Chapter Twenty-Nine
Rhys
Dev Kapoor drove up the Mount Rose Highway behind a snowplow on a Tuesday in January, which told me he thought I was about to do something stupid.
He came into the big conference room at HQ with snow on the shoulders of his overcoat and his laptop under his arm, closed.
He didn’t open it. He looked at the table instead.
Jonah sat at the far end in his red ski-school jacket, eating a granola bar like it had insulted him.
Two of Summit’s lawyers were on the speakerphone.
Our general counsel had the chair by the window.
In front of my place there was one sheet of paper and a pen.
“Tell me this is a restructuring,” Dev said.
“It’s a resignation.”
“From what?”
“Sterling House. All of it.”
He sat down without taking his coat off. Outside, the lake was the color of a nickel, and the wind was pulling snow off the roof in long white sheets.
“Walk me through it,” he said. “Slowly. Pretend I’m a banker.”
“My seat on the Sterling House board goes to Jonah. My operating role goes to Jonah. Sterling Resorts’ interest in the brand, and every share I hold personally, go to Summit. No price.” I slid the sheet across to him. “The board voted at seven this morning. Jonah made the motion.”
“I did,” Jonah said, chewing. “I’d like it in the minutes that I was against it and made the motion anyway.”
Dev read the page. He read it again. I watched him do the math behind his eyes and not like the number.
“Rhys. On the last mark, that stake is—”
“Don’t say it.”
“Somebody should say it.”
“Then somebody else can. I know what it is.” I put my hands flat on the table so I’d stop moving them.
“Lucy licensed her work to Sterling House on her terms. Her name, her royalty, no NDA. Good. But as long as I own any of it, every page she signs makes me richer. Every time she picks up a pen, I get paid. I’m not going to be the reason she can’t pick up a pen. ”
Nobody said anything. On the speakerphone, one of the lawyers coughed.
Dev closed the folder. He looked at his hands. “If this is about the email—”
“It’s about the email.”
“I wrote that line. It was my summary of a phone call. I shouldn’t have had it open on the table where she—”
“You didn’t get it wrong.” I made myself look at him.
“I said it. I said she was the key to closing the quarter. I meant the brand doesn’t work without her, and I meant I don’t, and I said it in deal language because that’s the only language I’ve spoken for ten years.
She read it exactly right. That’s the problem. ”
“Mr. Sterling,” said the speakerphone, “you understand that the transfer is irrevocable.”
“That’s the part I like.”
Jonah balled up his wrapper and threw it at the trash can by the door. It went in. He looked almost disappointed.
“For the record,” he said, “I teach seven-year-olds to snowplow. I don’t know what an operating role is.”
“You’re the only person in this family who’s never sold anybody anything.”
“I sold you a snowboard in 1999.”
“It was broken.”
“I told you it was broken. That’s my whole qualification.” He leaned back until his chair creaked. “You sure, brother?”
“You asked me three times in the parking lot.”
“And you said yes three times without doing the voice. That’s why I made the motion.”
I signed. It took four seconds. I’d spent ten years signing things in four seconds, and this was the first one I’d read every word of before I did it.
* * *
Our head of communications caught me at the elevator with a tablet already open.
“We need to get ahead of this,” she said. “I’ve got a release drafted. ‘Rhys Sterling steps back from Sterling House to focus on the core portfolio.’ Short. Clean. Dev’s people will sign off by noon.”
“No release.”
“Rhys, you can’t just vanish off a four-hundred-million-dollar brand and not—”
“I’m not vanishing. I’m going to write something.”
She lowered the tablet. “Write what?”
“A letter. Myself.”
“With respect,” she said carefully, the way you talk to a man on a ledge, “you don’t write things. You say things, and we write them.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong with everything I’ve ever said.”
The doors closed on her face, which was not unkind. Just worried. She’d been cleaning up after my mouth for six years.
* * *
The owner’s house at Glenbrook was dark when I got home. I turned on one lamp in the kitchen and sat down at the table with a yellow legal pad, three pens, and the place card.
I’d kept it in my wallet since June. A watercolor of the lake at dusk, folded once down the middle to fit: the dock a thin dark line, the water going from gold to violet, one tiny boat she’d put in with the tip of the brush.
