Chapter 9
She almost called him the next morning.
That was the part she couldn't forgive herself for, standing at the kitchen counter with her phone in her hand and his name pulled up on the screen, thumb hovering over the call button for a full, humiliating thirty seconds before she set the phone down like it had burned her.
She'd told herself it was about the acquisition file — that she wanted to see his face when she told him what thirteen months of engineered proximity actually meant, wanted to watch the version of the story he'd built for himself come apart in real time. That was even partly true.
But underneath it was something smaller and more dangerous. She'd wanted to hear his voice again, unbothered by an audience, the way it had sounded backstage when he'd said you looked like yourself in there and then, remarkably, stopped talking.
That was the trick of it, she thought. Three months of flowers and cars and shell companies she could refuse in her sleep. One man saying a true thing and then not asking for anything, and she'd stood in a kitchen at seven in the morning with her thumb over a call button like a teenager.
She put the phone in a drawer. Then, feeling ridiculous, she took it out again, because she ran a business now and businesses require phones.
The soft launch had gone well enough to be dangerous.
Twenty-two people in a four-hundred-square-foot room on a Saturday morning in December — Joy Adeyemi at the front because she'd earned it, Beth and three of the Sunday Loop crowd, Naomi's Queens regulars filling out the back, everybody's coats in a pile because there was nowhere to put coats.
The sound system worked. The floor was perfect.
Naomi ran the second half and was, unmistakably, better at the front of a room than Elena was, which Elena had decided to find delightful rather than threatening.
Afterward Miguel had come by with a bottle of something cheap and sparkling and they'd drunk it out of paper cups on the new floor.
Nine days to the real opening. Twelve names committed to the January schedule out of the twenty-two she needed to make rent past March.
Twelve wasn't panic. Twelve was, if she was honest, roughly where a sensible person would expect to be. She'd been telling herself that for a week and mostly believing it.
Then Dana called.
"You're not going to like what I'm about to tell you," Dana said, no greeting, which was never a good sign.
"Tell me anyway."
"Priya from the board — you remember Priya, does the catering committee — she was at brunch with some of the Foundation crowd this morning, and apparently Sloane's been talking. At dinners. To people who know both of you."
Something in Elena went cold and still. "Talking about what."
"About you. About Julian. The general shape of it is that Sloane's been telling anyone who'll listen that Julian's a wreck, completely devastated, doing everything right, and that you're — and I'm quoting Priya's secondhand version here, so grain of salt — 'refusing to even let a genuinely remorseful man explain himself.
' Making him grovel for sport. Enjoying the power of it.
" Dana's voice had gone tight with fury on Elena's behalf.
"She's out there running a whole redemption narrative for him at dinner parties like she's got standing to have an opinion about your marriage at all. "
Elena stood very still in her kitchen, the phone hot against her ear, and something cracked open that she'd thought was already as broken as it could get.
"She has the nerve," Elena said slowly, "to sit at dinner parties and talk about my marriage. After thirteen months of engineering her way into it."
"I know."
"After everything she already took from me in high school, she's now taking the story too. Making me the villain in the version of events where she destroyed my life on purpose."
"I know, El. I'm sorry. I almost didn't tell you."
"No. You should have told me." Elena's hand had curled into a fist at her side without her noticing, and she made herself unclench it. "Is that all of it?"
There was a pause on the line that went on slightly too long.
"Dana."
"There's a version where she mentions the gym," Dana said.
Elena sat down on the stiff couch.
"Mentions it how?"
"Not cruelly. That's what makes it so —" Dana made a sound of pure disgust. "Apparently it's very warm. 'Elena's got her little studio downtown, good for her, honestly it's probably the healthiest thing for her right now.' That kind of thing. Concerned. Generous."
"Little studio."
"El—"
"She said little studio." Elena's own voice went somewhere flat and unfamiliar. "To a room full of people with money, three weeks before I open."
"You don't know that anybody—"
"Renata Voss pulled out on Thursday," Elena said.
