Chapter 3 #2
"Nicole." Whitney lowered her voice, which was worse.
"I understand you're hurt. I do. That's a conversation I very much want to have with you, and I'll have it whenever you like, but this — " her hand moved slightly, taking in the desk, the coat, the floor full of people typing nothing — "this isn't the way to have it. "
"I'm not having a conversation," Nicole said. "I'm at work."
"You don't work here."
"I've never been asked to leave."
"That's not — " Whitney stopped. Recalculated. Smiled. "You know I adore you."
"I know you say it."
Something crossed Whitney's face then, fast, and it was the first honest thing anyone had shown Nicole since Saturday night: not guilt. Not even anger.
Confusion. The clean surprise of a woman who had genuinely believed she was liked.
At half past ten a woman from the sixth floor came down with a lanyard and a smile.
"Mrs. Sutton? I'm Robin, I look after the executive floor. I've been asked to sort you out with somewhere better than this."
"Better how?"
"There's an office free on six. It's got a door and a window, it's much quieter." She lowered her voice to something conspiratorial and kind. "Honestly, it's a bit of a zoo down here."
Nicole looked past her at the zoo: thirty desks, a printer that was making a noise, a man arguing pleasantly with a supplier, two people leaning over a drawing.
"Who asked you?"
"Sorry?"
"You said you'd been asked. Who asked you?"
Robin's smile stayed exactly where it was. "I think it came from Whitney's office."
"Thank you," Nicole said. "I'm going to stay here."
"It really is nicer—"
"I'm sure it is." She said it warmly, because none of it was Robin's fault, and because she had spent twenty-four years learning how to be warm while not moving an inch. "But a person in an office on six with a door doesn't work here. She's a guest. And I'm not a guest."
Robin went away.
Nicole sat looking at her monitor for a while after that, and understood that she'd just been offered the whole thing in miniature — the nicer room, the quieter room, the room with a door, the room where nobody has to watch you.
That was how it had been done the first time. Not with a shove. With an upgrade.
Gordon came down at eleven and did not come onto the floor.
She saw him through the glass at the end, by the elevators, standing with Trevor Nagle.
Trevor was talking. Gordon was watching his wife sit at a desk in his building, and he was turning his wedding ring with his thumb, and then he said something short to Trevor and Trevor stopped talking and they both went away.
He didn't come and ask her to leave.
She thought about that for the rest of the morning, and she could not decide whether it was the first decent thing he'd done or just the easiest.
IT reset her password at 12:40. The technician was about twenty-five and did not appear to have any idea who she was, which was the nicest ten minutes of her week.
"You're in the old directory," he said, frowning at his screen. "Like, the old one. That's a founder profile. I didn't know we had those."
"There are two."
"Huh." He typed. "Yeah. There's two."
Nobody gave her anything to do.
That was the first real hour of it, and it was worse than Whitney had been.
She sat at a working machine on a working floor with a working badge, and no work came, because there was no mechanism in that building for work to reach a person who wasn't on a project, and nobody was going to be the one who put her on a project.
So she read.
She started with the company website, because it was there. Our Story. A photograph of Gordon at about thirty-five on a job site in a hard hat, laughing at something out of frame — she remembered taking a version of that photo, though not that one — and underneath it four paragraphs.
Founded in 2006 by Gordon Sutton, then a thirty-one-year-old project foreman with a van and a conviction that Boston's old buildings could be made to work...
She read it three times.
It wasn't a lie. Not one sentence in it was a lie. He had been a foreman with a van. It was all true, and she was not in any of it, and the not-being-in-it had been achieved without a single false statement, which was a much harder thing to do and had taken somebody real effort.
She went further in. There was a page called Milestones.
The first entry was the founding. The second was the first office — the company moved into its first premises on Dorchester Avenue — in the passive voice, as though the room had happened to it, as though nobody's name had been on the lease, as though nobody had spent two hours arguing a landlord down over a radiator.
There was a leadership page. Six faces. There was a page about values with a photograph of the parish hall on it.
At half past twelve a man from finance she had known for nine years came past her desk, saw her, and did a thing with his face — a full stop, a recalculation, a small warm nod — and kept walking.
At one o'clock somebody left a takeout menu on the corner of her desk without saying anything. She never found out who.
At two o'clock she opened a blank email.
She'd been thinking about how to word it since the badge went green, and in the end she didn't dress it up, because the whole disease of that building was dressing things up.
To: Records Cc: G. Sutton; R. Danforth Subject: Founding file — request
Please provide copies of the following from the archive: the original lease for the Dorchester Avenue premises; the first payroll ledger; all incorporation and name-change filings, including the vote of the sixth year; and all hiring correspondence from the first three years.
I'm on four. Paper is fine.
Nicole Doran Sutton
She read it twice. She thought about taking Gordon off it, and left him on, because she wanted him to watch it arrive.
She sent it at 2:04.
At 2:09 a delivery reply came back from Records: Received. We'll be in touch.
At 2:11 her phone buzzed on the desk, face up, so she saw the whole thing without having to touch it.
Gordon: Whatever you need from that archive, ask me and I'll get it.
She looked at it until the screen dimmed.
That was the offer, again, in its purest form.
Not I'll tell them to give it to you. Not it's yours, it's always been yours.
Ask me, and I'll get it — the same sentence, structurally, as it's easier if I handle them, which he had said to her in a kitchen fourteen years ago and which she had heard, at the time, as love.
She turned the phone over.
Then she sat in a building she had helped pay for with two years of nobody's salary, and waited to see who in it was still afraid of her husband.