Chapter 23
The term sheet ran eleven pages and her signature was on the ninth, under Jo Ferrante's, dated the third of October. Cordelia turned it face-down and put her hand on the back of it while the line rang.
Jo picked up on the second ring. "If this is Renwick and Sable, I've already—"
"It's not. I'm not selling you the firm."
Jo didn't say anything. A door closed on her end and the noise behind her stopped.
"Okay," Jo said. "Is there a version of this where I talk you out of it?"
"No."
"Then talk to me. Tell me what’s going on."
"I'm restructuring instead. Remy, and Veronica Kepling, and Lauren Pike will take over."
"Cordelia, your daughter's twenty-eight."
"She won't be doing it on her own."
"And what about you? What will you do?"
"I'll take the board chair and get out of their way. There's a break fee, and I intend to trigger it. Etta will have your counsel on the phone first thing tomorrow, and whatever the number is, I'll pay it and I won't argue."
"You'll argue."
"I won't."
"Then you mean it," Jo said, "because I have watched you argue about a hundred and forty thousand dollars for six weeks."
"I remember."
"You won, is the part you're leaving out." Jo's chair creaked. "It isn't the money."
"I know it isn't."
"I have to stand up on Thursday in front of eleven people and tell them that the thing I've had two of my best women on since October has finished. And they'll want a reason." She paused. “She changed her mind is going to sound to them like I lost you."
"You didn't lose me."
"I know that. But they won't see it that way." The chair again. "So give me the reason and I'll decide how much of it to share."
Cordelia had had four days to find a sentence for it, but she still struggled to find her words in the moment. After a while, she eventually said, "I don't want to leave."
Jo waited for the rest of it.
"That's the reason," Cordelia said. "That's all of it."
"That won't hold up on Thursday’s meeting."
"No. I don't suppose it will."
Jo went quiet for long enough that Cordelia turned her chair toward the window. The harbor had gone flat and white in the six o'clock light, and one of the tour boats was coming in low in the water with everyone standing up too early.
"Nine days ago, you were about to be on the front page of the Pacific Ledger."
"They didn't print it."
"Because you spent ten hours on a Sunday making sure they didn't so you didn’t have to have it retracted. And it came out of my side of the table. Renwick and Sable are my lawyers." Jo said it evenly. "So tell me straight. Is this because you stopped trusting us?"
"No. It has nothing to do with you."
"All right." Another pause. "Then I'll tell you what I think, and you're not going to like it.
I've been at this as long as you have. Four women have walked away from a signed deal on me, and three of them did it within two weeks of something going wrong.
" There was no edge in Jo's voice at all, which was worse.
"Every one of them called it having a moment of clarity.
Two of them came back before the year was out wanting the same terms and didn't get them. "
"Jo—"
"I'm not saying you're one of them. I'm saying I can't see it from here, and I don't think you can either."
Cordelia didn't answer, because she wasn't sure Jo was wrong.
Four days ago, she had been intent on selling the firm.
What had happened since was Astoria letting herself into the kitchen and asking what she wanted, and Cordelia telling her she didn't know yet.
There was no version of that she could say into a phone, though.
"Thursday's going to be unpleasant," she said. "I'm sorry about that."
"You're not, particularly."
"No."
Jo laughed. "One more thing and then I'll let you go." She shuffled some papers. "Renwick and Sable want to know whether you intend to legally go after the associate for the leak. They'd like it in writing that you won't."
"I’ll leave her alone. There’s no need anymore."
"That's generous."
"It isn't. She's only two years out of law school, and I bet she'll never make a mistake that big again."
"All right." A pause on the line, longer than the others. "For what it's worth, I'd have taken good care of it. The firm."
"I know you would. That's why I chose you over everyone else."
She set the receiver down. She had been sitting forward the whole call, and she made herself recline.
Then she got up and went to the cabinet by the window for the succession file, because the next thing to do was write the role she was giving herself, and she wanted the current organizational chart in front of her while she did it.
The file was thick, and she took it back to the desk.
About a third of the way into the material, she came across Lauren's development plan.