Silence on the line.
"She said her schedule changed. And I believed her, because people's schedules change, and because I have been going around for two months assuming the best of everyone as a kind of personality.
" Elena pressed her fingers against her closed eyes.
"She trained with me for two years. She cried at my wedding. "
"That could be nothing."
"It could be. That's the whole problem." Elena laughed, and there was nothing good in it.
"I'll never know. That's what she's actually doing, Dana.
She's not telling people I'm a monster. She's being kind about me in rooms I'm not in, and now I get to spend the rest of my life not knowing which no was hers. "
She called Priti within the hour and tightened everything.
"I want it in writing," Elena said. "No more informal contact, not even through Theo, not even a message passed along by a mutual friend at a gala.
If he wants to communicate anything to me, it goes through you, on the record, and nothing verbal gets relayed secondhand through people I don't control. "
"You're allowed to do that," Priti said.
"For what it's worth, I don't think Julian's the one spreading this.
It doesn't fit anything I've seen from his side of the file the past three months.
But that's exactly why you're allowed to be furious about it — he let his own affair partner run loose in your social circle telling people you're the problem, and whether or not he's actively encouraging it, he hasn't stopped it either. "
"That's the part I keep landing on," Elena said. "He didn't do it. But he also didn't fix it. And I am so tired of being the only person in this whole situation who has to notice things and then also fix them."
She hung up, and then, because she was already angry and it was already ruined, she did the thing she'd promised herself she wouldn't.
She cancelled the follow-up call.
It had been on the calendar for eleven days — a scheduled, lawyer-brokered, forty-minute conversation about the Foundation's spring cycle and nothing else, the single narrow channel she'd agreed to keep open after the Winter Benefit, and she had spent a week telling herself it was purely administrative and had also, twice, thought about what she would wear for a phone call.
She wrote to Priti: Cancel Thursday. Foundation business can go through the board secretary.
Priti wrote back: Confirmed. Do you want a reason given?
No.
She sat with the phone in her lap afterward and understood that she had just punished a man for something another woman had done at a dinner party, and that she was going to do it anyway, because the alternative was walking into Thursday soft.
She spent the rest of the afternoon at the studio, running drills alongside Naomi's evening class just to feel her body do something hard and physical and simple — no phone, no lawyer, no thirteen-month conspiracy, just her breath and the burn in her legs and the uncomplicated ache of pushing herself past where she wanted to stop.
Naomi found her afterward sitting on the floor against the mirror, forearms on her knees, still breathing hard.
"You want to tell me why you did four rounds of something I programmed for eight-minute intervals in about five?"
"Not really."
"Okay." Naomi sat down next to her, which Elena hadn't expected.
"I'm going to say one thing and then I'll drop it.
You hired me on four months of money with your name on the lease and nobody else's.
You told me straight out you might not be able to pay me in April.
Nobody does that. Everybody in this industry lies about money, and you sat on this floor and told me the truth about it in your first ten minutes. "
"Naomi—"
"So whatever happened today," Naomi said, getting up, "whoever's telling whatever story about you out there — I want you to know that I signed up on the basis of about ninety seconds of evidence, and it's held for two months, and I'm not the one you have to prove anything to.
" She held out a hand and hauled Elena up off the floor.
"Twelve names is fine, by the way. I know you're counting. "
"How did you—"
"You've written the number on the pad four times this week. You cross it out and write the same number."
Elena laughed, which hurt her ribs.
At eleven that night she wrote him an email.
It went on for nine paragraphs. It started reasonably and stopped being reasonable somewhere around the third, and by the sixth it was asking him whether he had any idea what it was like to hear your own life described back to you at a brunch you weren't invited to, and by the eighth it had stopped being about Sloane at all and had become a very precise inventory of every time in six years he had let something slide because handling it would have been unpleasant.
It was, she thought, reading it back, entirely accurate.
She sat looking at the send button for a long time.
Then she copied the whole thing into a note on her phone, deleted the draft, and went and washed her face.