Chapter 2
Carter
There were six names on that list and I gave them one, and I have had nineteen hours since to work out why, and the best I’ve got is that she called me furniture.
Structurally unnecessary. Nobody has said a true thing to me since the funeral.
Some woman I’d known forty seconds looked at me in a corridor and told me exactly what I am, and I got on a plane at eleven at night with my whole chest lit up about it like a man who has never once made a good decision.
The tape gives my hands a job so the rest of me doesn’t go looking. Somebody taught me to wrap my own a long time ago, so I’d never have to wait on anybody to do it for me — and that is exactly as far as I let the thought go.
I never follow it to the end. That’s the trick of the whole thing.
“You’re back.”
Priya is in the doorway with a tablet already glowing and the particular stillness she gets when she’s furious and has decided to be efficient about it first.
“I’m back.” I tear the tape with my teeth. “I brought you a bagel and then ate it over Delaware.”
“Carter.”
“That’s the tone. That’s the tone you used about the mascot.”
“You had one job in that building yesterday, which was to sit down, be pleasant, and let two comms departments negotiate over your head like adults.” She sets the tablet on the treatment table.
“Instead you went upstairs alone, waited outside a woman’s office for forty minutes, and had a conversation nobody scheduled and nobody witnessed. ”
“Somebody witnessed it. She was there.”
“Do you know what she does for a living?”
“Comms.”
“She does what I do, Carter, except for people who want us to lose.” Priya folds her arms. “And you sat on a bench and told her you picked her.”
I keep my hands on the tape.
“You gave the head of communications for a rival club a piece of information about how this campaign was assembled. That’s not a sweet thing you did. That’s leverage.”
“She’d have found out.”
“She’d have suspected. Suspecting is a rumor. Knowing is a weapon.”
“Then it’s a weapon she was always going to get, and I’d rather she got it from me on a bench in June than from a leak in November.”
“That is a beautiful sentence and it is worth nothing.” Priya sets the tablet down again.
“The federation names a provisional squad in November. You are twenty-five, you are having the season of your life, and you are one embarrassing news cycle from being the guy they leave home because he’s complicated.
That’s the price list. That’s what was on the table when you decided to be honest at somebody. ”
I stop taping.
“Say the rest of it.”
“There isn’t a rest of it.”
“There’s always a rest of it. You do the numbers and then you do the thing you actually came in for.” I look up. “You’ve been awake since four.”
Priya doesn’t deny it, which is the closest she gets to affection.
“I want to know what she did with it,” she says.
“She told me to sit down.”
“She—”
“She told me to sit down. Then she gave me four terms. The fourth one was that if I ever hand a piece of her life to anybody without asking her first, she’ll end my career and I won’t notice for six months.
” I pull tape off the roll. “Nobody says the six-months part unless they’ve already worked out how they’d do it.
She wasn’t performing at me. She was warning me. ”
Priya is quiet for a second, which she almost never is.
“That’s the file,” she says.
“So tell me what’s in it.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’d be kind about it.” Flatly, like a diagnosis.
“You’d walk into a room already forgiving her for something she hasn’t told you.
She’d clock it inside thirty seconds. And for a woman who has been handled by professionals, being quietly forgiven by a stranger is the worst thing you could do to her. ”
I think about that for longer than she wants me to.
“Okay,” I say.
“Don’t do the okay.”
“That was a real one.”
“They’re indistinguishable and it’s your worst quality.” She picks up the tablet. “Call’s at eight. Be early. Don’t be charming.”
“That’s one instruction and one impossibility.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be on time,” I say. “And I’ll be quiet. And I’ll let you run it.”
Priya stops in the doorway and looks back at me the way you look at a light that’s come on in a house you thought was empty.
“That,” she says, “is the most alarming thing you have ever said to me.”
***
At 7:58 I’m in the media room with my hair still wet, a shirt with a collar, and a promise I intend to keep for about six minutes.
The screen comes up in quarters. Priya beside me. Then New York: a man in a gray suit with his chair angled slightly away from the camera like he’s already leaving, and beside him, in the last square, Sloane Vega.
Different blazer. Same face she had in the corridor, before she knew — dark hair pulled back into a knot that has already started losing pieces at the temple, dark brows doing most of the talking, gold hoops and three fine chains that are the only unbudgeted things about her.
