Chapter 14 #2
"Right," Yolanda said afterward, in the market floor, with the new air moving over them properly for the first time since 1987. "Now. The archdiocese has thirty-one buildings and I've got twenty-two of them left, and I have a problem, which is that I don't know who to call at your company."
"You call Lattimore."
"I call Lattimore and Lattimore calls you." Yolanda took her glasses off. "Nicole. What are you? Actually. What's the word?"
"I don't have one."
"Everybody has one."
"I have a desk on the fourth floor," Nicole said, "and no contract and no title and no salary, and I've been doing this since December for nothing, because the alternative was to be a woman who left."
Yolanda Beckett put her glasses back on.
"Well, that's absurd," she said. "Sort it out, would you? I'm sixty-four and I'd like to know who to shout at."
That was the twenty-second of July.
On the twenty-fourth, Nicole sat down at a rented kitchen counter with a legal pad, and did the thing she had not been able to do in 2019 when the offer said any role you want, with a title of your choosing.
She wrote the job.
It took her four hours and she did it the way she priced: on paper, badly, then again properly.
Scope. Reporting line — to the board, not to Gordon, which she underlined twice.
Salary, benchmarked against Lattimore's, which she got out of Dolores before Dolores retired.
The archdiocese portfolio, the retrofit division that didn't exist yet, Kara's team under it, and a clause about the founding archive that she drafted three times.
At the bottom she wrote a title and then crossed it out and wrote a different one.
It was not a nice document. It was not a request. It cost real money and it took two things off the sixth floor and it named a reporting line that put her outside her husband's authority entirely.
She read it through at two in the morning and thought: they'll say no.
And then she thought — with a kind of calm that surprised her, sitting alone in a rented kitchen with a dead burner and a garage view — and if they say no, I'll go somewhere that says yes, and I'll take Kara, and Beckett will follow me, and they know it.
That was the whole difference. In 2019 she'd had nothing to walk toward.
In July she had a client with twenty-two buildings, a project on the front of a trade journal, a woman named Ilene who would give her the file, and a man called Miles Ashby who ran mechanical at a rival firm and had said he'd ask again.
She showed it to two people before she sent it.
The first was Kara, who read it standing up in the market floor with a hard hat under her arm and got to the third page and said, "Wait. My team goes to you?"
"Your team goes to you. You go to me. And you get a budget line, which you currently don't have, which is why you've been begging Lattimore for a second surveyor since March."
"And you're — " Kara turned back a page. "You're not reporting to your husband."
"No."
"Can you do that? Is that a thing you can do?"
"I don't know," Nicole said. "I've written it down. That's as far as I've got."
Kara read the rest of it in silence. Then she handed it back and said, with an expression Nicole would remember for a long time, "If they say no to this, I'm going wherever you go."
"Don't say that."
"I'm saying it."
"Kara, you have a career and a mortgage and you're twenty-nine—"
"And I watched a woman reprint twenty handouts on a broken copier at seven in the morning so my name would be on a page," Kara said. "So. I'm saying it."
The second was Ilene Brackett, who read it at her desk with a pencil in her hand and made four small marks on it.
"Your archive clause is soft."
"Is it?"
"'The company will maintain the founding record.
' That's a sentiment, Nicole. That's not a clause.
" Ilene turned it around. "Who maintains it?
Under whose authority? What happens if a marketing department decides in six years that it's tidier without it?
" She tapped the page. "Say: a permanent archive, under the archivist's sole editorial control, not amendable by the executive, with a named budget. Make it ugly. Ugly survives."
Nicole looked at her.
"Ilene, that gives you the power to refuse the owner of the company."
"Yes," said Ilene Brackett.
Nicole rewrote it that night and made it ugly.
She did not send it to Gordon.
She sent it to the board, at nine o'clock on the Friday morning, with Ross Danforth copied and her husband not copied at all — and then she went to work, and did not check her email for four hours, and got more done than she had all week.
At two in the afternoon Ross came down to the fourth floor and stood at the end of her row without saying anything until she looked up.
"He's recused himself," he said.
"From what?"
"From your item. He's written to the board.
One line — that he has a conflict and will take no part in the discussion or the vote, and asks that he not be told the outcome before you are.
" Ross had his glasses in his hand and was not doing anything with them.
"Nicole, I've sat on things with that man for twenty years and I have never seen him take himself out of a room he could win. "
Nicole put her pencil down.
"When's the vote?"
"Thursday."
"Who's on it?"
"Seven," Ross said. "Without him, six. And I'll tell you the truth because you'd get it out of me anyway: two are certain, two are against, and two of them think you're a woman having a difficult year."
"And you?"
"I'm the seventh," Ross said, "and I'm not going to tell you how I'm voting, because you deserve to find out on Thursday like everybody else."
He put his glasses back on and went away, and Nicole sat at a desk she had claimed in December, unexpectedly and completely calm.