9. Joss
JOSS
Then I shifted my hips and felt the soreness, and I remembered all of it at once.
I lay very still under my sheet with the June morning already pushing pale light through the blinds.
The ceiling fan rotated above me. The city outside my window was doing its slow Thursday wake-up—a distant garbage truck, a car horn, the muted hum of traffic on the avenue two blocks over.
Everything sounded the same as it had on every other Thursday morning of my life, but nothing about me felt the same.
I’d ridden home in his car service. He’d insisted.
He called the driver before I’d finished pulling my tank top back on, and the car had been at the curb of the Myrror building by the time we made it down to the lobby.
Sutton walked me out with one hand at my back and told me twice he’d text me later that day before he closed the car door.
The driver hadn’t said a word the whole ride. He kept his eyes on the road, took the route to Pixel Lofts without me telling him my address, and when I reached for my wallet at the curb, he said, “Mr. Randall takes care of it” in a tone that ended the conversation.
I rolled onto my side and pressed my face into my pillow.
I had nine hours of work in front of me.
I had eleven hundred unread messages. I had an engineering follow-up on Outfit Builder I’d promised Sutton I’d close out by end of week.
And I was now going to have to walk into a building I had a different set of memories about than I’d had twenty-four hours ago.
I made myself sit up.
I’d dressed for work the way I dressed every weekday—a blouse that didn’t need ironing, a pencil skirt, low heels—but the choices felt different this morning.
I picked the blouse with the higher neckline.
I left the silver chain at home. I pulled my hair back into the same low knot I’d worn on the morning of the meeting last Friday, because the version of me that had walked into that conference room last week had felt like the version of me I needed to be again.
By 8:05, I was at my desk.
By 8:30, I’d answered four emails, none of which I could remember the contents of after I hit send.
By 9:15, I’d given up pretending. I sat with my hands flat on either side of my keyboard and let the screen blur in front of me, and I let myself think about him—just for sixty seconds, like a small allowance I’d granted myself. Then I made myself look back at my screen and try again.
The pod was quieter than usual. Or it sounded quieter. I wasn’t sure which.
Sutton was somewhere in this building. I knew he was, because his calendar had been visible on the Myrror internal directory when I’d checked it at 7:45 that morning from my apartment, telling myself I was looking for completely innocent professional reasons.
He had a board meeting at ten. He had a one-on-one with the head of engineering at 11:30. He had lunch blocked out, recipient unspecified. He had three back-to-back partner calls in the afternoon.
He was not coming to my desk today. I could tell that from his calendar alone.
He was being careful.
I understood why he was being careful. I’d just spent forty minutes choosing a blouse with a higher neckline, after all.
I made it through the morning. I closed two tickets.
I wrote a message to the head of engineering about the Outfit Builder estimate and rewrote it three times before sending.
I went to a stand-up meeting at ten and contributed nothing.
I came back to my desk at 10:15, sat down, and was halfway through opening my email when my phone buzzed on the desk.
A message. It was from Mira.
Stop by my office when you have a minute.
The same exact phrasing Sutton had used on Monday, which was either a coincidence or the standard managerial language of every senior leader at every tech company in America. It didn’t matter because the result was the same. I had been summoned.
I stood and crossed the floor to her office. The door was open. She was at her desk with her glasses on her face for once, two monitors going, her hands moving fast across her keyboard. She finished what she was typing before she looked up.
“Close the door.”
I closed the door and sat in the chair across from her desk without being asked. My notebook was in my lap. My hands were flat on the cover of it.
She pushed her glasses on top of her head and looked at me for a long second before she said anything. Then she said the last thing I’d expected her to say.
“How was the partner reception?”
“Fine,” I said.
“You did well, from what I heard.”
“Thank you.”
“You worked the room. The head of marketing said you held your own with three of our newer accounts. That was good to hear.”
“Thank you,” I said again. I sounded like a wind-up doll. I could feel my pulse in my hands.
Mira leaned back in her chair. She crossed her arms.
“Joss.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to think about your answer before you give it. Take your time.”
“Sure.”
“Are you doing okay?”
I didn’t answer.
That was, in itself, the answer. I knew it. She knew it. The two of us sat there with the question between us and the silence stretching, and I made myself look her in the face because if I looked away I was going to start crying. I had not given myself permission to cry in this building.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.”
“Try again.”
I closed my eyes for one second. I opened them.
“I don’t know,” I said.
It came out smaller than I’d meant it to. The truth, when I finally said it, sounded like a child’s voice in my own mouth.
Mira nodded once. “I’m not going to ask you what’s going on because I don’t need to ask. And because if I asked, I’d be putting you in a position I don’t want to put you in. So I’m not going to do that.”
“Okay.”
“What I am going to do is tell you a couple of things.”
She uncrossed her arms. She clasped her hands on the desk between us. Her wedding ring caught the morning light coming through her window.
“I was twenty-five when I started at the first real company I worked for,” she said.
“Not here. Years ago. And there was a man there—not the CEO, but senior to me. Way senior. And I was good at my job, and he noticed, and he made it very clear over a period of about six months that he noticed for more reasons than my work.”
I didn’t move.
“Nothing happened,” she said. “Nothing happened because I was lucky, and because I had a mother who’d told me what to look for, and because the man in question made a clumsy enough move that I could see it coming and step out of the way. But the thing I want to tell you is what happened after.”
“What happened after?”
“After, I spent the next four years at that company knowing that every other senior man in that building had heard about it. From him. From whoever he’d told.
