Chapter 11 #2
Two people from delivery came to her desk in the same week to ask about a header detail rather than going up to five.
Then Lattimore stopped copying the sixth floor on the Haymarket reports, and when Nicole raised an eyebrow at it he said, "Whitney's team have got enough on," which was a sentence with a whole political weather system inside it.
Then Kara's team simply stopped routing through the template. They built their own deck, put their own names on it, sent it to the client, and did not ask anybody. Nobody stopped them. Nobody could work out who would.
By the third week in May, Nicole had fourteen people coming to her about work and no title of any kind.
It occurred to her — sitting at a desk she had claimed in December because it was empty — that this was what power actually looked like when nobody handed it to you.
Not a seat. Not a line on a wall. Just the slow, unlegislated fact of being the person everybody went to, until one day the org chart is a piece of fiction that nobody has got round to updating.
Nobody had given her that. That was the thing she kept turning over. Nobody could give it and nobody could take it back.
Regina Halsey called at the end of May with an administrative question and got a different conversation.
"The four-month lease in Charlestown. You're past it."
"I went month to month in April."
"Right." Paper. "And the agreement's still unsigned, and it's been on my file since December, and at some point I have to either send it back or stop billing you for holding it."
Nicole stood in the Haymarket loading bay with a hard hat under her arm.
"Ask me your question again," she said. "The one from December."
"What do you want?"
"I know the answer now."
"Go on, then."
"I want the twenty years." Nicole watched a crew load a skip.
"Not the marriage — I genuinely don't know about the marriage, and I've stopped pretending I do.
I want the twenty years put down properly somewhere that outlasts everybody in it.
And I want a job. An actual one, with a number and a line and a person I report to who isn't him. "
Regina was quiet for a second.
"That's the first time you've said the word want to me without a man in the sentence," she said. "I'll hold the paperwork."
Ross took her to a diner on Dorchester Avenue on the last Friday in May, four hundred yards from the room over the print shop.
He ordered eggs at four in the afternoon and did not apologize for it.
"I've got something to tell you," he said, "and I've been carrying it since 2012, and I want to be clear before I start that it is not an excuse and I'll be very cross if you take it as one."
"Ross—"
"The name change," he said. "He fought it."
Nicole put her cup down.
"For five months," Ross said. "From the January to the June. And I mean fought — he had a consultant killed, he went round the partners one at a time, he put it on three separate agendas. There's nothing in the minutes because he lost every one of those rooms, and losing doesn't get minuted."
"The minutes say discussed."
"The minutes say discussed," Ross agreed. "That's what they say when a man has spent five months making a nuisance of himself and gets voted down."
"Who voted?"
"Six to one. He was the one." Ross moved his cup an inch. "He wanted Doran & Sutton, actually. Not Sutton and Doran. Yours first, because he said the phone answered better."
Nicole sat in a diner and looked at the tabletop for a while.
"Why didn't he tell me?"
"I asked him that in about the September." Ross had gone somewhere else in his face. "He said — and I've had this for fourteen years, so let me get it right — he said, If I tell her I fought for it, then I have to tell her I lost."
"That's not a reason."
"No."
"That's vanity, Ross."
"Yes," Ross said. "It is. And here's the part I've thought about most, so you might as well have it. If he'd come home in the June and said I fought for five months and I got beaten six to one and I'm sorry — what would you have done?"
Nicole opened her mouth.
She stopped.
Because she knew. She knew exactly and instantly, with a certainty that turned her stomach over: she would have gone in.
She would have walked into that building in 2012 with a lease in her hand and a room full of partners who had just told her husband no, and she would have made an absolutely enormous amount of trouble, and she would have been very good at it.
"He knew that too," she said.
"I think he did."
"So it's not that he lost." Nicole heard her own voice go flat. "It's that if he told me he'd lost, I'd have fought, and if I'd fought there'd have been a scene, and he'd have been the man whose wife made a scene."
Ross didn't say anything.
"He didn't protect the name," she said. "He protected the peace. And he kept doing it for fourteen more years, and it started with him being on my side."
"Yes," said Ross.
Nicole looked out of the window at Dorchester Avenue, where there was still, four hundred yards away, a print shop with a room over it that her husband paid rent on every month and had never mentioned to anyone.
"I can't use this," she said.
"No."
"It doesn't change one single thing that happened to me."
"It doesn't."
"He still wrote the joke."
"He did," Ross said. "Both things are true, Nicole, and I've had fourteen years with them and I still can't get them to sit next to each other. That's why I'm giving them to you and going home."