Black on black on black. A woman dressed so that nobody will describe what she’s wearing.
I’ve had nineteen hours. I could draw it from memory. That’s not a thing I’m going to say to Priya.
“Good morning.” Priya, warm, first, exactly on time. “Sloane, Marcus — glad we could get this in before the week runs off with us. I thought we’d start with—”
“Before we do.” Sloane doesn’t raise her voice at all. That’s the thing I’ll think about later. “One structural item, and it’s better now than in October.”
Priya’s smile doesn’t move. “Go ahead.”
“The co-lead on this campaign wasn’t selected by either comms department.
He was selected by the talent.” A beat, precisely the length of a beat.
“Mr Reinhardt was given six cleared names and chose mine personally. He told me so yesterday, unprompted, and I have no reason to think he was being anything other than truthful.”
The room is very quiet. Beside me Priya has gone absolutely still, in the way of a woman who warned somebody about this ninety minutes ago.
“That changes the exposure profile,” Sloane says. “Atlanta’s talent made an unbriefed selection about a New York employee’s public image. So New York holds narrative approval. Every asset, every caption, every posted frame. Atlanta carries the reputational risk, since Atlanta created it.”
“That’s not the structure we agreed,” Priya says.
“It’s the structure the facts produced.” Still level. Still pleasant. “I’m not making an accusation. I’m allocating a liability that already exists.”
Marcus, from his half-turned chair, says nothing at all, and I understand that he’s not here to negotiate. He’s here to watch her do it.
And here’s what I’ve got. I’ve got a version of this where I laugh and call it a hell of an opening bid and take the whole room’s temperature down four degrees, because that’s the thing I’m for, and I’ve been doing it since I was nineteen and it has never once failed.
I’ve also got a promise I made in a physio room at six in the morning.
So I sit there with my hands flat on the table and I let it happen to me.
“Carter?” Priya, quietly, off-mic.
“Miss Vega’s right,” I say.
Priya turns her head about an inch.
“I did that. Nobody asked me to and nobody briefed me and I did it anyway, so it’s mine.” I look at the square with Sloane in it. “Approval’s yours. That’s fine. That was going to be yours regardless, because I already agreed to it yesterday, on a bench, out loud.”
Something crosses Sloane Vega’s face.
It’s there for less than a second and it is not victory. If I had to name it — and I’ve spent nineteen hours doing not much else — it looks like a woman who had four more moves loaded and doesn’t need any of them.
She recovers immediately. She’s very good.
“Then we’re aligned,” she says. “Priya, I’ll send the approval chain by noon. Friday’s dinner: I have nine conditions, three of which affect your camera positions, and I’d like to walk your team through all of them rather than send a document nobody reads.”
“Send the document,” Priya says, “and I’ll read it.”
“You will.” Almost — almost — warm. “That’s why I said it.”
“Well handled.”
Marcus, from the edge of his frame, in the pleasant unhurried voice of a man logging a result. He isn’t talking to Sloane. He isn’t quite talking to anybody.
“That’s the version of her we’re paying for,” he says.
And Sloane Vega’s face does absolutely nothing, which tells me more than the last twenty minutes did.
Here’s where I break the only promise I made today.
“Sorry — quick thing.” I lean into frame. “For the record, I’ve now been told twice in one morning that I’m a liability, once by my own department, and I’d like it noted that I took it extremely well. Priya’s going to say I didn’t. Priya was not in the room for the mascot.”
Priya, beside me, does not move a muscle.
It works, the way it always works. Somebody in New York laughs. Marcus’s line goes into the water and doesn’t come back out, and the last thing anybody in this meeting will remember is a winger being a clown about a mascot.
Sloane looks at me through the screen for exactly one second longer than she needs to.
The call runs another twenty minutes and I don’t say another word, and afterwards Priya sits looking at the dead screen with her hands folded.
“She used it,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Inside twelve hours. In front of my boss and hers.”
“Yeah.”
“And then you did the mascot.” Priya turns to look at me. “You told me you’d be quiet.”
“I was. For forty minutes.”
“You were quiet while she took you apart. You opened your mouth eleven seconds after her boss called her a version.” She lets that sit exactly as long as it needs to. “I want you to hear the shape of that, and then I want you to tell me it was about the mascot.”
I don’t say anything.
Priya closes the laptop.