Chapter 12
She did not tell Gordon she was going.
That mattered, and she was clear with herself about why: not to punish him, and not to be secret about it. It mattered because there was a version of this where a husband intervened on his wife's behalf and it went well and was kind and generous, and that version would have ruined it permanently.
She told Bridget. Bridget said, "Do you want me to come and sit in the car," and Nicole said no, and Bridget said, "I'm going to sit in the car," and did.
She spent the two weeks before it deciding what not to do.
That was most of the work, in the end. There were about six versions available to her and she took them out one at a time in a rented kitchen and looked at them properly, which she had never done with anything in her life before December.
She could bring the minute books, and go through them item by item, and prove it. But proving it would turn it into an argument, and an argument has two sides, and Whitney Larkin had won every argument she had ever been in.
She could bring Ilene, or Ross, or a lawyer. But then it was two against one and Whitney would be the woman who got ambushed, and by Christmas there'd be a version of the story in this city where Nicole Sutton brought people.
She could shout. She could describe the ballroom, and the three hundred faces, and the coat line, and the nine years of she's such a good sport.
She wrote that one out longhand, three pages of it, at one in the morning. It was very good. It was the best thing she had written in twenty years and it would have taken the top of that woman's head off.
She burned it in the sink, which set off the smoke alarm and brought a neighbor to the door.
Because the thing about the three pages was that every line of it was about how it had felt, and feelings are the one thing Whitney could survive — feelings could be regretted, and apologized for, and disagreed with, and managed, and Nicole had spent five months watching that woman manage things.
So in the end she took one page.
Whitney's office was on six at the corner, and it had been Whitney's office for nine years, and there were photographs in it of a company Nicole had not been in.
"Sit down," Whitney said. "Do you want anything?"
"No, thank you."
She sat. Whitney sat. Outside, six floors down, Farnsworth Street was doing the four o'clock thing.
"You've come to tell me it's running," Whitney said.
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Eight thousand words. Ilene Brackett has given her the minute books."
Whitney closed her eyes for a moment.
"Of course she has," she said. "God. Ilene. Fifteen years I've walked past that woman."
"That's rather the theme."
"Yes," Whitney said. "I'm beginning to get that."
Nicole had planned this. She had planned it for two weeks, in a rented kitchen, and had written things down and thrown them away, and what she had arrived at in the end was that there was no argument to be made, because Whitney was not wrong about any fact and could not be beaten on facts.
So she did not bring the minute books. She brought one page.
She took it out of her bag and put it on the desk and turned it around.
"I'd like you to read that out loud."
Whitney looked at it. "What is it?"
"You'll know when you read it."
"Nicole, if this is—"
"It's four lines," Nicole said. "You wrote three of them."
Whitney picked it up.
Nicole watched her get to the third line and stop.
"I'm not going to read this out."
"Why not?"
"Because it's a private message between me and a colleague and it's — " Whitney put it down on the desk face-first. "You're better than this."
"I'm not sure I am," Nicole said. "But I'd like to hear it in the room, because I've read it about four hundred times in a kitchen on my own, and I've started to think I might be mad, and you're the only other person alive who knows what it meant."
The office was very quiet.
Whitney turned the page back over.
She read it in a flat voice, the way you read something to get to the end of it.
"she doesn't ask." A pause. "that's not what I said. — I know what you said."
She stopped.
"There's a fourth line," Nicole said.
Whitney did not look up.
"poor Nic," she read. "she'd have been so good at this."
The silence went on for a long time.
"Fourteen years," Nicole said. "That's what I want you to understand, and then I'll go.
Not that you two were close. Not the two a.m. — I've made my peace with the two a.m., or I will.
It's that you both knew. You sat there, the pair of you, and you diagnosed it correctly, and you were kind about me while you did it, and then you went to a meeting and closed the item. "
"That's not—"
"You wrote she'd have been so good at this three weeks before you sent me a letter offering me the client side." Nicole's voice did not rise at all. "You knew what I was good at. You wrote it down. And then you offered me the other thing."
Whitney's hand was flat on the desk.
"I didn't think about it like that."
