10. Sutton
SUTTON
The board prep was open on my second monitor.
The licensing review was open on my first. My assistant had sent me three follow-up notes from yesterday afternoon’s partner calls, and I’d opened each of them, read the first sentence, and not retained the second.
The coffee on my desk had gone cold an hour ago.
I’d been holding it together all week.
I knew I had. I’d been watching myself do it from a slight distance for six days now—the meetings, the calls, the decisions, the small managerial noises a CEO makes when he’s running a company.
I’d made all the noises. I’d run the company.
I’d closed two deals on Tuesday and approved a hiring plan on Wednesday and given a board chair forty-five minutes of my undivided attention yesterday afternoon while the woman who’d rocked my world was sitting at her desk like everything was normal.
And nobody had noticed.
Nobody had noticed that the man at the head of the table this week was not the same man who’d been at the head of the table last week.
I’d been giving the company exactly what it expected from me, in the exact tone it expected to receive it in, and the company had taken what I gave it and gone about its business.
The only person who’d noticed was Beckett.
He’d called me Tuesday afternoon and asked what I’d done after the dinner Monday night. I’d told him. He’d asked what I was planning to do about it. I’d told him I didn’t know.
He’d been quiet for a long second, and then he’d said, “Welcome to the club” in a tone of voice I’d been giving him grief about.
I’d been giving him grief because just weeks ago, Beckett had bought a building.
He’d bought Pixel Lofts on a gut feeling.
That was the whole reason. He’d been telling me for years that he remembered what it had felt like to be a broke twenty-three-year-old, and one afternoon in the spring, he’d called me from his car to tell me he was buying a mid-rise condo building.
Young professionals in this city deserved better than what he’d had, he’d said.
I’d told him on the phone it was the dumbest business decision he’d ever made. He’d taken the comment with the unbothered cheer of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and didn’t need me to understand it.
Then he met Hadley. She’d been running leasing at the building for a year before he bought it—came with the property, the way good people sometimes do.
Beckett told me later he’d known the second he saw her.
He’d gone in to walk the units with his inspector and she’d been in the leasing office with her hair in a braid and a stack of renewal letters she was hand-signing, and something about the way she’d looked up at him had rearranged his entire afternoon.
He’d called me that night, slightly drunk, and told me he was going to marry a woman whose last name he hadn’t yet confirmed. That had been five weeks ago. Suddenly, him buying that building on impulse made perfect sense.
I understood it all now.
I understood it now because if Joss had told me on Wednesday night, between the second and third floor of the executive elevator, that she wanted something I had no business buying, I’d have written the check before we hit the eighteenth floor.
I understood it because the things I’d thought were important last Friday morning at 8:55—the licensing pipeline, the Q3 close, the board’s enthusiasm about a possible acquisition discussion next quarter—had not become less important to me over the past week.
They’d just stopped being the thing I was building everything for.
The thing I was building everything for was eleven floors below me.
I’d known it Friday night on the rooftop, when she’d looked up at me with her shoes off and her feet tucked under her and answered my arrival with one of the best sentences I’d heard in years.
I’d known it Monday night in her hallway, when I’d had my hand on her jaw and made the only correct decision a man in my position could make, which was not to kiss her. Because if I’d kissed her there I would not have left.
I’d known it Wednesday in the conference room, in a way that had reorganized my understanding of what I was born to do.
And now it was Friday again, and I’d been at my desk since 6:20, and I had no idea where any of this was going next.
My phone lit up on my desk. I didn’t look at it right away. I made myself finish the email I was halfway through pretending to read. Then I picked the phone up.
Can we talk?
Three words. From Joss.
I read them once. I read them again. I put the phone down and looked at it for a beat, and then I picked it back up and typed.
When and where?
Her response came in twelve seconds.
Now. Your office.
I stood up.
I crossed to the door of my office and put my head out and asked my assistant to clear my morning.
She looked up from her screen and registered my face and didn’t ask any questions.
She just nodded once and started rearranging my calendar.
