CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Choice
POV: Jackson ? The present, weeks later
They came to him with a plan to win her back, and the plan was so good, so professional, so exactly right, that it took him a full day to understand it was the same poison in a prettier bottle.
The stock had slid. Not catastrophically, but enough, enough that the board had gone from managing a scandal to managing a wound, and someone in the communications group, Renata probably, had run the numbers and found the cure, and the cure was Sharon.
Because the public loved her now. That was the pivot the whole company had been waiting for.
The woman they'd hidden had become, against every projection, the most valuable brand asset Scott Hospitality had ever accidentally acquired, and the market had noticed, and the analysts had noticed, and the board had noticed, and now they sat around the long table and presented Jackson with a strategy so elegant he almost admired it.
A reconciliation. Public, of course. A reunion, framed as a love story, the billionaire who came to his senses, the wife who forgave him, a magazine cover, an exclusive, the two of them and the boy in soft light on the porch of the farmhouse, America's favorite marriage repaired in real time.
It would move the stock. It would flip the narrative from cowardice to redemption.
It would, Renata said, and she was right, be the single most effective piece of corporate communication in the company's history, because it wasn't a product, it was a family, and people would buy a family.
"We'd want it to feel authentic, obviously," Renata said.
"That's the whole value. It can't look staged.
So we'd shoot it warm, minimal, let her be herself, she's wonderful on camera, that's the gift here, she doesn't read as media-trained because she isn't. We put the real thing in front of the lens and the real thing sells itself. "
And Jackson sat at the table and felt something cold and clarifying move through him, because he had, at last, enough distance to see the shape of the thing they were offering him, and the shape was familiar.
They were offering to let him have Sharon back, publicly, as an asset.
They were offering to do to their reconciliation exactly what he'd done to their marriage, turn it into a managed public artifact, a thing performed for a room.
Six years ago the strategy had been to hide her because she hurt the brand.
Now the strategy was to display her because she helped it.
And Jackson understood, sitting there, that these were not opposite strategies.
They were the same strategy. Both treated Sharon as a variable in someone else's equation.
Both asked what she was worth to the company.
Neither once asked what she wanted, because it had never, in six years, occurred to this table that what she wanted was the point.
"No," Jackson said.
Renata didn't even look up from her tablet. She'd learned. "No to the porch, or no to the magazine? Because we have other"
"No to all of it. No to the concept." Jackson stood.
"You want me to win my wife back on camera to move the stock.
And a year ago I'd have done it, and told myself I was doing it for her, and it would have worked, and it would have been the most expensive mistake of my life, more expensive than the first one, because the first one I can at least say I did out of fear. This one I'd be doing on purpose."
"Jackson." One of the older members, patient. "The public wants the reunion. They're invested. If you don't give them a resolution"
"Then they don't get one. They're not entitled to one.
" He was already gathering his things. "That's the part I finally understand.
My marriage is not content. My son is not content.
Sharon is not a brand asset and I am not going to save this company by turning the best person I know into a magazine cover, because that is the exact thing I already did to her, I already turned her into a thing that was managed for the good of the Scott name, and it cost me everything, and you are sitting here asking me to do it again but nicer.
" He looked around the table. "The answer is no.
Let the stock do what it does. I've made my peace with the stock.
I made it in an empty house a while ago. "
He got to the door.
"What do we tell people?" Renata asked. Not hostile. Genuinely at a loss, a professional facing a variable she couldn't model.
"Tell them nothing." Jackson opened the door. "For the first time in the history of this company, tell them it's none of their business. See how it feels. It's terrifying. I recommend it."
POV: Jackson
His father found him afterward, which was not the pattern, because his father did not seek people out, people were sought to.
Richard was waiting by Jackson's office, actually waiting, standing, and there was something in the sight of Richard Scott standing in a hallway waiting for his son that rearranged the room.
"I heard what you did in there," Richard said. "Turned down the reconciliation strategy."
"You heard fast."
"Renata called me. She thinks you're having a breakdown. She wants me to talk sense into you." Richard's mouth did something that was almost, not quite, a smile. "I told her I'd see what I could do."
They stood in the hallway. Jackson waited for the pressure, the reasonable voice, the case for the stock and the strategy and the alignment, because that was who his father was, that was forty years of who his father was.
"Don't do it," Richard said instead.
Jackson looked at him.
"The strategy. Don't let them do it." His father's voice was low.
"I spent an hour last night on the phone with a woman named Kate.
Daniel's daughter. My niece. She's forty-four and she builds boats, actual boats, in Maine, and she was polite to me on the phone in the way you're polite to a telemarketer, which is what I am to her, a stranger calling about a dead man she loved more than she'll ever love me.
" He paused. "And somewhere in that phone call she said a thing about her father.
She said, 'He used to say the Scotts were people who'd sell you and call it saving you.
' And I have been turning that sentence over for eighteen hours, because it's the truest thing anyone's ever said about this family, and it's what that room is trying to do to you right now.
Sell her and call it saving you. Don't let them.
I let them, once, with Daniel. I called it protecting the family. I'm still paying for it. Don't."
And Jackson stood in the hallway of the building with his name on it and heard his father, for the first time in his life, advise him to choose a person over the company, and understood that something had genuinely moved in the old man, not all the way, maybe never all the way, but moved, a glacier is still ice but a glacier that's started to move is a different thing than one that hasn't.
"I wasn't going to let them," Jackson said.
"I know. I could see it. That's why I told Renata I'd talk sense into you.
" Richard almost smiled again. "This is the sense.
Go get your wife, if she'll have you. Not on camera.
The other way. The way I never learned." He turned to go, then stopped.
"And Jackson. If she won't have you. If it's too late, and it might be, you did earn too late.
If she says no, you let her say no, and you keep showing up for the boy anyway, forever, without making her feel it.
That's the last part of not being me. The grand gesture is easy.
Any coward can make a grand gesture, it's a coward's favorite thing, it looks like courage and costs nothing.
The hard part is the yes-she-said-no-and-I-stayed-decent-anyway part. Can you do that part?"
"I don't know," Jackson said honestly.
"Good answer." And Richard walked away down the marble hall, an old man who had erased his brother and was learning, three decades too late, to say the un-erasing thing out loud, and Jackson watched him go and felt the strangest thing, which was not forgiveness exactly, but the beginning of understanding, which is sometimes the more useful of the two.
POV: Sharon
He came on a Tuesday, which was wrong, because he came on Sundays, and the wrongness of the day was how she knew before he said a word that something had changed.
He didn't have flowers. She noticed that too.
Six years of Jackson showing up to hard conversations with flowers, with the gesture, with the thing in his hands to soften the thing in his mouth, and here he was on a Tuesday with empty hands, and he stood on her mother's porch and he looked, for the first time in a long time, like the man from the diner, the one who didn't know what to do with his hands because he wasn't performing anything.
"Ethan's at school," she said. "If you came for him."
"I came for you. I know that's not allowed.
I know the deal is Sundays and it's about him, not us, and I'm breaking it, and if you tell me to leave I'll leave and I won't do it again.
" He stayed on the porch. He didn't try to come in.
"I need to say something and it's not a speech, I promise it's not a speech, I've made you enough speeches.
Can I say it out here? You don't have to let me in.
I'd rather say it on a porch than not say it. "
Sharon crossed her arms. It was cold. She didn't invite him in. "Say it."