Chapter 2 #2
"My name's Joanna Pierce. I'm a journalist — I'm doing the twentieth-anniversary piece on the Sutton Group for a business monthly, it's a long-lead thing, it runs in the spring.
" A pause with paper in it. "Your husband's office gave me this number about a month ago.
I'm calling because I'd like a few minutes with the founder's wife. "
Nicole stood in the front hall with the receiver against her ear and looked at the lamp that stayed on for nobody.
"Mrs. Sutton?"
"Yes."
"Would you be willing? It doesn't have to be long. Just some color. What he was like in the early days, what it was like at the start."
"What it was like at the start," Nicole said.
"Yes."
Twenty-six years old, and cold, and their coats on in the room over the print shop because the heat was on a timer they didn't control.
Bidding a job she'd priced herself on the back of an envelope.
The lease with her name on it, because his credit was worse.
The typewriter. The ledger. The list in the back of the ledger of every person they'd hired, because she'd wanted to be able to look at it.
Gordon built a company. Nicole built a front desk.
"Ms. Pierce," she said. "Can I say something and have it be on the record?"
There was a small alert silence on the other end. The sound of a person putting down a coffee.
"You can."
"I founded that company," Nicole said. "With him. My name was on it. It was called Sutton and Doran. Doran is me."
Nothing for a beat.
"Mrs. Sutton, I want to be clear that I'll use that."
"I know you will."
"Can I call you tomorrow?"
"Yes," Nicole said, and hung up, and put both hands on the hall table because her legs had gone strange.
Boston is a big city that behaves like a small one. It took the sentence about four hours.
By six, three people had texted her the same screenshot of the same post. By seven her phone had a voicemail from a woman she'd sat next to at a hospital benefit for nine years, asking if she was all right, in herself.
By half past, Bridget had called twice and left a message that was mostly one syllable long.
Gordon started calling at ten past four.
She let it ring out and watched his name come up and go dark. He called at 4:14 and 4:31 and 5:02. At 5:20 he sent a message that said please pick up and at 5:48 one that said Nicole I'm asking you to pick up the phone and at 6:15 one that just said ok.
She spent that hour and a half upstairs in the closet.
She had told herself she was packing. What she actually did was stand in twenty-two feet of clothing and try to find something in it that was hers.
The gray was Vera's taste, chosen for a christening.
The green had been bought in a shop on Newbury with Whitney, who had been so good about it, who had said that one, absolutely that one, you look like money.
The long black she had worn to four funerals and had not chosen at all; a woman from a service had brought three and she had pointed at one.
She went along the rail with two fingers, item by item, the way she used to go down a column of figures.
Fourteen years of clothes and she could find nine things she had picked because she wanted them.
In the end she took a suitcase down off the shelf and put four things in it and stood looking at it, and it was so small, and the closet was so big, and she thought — with a clarity that arrived like cold air — I have been living in a hotel.
Downstairs, the front door opened.
Gordon came home at eight with two other people.
She heard them in the hall — his voice, and a woman from the office, and a man she didn't know. She stayed where she was, at the kitchen counter, with the six-dollar clock ticking.
The man came in first. Forty-ish, good coat, the kind of face built to be forgotten by a camera.
"Mrs. Sutton. Trevor Nagle. I handle communications for the group."
"I know who you are."
"Then you know why I'm here." He said it pleasantly. He put a slim folder on her counter. Everything in her life was arriving in folders now.
Gordon came in behind him and stood at the far end of the room like a man visiting.
"It's moving faster than we'd like," Trevor said. "There's a version of this that's a nothing story by Thursday. There's another version that isn't, and the difference is what goes out tonight."
"What goes out tonight."
"A short statement. Warm, brief, no detail." He opened the folder and turned a page toward her with two fingers. "The company's line, and then a line from you."
Nicole looked down.
"Twenty years is a long time and it belongs to everyone who was there. My husband and I are proud of what our family has built and consider this a private matter."
— Nicole Sutton
She read it twice.
She looked up at her husband, who had not said one word since he walked into his own kitchen, and who was turning his wedding ring with his thumb.
"You wrote me a line," she said.
Trevor said, "It's a draft, obviously, we'd—"
"I'm not talking to you." She didn't raise her voice. It turned out she had learned something from Vera after all. "Gordon. You wrote her a joke about me on Tuesday and tonight you've had a man write me a sentence to say."
"Nicole—"
"You keep putting words in my mouth and taking them out of that file." She picked the page up and looked at it and set it down again, square to the edge of the counter. "You've been doing it for fourteen years and I only just noticed."
"Then tell me what you want to say," Gordon said. "Say anything. Say it however you want. I'll stand next to you."
"I already said it," she told him. "At about two o'clock. To a journalist."
The silence had a texture.
"What did you say," Gordon said.
Nicole picked up her glass of water and finished it and set it in the sink, because the habit of tidying a room she was leaving was apparently going to outlive the marriage.
"I said I founded that company."