And the version they’d heard was not the version that was true.
So when I got promoted, people wondered.
When I got a good review, people wondered.
When I closed a deal, people wondered. My work was no longer just my work.
It was my work plus a question mark, and the question mark had been put there by a man who hadn’t even succeeded in doing anything to me. He’d just talked like he had.”
She let the silence drag between us. I sat with my notebook in my lap and my heart in my fingertips and I felt the words land one at a time.
“I’m not telling you this,” Mira said, “because I think what’s happening here is the same thing.
I don’t. I’ve been in rooms with both of you, and I have eyes, and what I’m watching is not that.
What I’m watching is something else. But the something else has the same problem, Joss.
It has the exact same problem. Because when people start to notice—and they’re noticing—the version of the story that gets told isn’t going to be the true version.
It’s going to be the easy version. And the easy version is always the same one when the woman is twenty-three and the man owns the company. ”
“I know,” I said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you also know that you’ve worked harder than most of the men on this floor to be in the room you were in last Friday.
You came in here on day one and you outworked your entire onboarding cohort, and I told the head of engineering after that meeting last Friday that I wanted you on the executive track.
That conversation happened, Joss, that conversation actually happened.
And now I’m sitting here trying to figure out whether the conversation I had with Sutton on Monday is going to be the last conversation I get to have about you that’s only about you. ”
I felt tears well in my eyes. I made myself blink them back.
“I’m not your mother. I’m not your friend. I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m not going to call HR. I’m not going to call him. I’m telling you what I know because somebody told me when I was twenty-five, and I’m paying it forward, and you can do with it whatever you want.”
“I understand.”
She held my gaze. “I’ll tell you one more thing, and then I’ll let you go.”
I nodded.
“He’s not paying for this, Joss. You are. And I think you already know that, but I want to say it out loud so you can’t unhear it. Decide if you can afford it.”
The room got very quiet.
Mira looked at me one more second. Then she put her glasses back on and turned to her monitors, and the meeting was over.
I stood up. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“For all of it.”
She didn’t look up from her monitor. She nodded once. I walked out of her office and closed the door behind me, and I crossed the floor back to my desk on legs that didn’t feel entirely connected to the rest of me.
The afternoon was a fog.
I got through it the same way I’d gotten through Tuesday morning—by typing things I had no recollection of typing.
I closed a ticket. I attended a meeting in which I said one sentence I couldn’t reconstruct an hour later.
I sent the Outfit Builder follow-up to the head of engineering.
I drank water and I drank coffee and I did not eat lunch.
At 3:45, I saw him.
He was in the large conference room on the far side of the floor, standing at the head of a table with about a dozen people in chairs around him. His suit was on. His sleeves were down. He was talking, and the room was listening, and his face had the same composed neutrality expected of a CEO.
He looked exactly the way he’d looked on Monday morning when I’d seen him through the same glass walls.
He looked exactly the way he’d looked in every all-hands video I’d ever sat through, every press photo I’d ever scrolled past, every glimpse I’d ever caught of him crossing the lobby in the fourteen months before last Friday—when he had been a name on my offer letter and a face on a screen and nothing else.
He looked completely fine.
I stood at my desk with my hand on the back of my chair and I watched him for maybe five seconds.
He didn’t look up. He didn’t turn his head.
He didn’t know I was watching him, because the meeting had his full attention, and the meeting was getting from him the same Sutton Randall the meeting had always gotten—composed, certain, in command of a room of senior people who were taking notes on whatever he was saying.
He’d been inside me less than twenty-four hours ago. And he looked fine.
I sat down. I worked. Or I pretended to work.
I made it to 5:30. I made it to six. At 6:15, I logged off, picked up my bag, walked out of the building, and didn’t look back at the glass-walled conference room on the way out.
I made it out the front doors of the Myrror building and onto the sidewalk before I let myself breathe properly.
The ride home was thirteen minutes. The car was a rideshare this time, because I didn’t have a CEO calling a private driver for me on a Thursday evening at 6:15.
I sat in the back seat with my forehead against the warm window and watched the city go by and felt Mira’s words repeating behind my eyes.
He’s not paying for this. You are. Decide if you can afford it.
The apartment was empty when I got home. Hadley’s note from the night before was still on the counter. Staying at Beckett’s. Eat something. I read it again. I still didn’t eat anything.
I sat on the couch in the living room with my phone in my hand and the June dusk coming through the windows, and I stared at our text thread. He hadn’t texted all day. Neither had I. Both of us had been careful, and both of us had known we were being careful.
I scrolled up to his last message.
I’m at the front entrance.
I scrolled down to my last message.
I’m on my way.
I sat with the phone in my hand for what was probably an hour.
The sky outside my window went from blue to gold to pink to dark.
I didn’t turn on a light. I didn’t text him.
I didn’t call him. I sat in the dusk with Mira’s sentence sitting in my chest and the smell of warm city night coming through the open window, and I knew what I was going to do.
I was going to tell him in the morning.
I was going to walk into his office on Friday—one week to the day from the meeting where I’d first met him—and I was going to say the thing I had to say to him, and I was going to let him answer it however he was going to answer it.
We’d figure out what came next together. Or apart. I didn’t know which yet.
I set the phone down on the coffee table, face up.
Then I sat on the couch in the dark for a long time and let myself feel everything I’d been refusing to feel since that morning. I didn’t cry, and I didn’t text him, and I didn’t move from the couch until the city outside my window was fully dark.