Chapter 9 #2
"You have shares," Esther said. "You have standing and a register and a name in a magazine, and a bank that needs your signature. You are the first person in the history of this company who is going to make that decision with the actual facts in front of her."
"So you send me everything."
"So I send you everything." A rustle of paper. "Including the parts that make him look bad, and including the parts that make him look better, and I have sent you both this quarter and I imagine you noticed which one you believed faster."
Clara did not answer that, because she had.
"I'm not on his side, Clara. I want that said once." Esther's voice did not change at all. "I'm not on yours either. I'm on the side of a woman having the whole file. That's the entire thing. Goodbye."
She got in the car at ten at night, which was stupid, and drove south, which was worse.
She did not go to the Verdura. She did not go to the offices. She drove for two and a half hours in the dark with the radio off and came off the freeway at Olive Mill and went up into the hills and stopped outside a gate with eight hundred feet of eucalyptus behind it.
She sat in the car outside her own house.
The gate code still worked. She knew it still worked because she could see, from the road, that nothing had changed — the light over the range was on, on the timer she had set, in a house that belonged to her now in the eyes of the law and in which she had not spent a night since September.
There was a light on upstairs. The gray-green room.
Willa was sixteen and awake at half past midnight, and Clara sat outside a gate and did not put the code in.
She thought about the text she had sent from a turnout on the 101 three weeks ago.
I'm sorry I didn't call you back. You were right about your grandfather.
Willa had replied within four minutes. It had said: ok
Two letters. That was all. Clara had read it perhaps two hundred times.
She sat outside the gate for forty minutes. Then she turned the car around and drove three hours back up the coast, and got in at four in the morning, and did not sleep.
Adrian called at eight.
She picked up. She was too tired not to, and afterward she could not construct a better reason than that.
"Clara."
"I've seen the deck."
A pause. "Which deck?"
And it was the wrong answer. It was not a lie — she believed, then and later, that it was not a lie — but it was the wrong answer, because a man who had read page thirty-four would have known which deck, and a man who had not read page thirty-four was a man who was still, in February, not reading the other fifty-five pages.
"Sixty-one pages," Clara said. "Ninth of January. There's a slide with our faces on it and the heading is PROVEN VISUAL EQUITY."
The silence went on.
"I'll find it," Adrian said.
"Don't bother."
"Clara —"
"I'm not accusing you of running it. I want to be clear about that, because you're about to defend yourself and I'd rather you didn't." She was standing at her window in the dark. "I don't think you read it. I think somebody sent it to you and you looked at the first six pages and said fine."
"That's — " He stopped. "Yes. That's probably what happened."
"I know it is. I've watched you do it forty times."
"Then what are we —"
"Adrian." Her voice was very quiet. "For nine years I read the other fifty-five pages.
That was the job. That was my whole job, and nobody ever gave it to me and nobody ever paid me for it and I did it in a room you called an office as a favor.
And the reason you are able to say which deck right now, in February, in the middle of a refinancing, is that there is nobody doing it. "
He did not say anything.
"So no," she said. "I don't think you were managing me. I think you have never in your life known what was in the room you were standing in, and I made it so you never had to find out, and I have been calling that love since I was thirty-one."
"Clara."
"There's a slide," she said, "with a diamond on it, and the diamond is me coming back in September. Somebody put that in a document and printed it and put it in a binder. And I want you to understand that I'm not angry that they did."
"Then what?"
"I'm angry that they were right," Clara said. "Because if you had asked me in January — if you had called me and asked me to stand next to you at the Founders' Dinner for the sake of the company — I would have said yes."
She hung up.
Then she stood at the window in an apartment above a hardware store, and it came for her all at once, four months late: not the folder, not the schedule, not Margot Ferrand's hand four inches from her husband's on a white tablecloth.
Just the plain fact that she had started to hope. Somewhere between a stairwell and a covenant negotiation, without permission and without noticing, she had begun to hope.
And a slide deck had priced it at a milestone.
Clara went down onto the floor and stayed there for a long time.
At two in the afternoon she called Hugo Bertrand and said, "Is the offer still open."
"Yes."
"Don't ask me why I'm calling today."
"Wasn't going to."
She could hear a kitchen behind him, and someone shouting about a delivery, and a door.
"I want to see the paper," Clara said. "The actual paper. Not the idea of it. Structure, split, who signs what, what happens if we disagree, what happens if I want out in three years."
"I'll have it to you Thursday."
"You've already had it drawn."
A pause. "I had it drawn in November," Hugo said. "I've been sitting on it since. I wasn't going to hand you a document while you were in the middle of that, because then it's a rescue, and I don't want to be a rescue. I want to be a business."
Clara stood at the window with her forehead against the glass.
"You should know I'm at the worst point I've been at," she said. "You should know that's why you're getting this call."
"Okay."
"That doesn't bother you?"
"Clara." He sounded genuinely puzzled. "People make good decisions on bad days all the time.
That's most of the good decisions I've ever made.
" Something clattered. "I'd rather you signed it in a year when you were fine.
But if you want to read it on the worst day, read it on the worst day. It's the same paper."
She laughed, wetly, once.
"Thursday," she said.
"Thursday."
The document arrived on Thursday and it was thirty-one pages and it was, in every line, exactly what he had told her it would be on a bluff path in December. Her name first. Operating control unambiguous. A clean exit at three years at a formula she could calculate herself.
Clara read all thirty-one pages twice.
Then she put it in the drawer with the unsent email, and did not sign it, and did not know why, and was too tired to find out.