"No."
"Nicole, I didn't. I don't — " and then she stopped, and something in her face came apart in a way that Nicole had never seen and had not expected and did not enjoy.
"I've been going back through them. Since February.
All eight. And I keep finding — the dates.
Your father. The Florida thing. And I keep telling myself I didn't know when your father had a stroke, and then I remember that I sent flowers. "
Nicole said nothing.
"I sent flowers," Whitney said, "and a week later I sent a board seat."
"Nine days."
"Nine days." She laughed, and it was a bad laugh, and it came a half-beat before nothing at all. "Well. There we are."
Nicole sat with her hands in her lap.
She had come here to be devastating and she had been devastating, and it turned out that the sensation of being devastating was nothing like she had rehearsed.
There was no floor under it. There was just a woman of forty-five behind a desk, going through ten years in her head at speed and finding it exactly as bad as it was.
"Can I ask you something," Whitney said. "And you're entitled to tell me to go to hell."
"Ask."
"Why do you think I did it?"
Nicole thought about it. She had earned the right to be cruel and she found, sitting there, that she did not want to be, which was inconvenient.
"I don't think you did it," she said. "I think you arrived in year six into a company with two founders and one name on the door, and everybody told you the story, and the story was that Gordon built it and his wife was around at the start.
And it was a good story and everyone believed it including him.
So you built fifteen years on top of it.
" She paused. "And every time reality knocked — a board getting uncomfortable, a man in the trade saying everyone knows who ran that outfit — you closed the item.
Because reopening it would have meant everything you'd built sat on top of something that wasn't true. "
"That's very generous."
"It isn't remotely generous," Nicole said. "I'm telling you that you didn't hate me. You just needed me to be who they said I was, and I cooperated, Whitney. For ten years. Every time you handed me an exit I took it and said thank you."
Whitney put her face in her hands for a second, then took it out again.
"The roast," she said.
"Yes."
"I want to say something about the roast and I can't work out if it's an apology or an excuse, so I'll say it and you can decide.
" She sat back. "I wrote that in about forty minutes on a Sunday.
I've written one every year for twelve years.
It's not — Nicole, I promise you it was not a considered act.
That's the thing I've been trying to say to you since December, and it always comes out as a defense and it isn't meant to be one. "
"I know it wasn't considered."
"Then—"
"That's what's wrong with it," Nicole said.
"If you'd sat down and thought about how to hurt me, that would be a woman with a grudge, and I could hate you and go home.
You did it in forty minutes without thinking.
It came out of you fully formed, because after fifteen years that's just — that's what was in there.
" She stood up. "You didn't decide I was decorative.
You'd known it so long you could be funny about it in forty minutes on a Sunday. "
Whitney sat looking at the page on her desk.
"Is Gordon going to fire me?"
It was such an ordinary, frightened question that it landed harder than anything else in the room.
"I have no idea," Nicole said. "I haven't discussed you with my husband since December and I'm not going to start.
Whatever happens between you and him is between you and him, and I want that on the record, because in about four months somebody is going to tell you I asked for it, and I didn't, and you should know that. "
"That's — " Whitney's mouth moved. "Thank you."
"It isn't a kindness. I don't want you to be a thing he did for me either."
She picked up her bag.
At the door, Whitney said, "For what it's worth. And I know exactly what it's worth."
Nicole waited.
"You'd have been better at it than me," Whitney said.
"That's not a nice thing to say to you and I'm not saying it to be nice.
I've read the ledger. You priced better than I price, in pencil, on no sleep, at twenty-six.
" She was very still. "And I've spent four months trying to work out how I feel about that, and the honest answer is that I'm relieved you weren't there.
That's the worst sentence I've ever said out loud. "
Nicole stood in the doorway.
"Yes," she said. "It is."
And she went.
Bridget was in the car with the engine off and the windows fogging.
"Well?"
"It's done."
"Did you destroy her?"
Nicole put her seatbelt on. Farnsworth Street was going gold at the top of the buildings and gray at the bottom.
"I don't know," she said. "That's the thing. I keep waiting for it to feel like something."
"What does it feel like?"