Underneath, in her small upright hand, Rhys.
Three hundred of these, every one a different corner of Glenbrook, so nobody’s would match.
I propped it against the sugar bowl where I could see it.
Juniper’s water bowl was still by the back door. I hadn’t been able to put it away.
The first draft started, I want to take a moment to recognize. I read it back and heard my own voice through a microphone, glass raised, and tore off the page.
The second started, The Sterling look has always been. That was a brochure. I tore that off too.
The third was better for a paragraph and then turned, without my permission, into a pitch.
Lucy’s vision has shaped every guest experience across our portfolio, and going forward— Going forward.
I sat there and stared at the words going forward and understood that I didn’t know how to write a sentence that wasn’t trying to get something.
“Going forward where?” I asked the empty kitchen. It didn’t know either.
By one in the morning there were eleven balls of yellow paper on the floor and I had nothing.
I put my boots on and walked across the grounds to the lodge. The snow had stopped. The path lights made small gold coins on the drifts. The great room was dim, the masonry heater ticking as it cooled, and I went past it and down the hall to the library.
Even at night, you could feel what she’d done with that room.
The windows were set high on the north wall so the light would come in even and cool all day and never glare off a page.
The shelves stopped short of the ceiling so the room would breathe.
There was a window seat exactly as deep as a person curled up with a book.
I’d walked through this room a thousand times with investors and said We wanted it to feel like a lodge you’d inherited. We. I’d said we.
The night auditor found me there twenty minutes later with the legal pad on my knee.
“Can’t sleep, Mr. Sterling?”
“Writing a letter.”
He set a cup of coffee on the side table without my asking. “Who to?”
“Everybody, I think.”
“That’s a lot of stamps.” He hesitated at the door. “My wife says you write the hard ones like you’re talking to one person. Then you mail it to everybody else.”
“Is your wife usually right?”
“About everything except me,” he said, and left.
One person.
I stopped trying to write about the company.
I tested myself instead, the way she had at the fire station with Moleskine number fourteen, the day I couldn’t tell her which lodge her own drawing had become.
Since then I’d gone through all the scans on my laptop, one page at a time, the way I should have in 2016.
I knew now. The stair with the landing you could sit on.
The boot room with the drain in the floor.
The towel hooks set low by every shower.
The great room, on a napkin, on our wedding morning, before there was a lodge to put it in.
I wrote those down. Just the list. Every room I could remember and which notebook it came from, and the date. It ran four pages.
At ten to five, the windows in the library started going gray, even and cool, exactly the way she’d promised they would. I turned to a clean sheet and wrote the first line, and I didn’t cross it out.
Every Sterling room you’ve ever slept in was drawn by my wife, Lucy Hart.
Everything after that was easy, because it was only true.
At six-ten I typed it up and emailed it to the editor of Alpine Living, the same magazine that had put Margot on its cover in September, with a note: Run it as written or don’t run it. No edits, no headline about me, no photo of me. I’m not buying the page. It’s a letter.
She called at eight. I was still in the library, still in yesterday’s shirt.
“This is unusual,” she said.
“I know.”
“You don’t want to see a proof?”
“No.”
“Mr. Sterling, can I ask why you’re doing this in print? You could post it anywhere and it’d be everywhere by lunch.”
“Because you printed the other thing,” I said. “Same magazine. Same size type. She deserves the correction where the mistake was.”
There was a long pause on the line.
“February issue,” she said. “As written.”
After she hung up, I sat with my phone in my hand for a long time.
I hadn’t texted Lucy since she’d asked me to stop coming.
I’d typed a hundred messages and sent none.
The license schedules were still sitting unsigned in Cilla Tran’s office in San Francisco, and I knew, because Dev had told me, that Summit was getting nervous, and that every week she didn’t sign, somebody in a suit said my name in a worried voice.
Let them.
I didn’t tell her about the letter. The letter wasn’t for her to answer. I wrote one line, read it three times to make sure there was nothing in it that asked for anything, and sent it before I could make it better.
Sign or don’t. Nothing you do can help me now. That’s how it should be.