of high school and two years of my marriage, and I'm not giving her a year of my thirties on top of it."
"Then what do you want?"
Elena looked out the window at the gray December morning, at a city full of people going to work.
"I want to sit across from her once," she said.
"Not to scream. Not to make a scene where she gets to tell everyone how unhinged I was.
Once, calmly, with all of it on the table, so that she knows I know — every piece of it, the referral, the thirteen months, all of it — and so she has to sit there while somebody says it out loud to her face.
" She turned back. "And then I want to walk out before she answers, and never think about her again. "
Priti was quiet for a second. Then she pulled a legal pad toward her and uncapped a pen.
"Okay," she said. "Then let's make sure the room is yours."