27. Daniel
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Daniel
Rebecca asked to meet with me three weeks after the restructuring conversation, requesting it formally through my assistant rather than simply appearing in my doorway the way she once would have, and I understood, walking into the small conference room where she'd chosen to hold it, that the formality itself was part of what she needed to say.
"I've thought about it," she said, without preamble, once I'd closed the door. "I want to stay. But I needed time to actually mean that instead of just reacting to not wanting to lose my job."
"I'm glad. You're good at what you do, Rebecca. That was never in question."
"I know it wasn't. That's part of what made the last few weeks strange.
" She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn, an unconscious habit I recognized because it was so close to my own that it startled me slightly, seeing it reflected back.
"I had to actually sit with the fact that some of what I built my identity around here wasn't fair to ask of anyone, including me.
I liked being the person who understood you best in this building.
I liked what that made me feel like I was worth.
It took me a while to admit that liking it didn't make it right. "
"I don't think either of us saw it clearly while it was happening."
"Maybe not. But you're the one who's married, Daniel, and you're the one who finally saw it and did something about it.
I just got to keep being oblivious a while longer because nobody was asking anything different of me.
" She said it without bitterness, a plain accounting rather than an accusation.
"I talked to a therapist myself, actually, for the first time in years, mostly about this.
Turns out I've got my own version of needing to be indispensable to somebody.
Different shape than yours, but the same basic problem. "
"What'd you land on?"
"That I want a working relationship here that doesn't require either of us pretending it's something else.
Professional, real, mutually respectful, and entirely ordinary.
I can do that. I think I actually want that, once I stopped mourning the version where I got to feel special instead.
" She looked up at me, something steadier in her face than I'd seen in weeks.
"I'm not going to pretend the adjustment's been comfortable.
It hasn't. But I don't think comfortable was ever actually good for either of us. "
"For what it's worth," I said, "I think you're going to do great things here, doing it the right way this time. You always had the talent. I just made it too easy to build the wrong kind of relationship around it."
"We both did." She stood, extending her hand, formal again, and I shook it, understanding that we were closing something out properly, the way you close out any relationship that had once meant something real and had needed, for both our sakes, to become something smaller and more honest. "Tell Natalie I hope it works out.
I mean that. Whatever complicated feelings I've got about my own part in this, I never wanted your marriage to end, and I'm glad it looks like it isn't going to. "
"I'll tell her."
I did tell her, that same evening, and Natalie was quiet for a moment on the phone before she said, "That's a good thing, actually.
I think I needed to know she landed somewhere solid too, not just that she disappeared from the story once she'd served her purpose in it.
That would have felt like a different kind of unfairness, honestly, even though none of this was ever really about her. "
"It wasn't," I agreed. "It was always about what I did with what she was willing to give me. She's just the one who has to live with her own part of it now, the same way I have to live with mine."
Rebecca stayed on at Kessler Outdoor, ran business development with the same considerable skill she always had, and became, over the following months, exactly what she'd said she wanted to become: a genuinely excellent colleague, nothing more, nothing hidden, the specific ordinary professionalism that should have been possible between us from the very beginning, if either of us had understood early enough what we were actually building instead of what we thought we needed.