Chapter 17 – MADDIE
MADDIE
Iused to run the Sterling Foundation gala in my sleep.
Three hundred people, a silent auction, a seating chart that was basically an exercise in interpersonal Minesweeper, a program timed so the checks came out before the wine wore off.
For eight years it was mine, the one night a year nobody could call me decorative, because you can't call a woman decorative while she's running a room that size from behind an earpiece.
This year Damon hadn't let me touch it. He'd said it like a present. You don't lift a finger, I've got Taylor on it, you just show up and be beautiful.
Taylor did a fine job. The room could have been one of mine, the same uplighting, the same merciless order in the bar lines. I stood in the middle of it in a dress I hadn't chosen for an event I hadn't built, holding a drink, with nothing in my hands and nowhere I was needed.
Old habit kept trying to make me useful.
I saw a centerpiece listing on table nine and started toward it before I caught myself.
A server was fighting a tray near the doors and I had my hand half up to flag the captain before I remembered the captain wasn't mine to flag.
Taylor found me doing it and steered me away with fresh champagne.
"It's handled, sweetie. Go enjoy. You've earned a night off.
" She meant it kindly, but it felt like being pushed out of my own room.
Emily found me at the silent auction tables.
"Maddie. You look lovely." Her eyes went down the dress, the emeralds, and came back up. "It must be wonderful, getting to just enjoy these now. No clipboards, no earpiece. I honestly don't know how you ran them all those years and stayed sane."
I forced a smile that felt thinner than the silk of her gown. "Practice."
"It's a different kind of work, isn't it, keeping a man like Damon comfortable through a year like this. Not everyone could do it." She sipped. "I'd lose my mind. But I've always needed something of my own to point at. A project with my name on it. I suppose that's a temperament thing."
I pursed my lips. "I suppose it is."
She smiled. I smiled. We understood each other completely, which is what happens when one woman tells another, very politely, that she's little more than furniture.
There were more across the night. A remark about how nice it must be to have time for hobbies now.
A question about whether I'd been following the trial at all, asked slowly, the way you'd explain something to a child.
I caught each one and let it sail past, because catching things and letting them sail past was the other job I'd held for eight years, and at least that one nobody had handed to Taylor.
I watched Damon work the room from across it.
He was good, certain, a half inch above everyone, and Emily was never quite on his arm and never quite off it, always a half step into the conversation, the one he turned to when an investor's questions got technical, the one whose shoulder he touched without looking when he wanted a figure.
I'd spent the marriage being the person he turned to without looking.
I knew exactly what it looked like from the far side of a room.
It happened during the speeches.
Damon was at the podium, warm and certain, thanking the room for its faith in a hard season, when the doors at the back banged open hard enough to turn heads.
A woman came through them. She wasn't dressed for it.
She had a heavy coat over what looked like pajamas, her hair down and uncombed, her face gone somewhere past the point of noticing three hundred strangers.
"You." She was pointing up at the stage. At Damon. "You did this. My father is on a ventilator because of your drug, and you're standing up there in a tuxedo asking these people for their money."
For a second the whole room held still. Then security moved, two men converging from the walls, and she got louder and faster, the words spilling out faster than they could reach her.
Her father had been on the new medication.
He'd had a cardiac event two weeks ago, his heart, exactly the thing the warnings nobody read had warned about. The doctors said it was the drug.
The men had her by the arms. She didn't fight so much as keep talking through them, twisting to hold Damon in her sight as they walked her backward to the doors.
"You knew. You all knew and you sold it anyway. You should be ashamed. Every one of you in this room should be ashamed!"
The doors closed on the last of it. The room let its breath out all at once into a hundred low conversations, someone signaled the band, and a soft wall of music came up to paper over the hole she'd torn in the night.
Damon recovered at the podium without losing more than a beat.
Our hearts go out to every family touched by illness, he said, and his voice didn't shake, and the murmurs settled, and the gala folded back over the moment like water over a dropped stone.
I couldn't stop seeing her face. Nobody else in the room seemed to be having the slightest trouble.
Damon found me when the speeches were done and the floor had been smoothed back into music and money. "We're going." His hand was already at the small of my back, steering, the same hand he'd use to move me through a doorway or away from a centerpiece.
In the car he was on the phone before we'd cleared the lot. Emily first. Then legal.
"What do you mean there are no calls?" he demanded. "A woman doesn't just storm into that room without another point of contact being ignored first, and I want to know exactly who ignored it. I want to know who failed to triage this."
A part of me wondered if he was upset because no one had taken her concern seriously, or because it looked bad, but I was afraid to ask. Afraid to know how much the answer would deviate from what it would have been when we were in college.
Next, he called someone whose name I didn't catch, the words coming in waves.
Liability, statement, we get ahead of this tonight or we chase it for a month.
I watched the city slide past and thought about the woman in her coat over pajamas, driven to break into a black-tie gala because not one person at this company would pick up a phone for her.
I thought about her father, breathing on a machine, while we'd been deciding which fork to use.
When Damon finally came off the call I asked him, quietly, if it was true. If her father's condition was a result of the new drugs.
He looked at me as if I'd switched to a language he didn't speak. "It's not true. It's Brighton. It has to be Brighton."
"You said has to be. Not is."
"Maddie." There was a warning under his voice. "I don't have the room for this tonight." He was dialing again before he'd finished the sentence.
I sat in the dark of the car beside my husband and hoped, for the woman's sake, that he was right.
And I hoped, for ours, that he could still tell the difference between a thing that was true and a thing he needed to be true, because I wasn't sure anymore that he could, and I couldn't say when he'd lost it.