I went back into my office. I left the door open.
I stood at the window with my hands in my pockets and watched the morning hit the city below me—the river catching the sun, the buildings throwing their shadows the wrong direction this early in the day—and I waited.
I knew what was coming.
I’d known what was coming since yesterday afternoon, when she’d been standing at her desk watching me through the glass wall of the conference room.
I hadn’t seen her watching me. I’d known anyway.
I’d known the second I came out of that meeting and looked across the floor and didn’t catch her eye, because the only reason she wouldn’t have caught my eye was that she was deciding something.
And that something was why she was coming to my office, I assumed.
I was going to listen. I was going to listen, and I wasn’t going to interrupt, and I wasn’t going to fix anything, and I wasn’t going to talk her out of anything.
I’d spent the last week being a man who was certain about exactly one thing, and the thing I was certain about was her.
If she’d spent yesterday and today becoming certain about something herself, then my job was to hear what it was.
I heard the elevator chime down the hall. I didn’t turn around.
I heard her heels on the executive floor—the same low heels she’d worn in the meeting last Friday, I would’ve bet money on it—and I heard the small sound of her stopping outside my open door. I waited two beats. Then I turned.
She was standing in the doorway in the same blouse she’d worn last Friday morning.
The same pencil skirt. The same low knot at the back of her neck.
Her notebook was in one hand, held the same way she’d held it a week ago today, eleven floors below me, when she’d walked into that conference room expecting a normal meeting.
She looked exactly the way she’d looked the first time I’d noticed her.
I had a brief, ridiculous thought about how many times in my life I’d be allowed to see her for the first time again, and then I cleared my throat. “Come in.”
She came in.
“Close the door.”
She closed the door.
She stood in the middle of my office with her notebook in her hand and her eyes on my face, and we looked at each other for what felt like the longest four seconds of my life.
I didn’t move toward her. She didn’t move toward me.
The silence between us was the same charged silence that had been sitting in every room we’d been in for the last week, except now it had a different weight.
She spoke first. “I’m not here to break things off with you.”
I closed my eyes for one second. I opened them.
“Okay,” I said.
“I needed to say that first.”
“I’m glad you did.”
She nodded. She crossed the office. She didn’t sit in the chair I gestured to. She set her notebook on the corner of my desk and stood next to it with her hands on the surface. She looked at me across the four feet of mahogany between us and started.
“Mira pulled me into her office yesterday.”
“I know.”
She blinked. “You know?”
“I saw it coming. I’ve been waiting for it all week.”
“You’d been waiting for it.”
“Joss.” I took a breath. “I’ve been the CEO of this company for nine years, and Mira’s been running product for me for six of them.
I saw her face at the reception on Wednesday.
I knew she’d seen me cross the room to you.
I knew that meant she’d watched us all week.
And I knew that the next thing she’d do, because Mira is exactly the kind of senior woman she is, would be to pull you in and tell you what I’d want her to tell you if I had a junior PM in my org with her name on a fast track. ”
“What did you think she was going to say?”
“That you’ve earned everything you have here.
That the company you’re building isn’t safe if people start thinking you’re being promoted for the wrong reasons.
That a man at the top of the org chart sleeping with a woman at the bottom of the org chart is not a story that ends the same way for both of them. ”
She was watching me very steadily.
“Did she say all that?” I asked.
“Some of it. She said most of it. She said something else, too.”
“What?”
“She said you’re not paying for this. She said I am. She said to decide if I can afford it.”
I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t tell her Mira was wrong. Mira wasn’t wrong. Mira was, in fact, the most correct person who’d entered the room in the last week.
“She’s right,” I said.
Joss didn’t move.
“I’ve been running this company while you’ve been sitting at your desk eleven floors below me trying to act normal,” I said.
“And the company hasn’t noticed anything.
And you have. And nobody has called Mira into a meeting to ask her what’s going on with the CEO this week.
They’ve called Mira into a meeting to ask her what’s going on with you.
