40. Elyse
Elyse
My darling Elyse,
Being alone might be the healthiest and most terrifying thing I’ve done in a long while—besides falling, heart and soul, for you, of course.
I went swimming in the Sound this morning, and it was fucking freezing.
You would have laughed at how long it took me to get my whole body into the water.
I hated every second of it… but afterward, I felt almost alive.
I’m definitely doing it again tomorrow.
I might even lean into this whole Wim Hof thing I have going on and grow a beard. I keep wondering if you’d approve of it.
Confession corner:
My family has been covering up every crime and wrongdoing and scandal for generations.
Anything that could cast the lightest smudge on our reputation gets erased.
And you know why we do it? Because we can.
Because every time we get away with this shit, it makes us cockier. It’s the absolute opposite of courage.
During the building of Fairwater in the 1890s, one of the contractors died.
He fell from the scaffolding while tiling the roof.
My great-great-grandfather paid off his family to keep quiet and had him buried in a grave in the southeasterly corner of the estate.
You wouldn’t find it unless you knew where to look, because the small cedar cross that marks it is overrun with ivy.
The money that man’s wife received was nowhere near the equivalent of what a wrongful death suit would net her these days, and my great-great-grandfather knew it.
The man’s name was John Donnelly, and he had three children.
That’s the first documented case I know of where the Vosses threw money at a potential scandal and got away with it scot-free. When I say documented, the details are sealed in the family safe, right here on site. And when I say first, it’s the first that I know of.
But it sure as hell isn’t the last.
Today’s jobs have been hacking away at all the ivy and ordering a proper marble gravestone for John. God knows every last person in my family could use a more visible reminder that every cowardly choice that we make to erase our crimes and edit our image in real time has a price.
That’s why I fell so hard for you, I think. You’re the purest, truest person I’ve ever known. Like I said, your face has nothing on the beauty of your heart.
My courier tells me your cherry pie was delicious.
More tomorrow, my darling.
Yours always,
Sinclair
My eyes are wet, and my chin is trembling.
I fold the letter back up and sit quietly on my bed for a while, taking a moment to give thanks for the too-short life of John Donnelly.
His poor, poor wife. His poor kids. I think back to the gracious, symmetrical splendor that is Fairwater, and my stomach turns.
What a price for all that beauty, all that excess. What an awful, terrible price.
I’m not religious in the slightest, but I make a quick sign of the cross. I hope he’s resting in peace. I’m glad Sinclair is choosing to finally honor him in the way he deserves, even if his actions are, ooh, one hundred and thirty years too late.
He’s really going for it with this radical transparency thing… But I assume the statute of limitations on poor John Donnelly has long gone. If he’s gonna put his money where his mouth is, then the true test will be whether he’s willing to incriminate himself beyond how he already has.
I’m still feeling shaken up about John when I head outside to see the messenger, whom I now know is reporting back to Sinclair.
It shouldn’t surprise me, and it doesn’t.
What surprises me is that I don’t mind. It’s a strange feeling, but somehow having Sinclair know these tiny details is its own kind of reply, and I don’t hate it.
It’s the flimsiest string binding us both to what we once had.
I hold up a cup of coffee and a brownie and tell him, “No reply today, thanks.”
December 3
God, therapy is brutal. Brutal, and endlessly fascinating.
Elizabeth—that’s my therapist—is very stern.
I think you’d like her. She chides me a lot, which you’d enjoy, though, oddly, she chides me hardest of all when I want to beat myself up for something she believes to be my parents’ fault.
That’s one of the reasons I haven’t written you about the therapy stuff yet.
I needed some time to process all these “epiphanies” before I could write about them in a remotely coherent way.
Confession corner:
I’ve used my fixer more than once to dig up dirt on an employee I wanted to get rid of, just so I could fire them for cause and save the firm their severance. Worse, it’s always felt like nothing more than smart thinking.
And it’s never even about the money.
It’s about getting one over on someone.
It’s about never, ever letting someone else win against the Vosses.
A few of the many names, if you want them: Carter George, Lena Kowalczyk, Antonio D’Angelo.