She had signed off on it in February. Eighteen months of milestones, board exposure in the second quarter, the civic portfolio widened in the third quarter, the whole infrastructure division hers by the following spring.
Beside the twelve-month line, she had written “too slow” in the margin and pushed the date up by a quarter.
You did not give a woman a timeline and then move the dates up for being too slow.
Not when you had already sold the firm. She wanted it to mean she had never really been leaving, but it might only mean she was in the habit of driving a tight ship.
At half past six, she put the file back in the cabinet, took her coat off the back of the door, and went down to the garage.
Cordelia had written Wren’s address on the back of a meeting agenda at four o'clock and folded it into her coat pocket. In the car, she took it out and put it in her maps app, even though she had already memorized it by heart. She sat with the key in her hand before she started the engine. She drove east into a part of the city she wasn’t entirely familiar with.
Narrow streets, cars parked tight along both sides, older buildings of three and four floors with their windows open to the warm evening.
Two women were sitting out on a stoop with a bag of takeout between them, and one of them laughed and put her head back against the railing.
She parked two blocks away and walked. Wren’s building was the third on the left, with a maple out front and four steps up to the door.
There were six buzzers in a brass plate, the names on little cards behind a plastic window, most of them typed.
The fourth one down said W. DAVIES in blue ink, in small handwriting.
She pressed it. Nothing happened for long enough that she started wondering what she would do if nobody answered. Then the speaker clicked.
"Hello?"
"Hi. It's Cordelia."
There was a long pause. Cordelia stood on the step and listened to Wren’s breathing through the speaker and couldn’t remember the last time she had waited on a sidewalk waiting to be let inside.
Eventually, the door buzzed and unlocked, and Cordelia pushed open the door.
The hallway inside smelled of somebody's dinner and old wood.
She climbed two flights of stairs and saw Wren already standing in her own doorway on the landing with the door open just wide enough to stand in.
She was in a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves half-pushed up and her hair down. In the light from the apartment, she looked thinner than she had a month ago. Cordelia had noticed that before and had never once asked her about it.
"Is something wrong at the office?"
It was a reasonable question. Cordelia had never once shown up anywhere in Wren's life for any other reason. "No. Nothing's wrong at the office."
Wren waited without pressing more.
"Can I say something? I'd rather say it here than at the office."
"Yes.”
"I was going to disappear," Cordelia said.
Wren's face didn't change.
"Not step back or hand over or any of the other words I've been using since October.
When the handover was finished, I was going to send a letter to every board I belong to and disconnect my phone and go somewhere where nobody knew me.
I wasn't going to tell anyone, not even Remy. That was the plan…until Saturday."
"I already knew some of that," Wren said. "Remy worked most of it out."
"I know she did."
"So why are you here?"
"Because I'm not doing it. I killed the sale this afternoon. I called Jo Ferrante and told her I'm not selling the company."
Something crossed Wren's face and Cordelia couldn't read it.
"I want to say the next part properly," she said, "because I know how it sounds.
If you shut this door tonight and never spoke to me again outside of work, that call still happened and it still stands.
I'd have made it anyway. You need to know that before I say anything else or the rest of it sounds like I'm asking you for something. "
Wren looked at her for a moment. "I believe you mean it tonight.”
"That's fair," Cordelia said. "I'd like to tell you about Sunday anyway."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
"Then let me tell you the part you weren't there for," she said.
"I didn't notice. Not that I was busy and got it wrong.
That I didn't notice you were in the room.
Something happens to me when things go wrong.
I don't know what it's called, and I don't recognize when it's happening.
" She made herself finish, despite not knowing exactly what she was going to say.
"You were in and out of my office all day, and I couldn't tell you now what your face looked like or what you wore.
And I've spent nine days since then thinking about how well that day went. "
"I got thanked."
"You got managed," Cordelia said. "I'm not asking you to forgive it."
Below them somebody came in off the street and went into a ground-floor apartment and shut the door.
Cordelia continued, "One more thing and then I'll go. The board meets on the third of July. After that, Remy runs the firm and I'm not your employer."
"You've thought about this a lot."