That’s the asymmetry. That’s what Mira was telling you.
And I’m not going to stand in this office and tell you it’s not real. ”
“I know,” she said, very quietly.
“So tell me what you want,” I said. “And we’ll figure out how to get there.”
She was quiet for a long time.
I let her be quiet. I’d cleared my morning. I had nothing else to do. The June sun was coming through my windows behind me and falling across the floor between us, and she stood in it and worked her way through whatever she was about to say.
“I want to leave Myrror,” she said.
I nodded once.
“I don’t want to leave Myrror because you want me to leave Myrror.
I want to leave Myrror because Mira’s right, and because I’ve been operating at fifty percent for a week, and because if I stay here, my whole career is going to be a question mark with your name on it.
And I don’t want that. I want my work to be my work. ”
“Understood.”
“I’m not going to ask you to make calls for me. I’m not going to ask you to introduce me to anyone. I’m not going to take a job at a company you own or a company you have a board seat at or a company you invest in. I’m going to figure out the next part by myself.”
“Okay.”
She looked up at me. “That’s it. That’s the whole ask. Don’t fix it. Don’t engineer it. Let me do it.”
“Okay,” I said.
She blinked. “Okay?”
“That’s it,” I said. “I’m not going to fight you on it. I think you’re right. I think Mira’s right. I think you should do exactly what you just said you’re going to do. And I’m telling you right now that I will not interfere with one minute of it.”
“What do you need from me?” she asked. Her voice had gone smaller.
“Nothing.”
“Sutton.”
“I don’t need anything from you, Joss. I need you to figure out the next part by yourself. That’s the only thing I need.”
She made a small sound. It might’ve been a laugh or it might’ve been the beginning of a cry, and I couldn’t tell from across my desk because she’d put her hand over her mouth in the second it took for the sound to come out.
I waited.
She lowered her hand.
“I have ideas,” she said.
“What kind of ideas?”
“Ideas I’ve been carrying for a while. Some of them are mine, not Myrror’s. They’ve been Myrror-shaped for fourteen months because I work here, but they don’t have to be. I want to find out what they are when they’re not Myrror-shaped anymore.”
“Then go find out.”
“Okay.”
“I have one more question.”
“What’s that?”
“How long?”
She tilted her head.
“How long before I’m allowed to take you out to dinner like a person who isn’t your boss?”
She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were filled with tears.
“A month,” she said. “Give me a month.”
“You have it.”
“You can wait a month?”
“It won’t be easy. But I’ll give you as long as you need.”
She nodded.
The silence came back. It had a different weight now than it had three minutes ago.
The conversation was over. The decision was made.
And there was one more thing she hadn’t said yet that I knew she was about to say, because she’d been working her way toward it the whole time she’d been standing in my office. I could see it in her expression.
“I love you,” she said.
I let the words settle over me. I let myself stand there for one second longer than I needed to, looking at her across my desk in her last-Friday blouse with her notebook on the corner and her hands flat on the wood, and I let it be true.
“I’ve loved you,” I said, “since you said hi on the rooftop.”
Her face did something I couldn’t put a name to. It was somewhere between laughter and tears and the kind of relief a person feels when she’s been expecting bad news and gets something else entirely.
“That fast?” she asked.
“That fast.”
I crossed the office. I came around the desk and I pulled her against my chest, and her arms went around me. Her face pressed against the side of my throat, and I held her in the morning sun in my office on the eighteenth floor of the building she was about to leave.
I let myself think the thing I’d been holding all week.
Everything I’d built, I’d built for this.
I’d built the company. I’d built the empire.
I’d built the apartment, the bank accounts, the life.
I’d built them for a reason I hadn’t been able to name for nine years, and now the reason was in my arms. The reason had a name, and the reason was going to leave my building this afternoon and figure out the next part of her own life by herself.
I was going to wait one month, and then I was going to ask her to dinner.
After that, we were going to do this the right way.
I held her tighter.
She held me back.
The sun moved across the floor.
We stood there for a long time.