Chapter 6 #2
"It's competitive if we're the only ones who know the shaft's a decision and not an error," Nicole said. "Everyone else is pricing a repair. We're pricing a negotiation with a building that's been arguing with itself since Reagan."
"Twelve is still high."
"I once put four percent on a school in Dorchester." Nicole sat back on her heels. "The number I got wrong wasn't the price of the work. It was the price of finding out what was actually there. That's the number nobody puts in, and it's the one that eats you."
Kara chewed her pen.
"Nine," she said.
"Nine and a half."
"Deal."
They went with nine and a half, and it was Nicole's name on the contingency line, and she sat looking at that for a while too.
The submission was due on a Monday at noon and she finished it on the Sunday night.
Everything was done. Thirty-one pages, the sequence, the contingency, Kara's narrative, Corbett's change order scanned at last by his son on a phone in a storage unit and it looked terrible and she put it in anyway, because a bad photograph of a real 1987 document beats a clean paragraph asserting the same thing.
The only thing left was the cover.
PROJECT PRINCIPAL:
The cursor sat there.
She could type Lattimore. He'd sign it; he'd said so, cheerfully, on Friday — stick my name on it if it makes the portal happy. That was the easy version and it would take four seconds and the work would still be hers and everyone who mattered would know.
Everyone who mattered would know. She had built an entire decade out of that sentence.
Nicole sat in a rented kitchen at eleven at night with drawings all over the floor.
Everyone who mattered knew about the lease.
Everyone who mattered knew about the ledger.
Sal Corbett knew. Ross knew. Forty-one people hired before the sixth year knew, and most of them had retired, and two of them were dead, and the number of people who knew got smaller every single year while the number of people who read the website got larger.
That was the arithmetic. That was the whole arithmetic and she had never once done it.
She typed:
N. Doran, Project Principal
Then she sat and looked at it for a full minute, the way you look at a wall you've just knocked a hole in.
It was not her married name. She noticed that after the fact, which is how she knew it was true.
She hit submit at 11:24 and then walked around the apartment three times because her hands wouldn't settle.
The city's decision came through on a Tuesday at 4:40.
Kara Bowers stood up so fast she knocked her chair over.
They'd submitted nine days earlier: a sequenced plan that took the shaft apart in three weekend windows instead of one sixty-day shutdown, priced off Sal Corbett's forty-year-old records instead of a survey, with a contingency Nicole had set herself because she remembered what happened to a company that got its number wrong.
AWARD RECOMMENDATION — SUTTON GROUP.
The fourth floor made noise. Actual noise, whooping, somebody drumming on a desk, and it went on long enough that people came out of the stairwell to see what it was.
Nicole stood in the middle of it with the printout in her hand.
Her name was on the submission. Not in a mention, not in a line about heritage. On the cover, on the signature page, on the technical narrative: N. Doran, Project Principal. She had typed it herself, at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, and had sat looking at it for a full minute before she saved the file.
Lattimore shook her hand. He did it in front of everyone and he did it properly, and she thought better of him for it, and filed that away.
"Drinks," somebody said. "Right now. It's Tuesday, who cares."
Half the floor went. Nicole went. She had two glasses of wine in a place on Congress Street with a dozen people who all wanted to explain their piece of it to her, and Kara Bowers got tipsy and told her, at some volume, that nobody had opened her survey folder for three months and she had nearly quit in January.
"Don't quit," Nicole said.
"I'm not gonna quit now," Kara said. "Now it's — " she waved her glass — "now it's interesting."
Outside, waiting for a cab that Kara had insisted on ordering her, Nicole stood on Congress Street in the cold with her coat open and let herself think about the shape of a year.
Thirty-one archdiocese buildings. Haymarket, sixty days, three windows.
Yolanda Beckett had already said the word next twice, and Sal Corbett had a storage unit full of forty years of Boston, and Kara Bowers was twenty-nine and would be extraordinary by thirty-five if nobody managed her into a corner first.
There was a whole life in that. Not a consolation prize and not a hobby — a real working life, hers, with her name on it, and it did not require one single thing from anybody on the sixth floor.
She could do that. She could do that for twenty years and be good at it and be happy.
The cab came. She got in.
Nicole let herself into the Charlestown apartment at ten past eleven, and she was tired in the way she used to be tired, in her legs and her eyes, which was different from the tiredness of the last ten years.
She hung her coat up. She got a glass of water. She stood at the counter in the dark, looking at the parking garage going orange.
And she thought: I haven't thought about him since Tuesday.
She checked it, the way you press a bruise. Last Tuesday. Six days. She had thought about Whitney twice and the trust once and her mother-in-law not at all, and she had not thought about Gordon Sutton, her husband of twenty-four years, in six days.
She had been happy today. That was the thing. She had stood in a room full of noise with her own name on a cover sheet and she had been so happy she'd forgotten to check whether she was allowed to be.
Nicole set the glass down very carefully in the sink.
Then she put both hands on the edge of the counter and cried harder than she had cried on the night of the gala, standing up, in the dark, in a rented kitchen, with a dead burner and a garage view — because a life she could love was standing right there in front of her with its hand out, and taking it meant that everything he'd broken had been worth breaking.