Chapter 7 #2
Nineteen people. Four from the city. Yolanda Beckett had come because she'd heard about the shaft and wanted to watch. Whitney was there, at the end, with her chin on her hand. Gordon came in three minutes late and stood at the back by the door.
Lattimore ran the opening. He was good at it.
At page eight he said, "And I'll hand over for the technical approach," and there was a small hitch in the room, because that was not what the agenda said.
Nicole stood up.
"Before Kara takes you through it," she said, "one correction to your handouts. Page nine, at the bottom."
She had reprinted them at seven that morning. Twenty copies, on the fourth-floor machine, which jammed twice.
"The credit line on that page is wrong," she said.
"The shaft analysis is Kara Bowers's work.
She surveyed the building in November, she found the change nobody recorded, and the reason this program is three weekends instead of two months is that she went and looked.
Our template has one line on it and it says Delivery Lead.
That's a template problem and we'll fix it.
But this is a client document, and I'm not letting a template tell you who did the work. "
Nobody moved.
Yolanda Beckett said, "Which one's Kara?"
Kara Bowers, going a spectacular color, put her hand halfway up like a fourth-grader.
"Good," said Yolanda. "You can explain the shaft to me, because I've read that page three times and I still don't understand what a header is."
The laugh let the room out. Kara stood up, and got her laptop unplugged and replugged, and started badly, and then about ninety seconds in stopped being nervous because she was talking about a building, and after that she was extremely hard to stop.
Nicole sat down.
Whitney was watching her from the end of the table. Not angry. Not even cold. She was looking at Nicole the way you look at a machine that has started making a new noise.
Gordon, at the back by the door, was not watching Kara at all.
He was looking at his wife with an expression she had not seen on his face in a very long time, and it took her the rest of the meeting to place it, and when she placed it, at about twenty past eleven, it landed harder than any of the last three weeks.
It wasn't guilt. It wasn't even pride.
He looked like a man watching a house he used to live in.
Afterward, in the corridor, Kara said, "You didn't have to do that."
"I know."
"They're going to be—"
"They're going to be a bit unpleasant to me for a while," Nicole said. "I've got a trust fund and no reputation left to protect. I'm the cheapest person in this building to be unpleasant to."
Kara laughed, and then stopped, and looked at her.
"Thank you," she said.
Whitney was waiting by her desk at four.
She wasn't angry. Nicole had prepared for angry on the way down the stairs and got something much harder to stand in front of: Whitney Larkin sitting on the edge of a desk with her arms folded, looking genuinely, openly hurt.
"You corrected a client document in front of a client."
"I did."
"You could have called me. I'd have fixed it before the meeting.
" She said it plainly. "You didn't call me.
You reprinted twenty handouts on the fourth-floor copier at seven in the morning so that the correction would happen where people could see it happen.
That's not fixing a credit line, Nicole. That's a demonstration."
She was, of course, completely right.
"Yes," Nicole said.
Whitney blinked. Whatever she'd braced for, it wasn't agreement.
"Then you understand what you've done to that girl."
"Tell me."
"She's now the person a correction happened about.
" Whitney's hands moved once, frustrated, and Nicole understood with a lurch that the frustration was real and the concern underneath it was real too, which was the whole horror of her.
"For a year, every room she walks into, that's the first fact.
Not the shaft. Not that she's the best technical head we've hired in five years — I know that, I've said it upstairs, I said it in November.
The first fact will be that there was a scene about her. "
"And whose fault is that?"
"Yours. Today. Obviously."
"No," Nicole said. "Whose fault is it that a correction has to be a scene?"
Whitney stopped.
"You've built a place," Nicole said, "where the only two ways for a woman's name to get onto a page are a favor or a scene. And you're standing here genuinely upset with me for picking the second one, and you have never once in fifteen years asked yourself why there isn't a third."
"That's not fair."
"You keep saying that word to me."
"Because it's not." And her voice went up — the first time Nicole had ever heard it, in fifteen years, in any room. "I have promoted more women in this company than anyone in it. I built the mentoring program. I have spent my entire career—"
"Whitney." Nicole didn't raise hers. "You stood up and read she built a front desk to three hundred people."
The floor around them had gone extremely quiet.
Whitney Larkin looked at her for a long moment. Something worked in her face — genuine bewilderment, and under it, for about a quarter of a second, something that looked almost like fear.
"That was a joke about a woman who doesn't work here," she said.
And she meant it. That was the thing Nicole took home with her and could not put down: she meant it, completely, the way you mean a fact about the weather.
"Right," Nicole said. "That's the whole conversation, isn't it."
Whitney went. The floor took about a minute to start making noise again.
Nicole sat down and looked at the harbor end of Farnsworth Street, where a truck was reversing with its beeper going.
She had come into this building in December with a very simple plan. Get the file. Get the record straight. Get her name said out loud once, in public, by someone other than herself. Then go — with a settlement, a life, and the door closed.
Four months, she'd told the rental agent. She'd been so proud of four months.
She thought about a young woman in site boots learning the exact same lesson in the exact same rooms, in the exact same words, delivered with exactly the same affection.
A piece at a time.
Nicole put her hands flat on the desk.
She wasn't leaving in four months. She wasn't leaving at all, not the way she'd meant it, and it had nothing to do with her husband.
That was the moment she stopped fighting for the past and started fighting for the building.