(Elizabeth asked what I intend to do about Carter and the others besides feel terrible on paper. Fair point. Working on it.)
December 5
Today, Elizabeth and I talked about why I paid you for those first two Alchemy sessions (and why I tried to pay you for the ones at my apartment).
I assumed it was because I had some fucked-up, entitled need to make my money talk where my charms couldn’t.
To back you into a corner, maybe. And I think there was an element of that.
But she had another theory. She said it was less about my seeing you as purchasable and more about my being unable to tolerate an unpriced encounter: that if money changed hands, I didn’t have to run the risk of finding out whether I’d be chosen for free.
According to her, I probably never have been chosen for myself. More for my name and my money.
But I don’t know. This all sounds awfully like “poor little rich boy” to me. What do you think? (Don’t answer that. You don’t owe me your insight.)
December 7
Confession corner:
Three years ago, I gave one of my best strategists a seriously lukewarm reference to stop him from getting a job he wanted. The job wasn’t even at a competitor—it was as a lecturer at NYU. He was burned out and wanted a change of pace.
He didn’t get the job.
He did, however, end up being signed off sick a couple months later with burnout and depression. He never came back to Voss.
December 9
Confession corner:
My brother’s wife (the marriage Mom and Dad and her parents strong-armed him into) has been in love with another woman for years.
My siblings and I all know. She doesn’t hide it from us.
My brother is fine with it—he doesn’t love her either—but neither of them has any clue of how to extricate themselves from the marriage.
They’re both that terrified of their parents. It’s so fucked up.
(I have her blessing to share this with you, by the way.)
December 10
I’ve never broken up with a woman myself. I’ve always had my assistant do it with a brief phone call and a token couriered from Cartier. The longer you’ve lasted, the nicer the jewelry. It’s like a mini divorce settlement, every time. “Thank you for your time and I’m sorry for your trouble.”
You’re actually the first woman who’s broken up with me.
When you consider how badly I treat my fellow humans, that’s quite something, isn’t it?
I think it’s a combination of factors: most of the women I’ve dated don’t know how rotten my soul is.
Some of them don’t want to know. And others don’t care—or it’s a small price to pay for dating a Voss.
Because, let’s be honest, it’s not my soul they’re attracted to, is it?
I fucking love that you’re not like them. That you had the self-respect to kick me to the curb like the piece of dogshit that I am.
December 11
Today I had to go into the office for a quarterly board meeting. I was borderline panicky—I felt like the longer I stayed holed up with all my yes-men the quicker I would undo the work I’m doing back here. So I came right back and jumped in the Sound so I could wash Manhattan off my skin.
(The beard did not go over well at work. I got more than one Unabomber reference.)
December 15
My darling Elyse,
Did I mention therapy is brutal???
Here’s what I learned about myself today:
I was never that fucked-up rich kid who crashed the BMW Daddy bought him or shoplifted for attention.
I was a model teenager, a straight-A student.
I knew, on some level, that my parents, and their parents, and their social circle, were full of shit, but here’s the thing: I went along with it anyway.
My siblings and I laugh at my parents behind their back.
We roll our eyes and revel in our superiority, but we take the jobs and the money and the status that our name gives us.
And honestly, that feels worse to me than blindly going along with it all.
And here’s more psychobabble: okay, bear with me, because I find this shit hard to get my head around, and even harder to admit to on paper. I can’t imagine what you must think of me. But here goes:
My family’s currency is image. How things look is more important to my parents than how things are. Any of us could have told you that, and from a young age, and I’m sure you could have told me that, too.
But get this. Elizabeth doesn’t think I believe that—but she thinks I weaponize it anyway. If how things look is so important, then the person who controls how things look controls what happens. They control everything, basically.
Even writing that down blew my mind all over again, and not in a good way.
I had to go for a very fucking cold, dark plunge in the Sound to absorb this.
(Elizabeth says “embody” instead of absorb, and it makes me snicker every time.
If I turn into a person who uses the word “embody” unironically, then I hope someone has the decency to shoot me.
But she can carry it off because she has three doctorates. So, yeah.)