CHAPTER FOUR
PIERCE
The marketing consultant's name was Griffin, and he had the energy of a man who charged four hundred dollars an hour to tell other men what they already suspected about themselves.
"Your bio's a liability," he said, sliding a printed copy across the conference table like evidence in a trial.
"Not factually. Factually it's fine. But it reads like a memoir when it should read like a prospectus.
Investors at your level don't want to hear about a whiskey at a dive bar. They want to hear about returns."
"The whiskey's kind of the point, though. It's the whole reason anyone remembers the story."
"It's charming the first time somebody hears it in person.
On paper, in front of a board considering a nine-figure investment, it reads like you're still selling them on potential instead of performance.
" Griffin tapped the page, right where the old bio described the night at Ruthie's, the forty minutes, the woman who told him he hadn't actually lost anything that mattered.
"You've got the numbers now to just tell them the numbers.
Wilkinson Street, the Ashford building, the tower.
Let the record speak. Save the whiskey story for interviews, if you want, human interest angle. Keep the official bio clean."
I looked at the paragraph he wanted cut, the one I'd written myself two years ago and made a small point of keeping intact through every revision since, and felt something in my chest that I recognized, uncomfortably, as relief.
Relief that somebody else was suggesting it.
Relief that I wouldn't have to be the one who decided the story wasn't worth telling anymore, only the one who agreed when a professional told me it wasn't.
"Fine," I said. "Cut it. Keep the rest clean too, while you're at it. Numbers, projects, education. Nothing personal."
"Smart." Griffin made a note and moved on to the headshot selection, pulling up three options on his laptop, all of them showing me in variations of the same charcoal suit against the same neutral backdrop.
"This one," he said, tapping the middle image.
"Confident, approachable, not trying too hard.
This is the guy investors want running their money. "
"What was wrong with the one we used last year?"
"Nothing was wrong with it. It just had you standing in front of the Wilkinson building instead of a clean backdrop.
Made it feel more like a local story than a regional one.
You're past local now." He said it without any particular judgment, just professional assessment, and I nodded and let him pick, because he was right, technically, and because arguing for the old photo would have meant explaining why it mattered to me that the backdrop had been an actual building I'd actually built instead of a rented studio wall, and I didn't especially want to hear myself try to make that case out loud.
I sat there half listening, thinking about the ease with which I'd just agreed to erase a paragraph that used to be the first thing I told anyone who asked how I'd built any of this.
I called it a business decision, the kind serious developers made every day when they wanted a cleaner public narrative.
That explanation got me through the rest of the meeting without reopening the question.
Later that week, at a smaller industry lunch, I found myself in a conversation with two men from a Raleigh investment group, both of them talking about their wives' involvement on hospital boards and school fundraising committees, the specific social currency of a spouse who did the right kind of visible good work.
One of them, a man named Alderman, turned the question toward me eventually, the way these conversations always did.
"What about your wife, Redmond? She involved in anything like that? Boards, committees?"
"She's got her own thing going," I said. "Keeps her busy."
"What's her thing?"
There was a version of this conversation where I said veterinary technician plainly, where I told him Laurel worked at a downtown clinic and loved it and had zero interest in a hospital board because she was too busy actually helping animals instead of raising money to help them from a comfortable distance, which was a better answer than anything Alderman's wife was probably doing with her afternoons.
I had that answer sitting right there. I'd used it a hundred times before, proudly, without a second thought.
"Just keeps busy," I said instead, and reached for my water, and let the men around the table assume whatever they wanted to assume, that Laurel did something vague and unremarkable, a hobby rather than a job, a woman who filled her days without any particular purpose worth naming.
Nobody pushed. The conversation moved on to a proposed rezoning downtown, and by the time lunch ended I'd mostly forgotten I'd said anything at all.
It was driving back to the office that the sentence caught up with me, the way these things always seemed to catch up with me a few minutes too late to do anything useful with the discomfort.
Just keeps busy. I hadn't lied. I hadn't said Laurel didn't exist, hadn't claimed to be single, hadn't done anything a lawyer could point to as false.
I had simply let a true, good, specific answer stay unsaid, and replaced it with a vague enough non-answer that nobody in that room now had any real idea who my wife was or what she did with her life.
I thought about Whitfield's voice on the phone a few days earlier, warm and unbothered, asking after Laurel the way he always did, still fond of the woman who'd corrected him at the Dunhill all those years back.
Whitfield had never once needed me to make Laurel smaller or vaguer to feel comfortable around her.
If anything, he'd liked her more, plainly and immediately, the second she'd refused to be impressed by him.
It occurred to me, sitting at a red light two blocks from my building, that nobody in either of these recent conversations, Marcus Hendricks with his old-money curiosity or Alderman with his hospital-board wife, had actually demanded anything of me.
I had done all of this without being asked.
I had simply decided, somewhere along the way, that the honest answer wasn't worth the risk of giving it, and I couldn't fully explain to myself what risk I thought I was managing.
Naomi caught me on my way out at the end of the day, holding up her tablet. "New bio's live. Marketing wants to know if you want to share it on your personal page too, for reach."
"Sure. Whatever they think is best."
"You want to read it first? Just to make sure it sounds like you?"
I almost said yes. I had my hand halfway to the tablet before I changed my mind, telling her it was fine, that I trusted Griffin's team to have gotten it right, and headed for the elevator before she could ask again.
It wasn't that I didn't want to read it.
It was that some part of me already knew what wasn't in it anymore, and I didn't especially want to see the empty space where it used to be laid out in clean, professional font for anyone to notice.
That evening, at home, Laurel asked about my day over dinner, and I told her about the lunch, the rezoning proposal, a funny story about Alderman spilling wine on his own tie halfway through the meal.
I didn't mention what he'd asked about her.
I didn't mention what I'd said, or hadn't said, in response.
It wasn't a decision, exactly, not one I made consciously at the table.
It was just easier to talk about wine and ties than to explain a silence I didn't yet have language for, and by the time we'd finished eating and moved to the couch, tangled together in front of some show neither of us was really watching, the whole exchange with Alderman had folded itself down small enough to fit somewhere I didn't plan on unfolding again anytime soon.
Lying in bed that night with Laurel's back warm against me, I reduced the day to harmless details. A trimmed bio. A vague answer at lunch. Small edits to a life that was otherwise, by any reasonable measure, exactly what I had always wanted.
I almost believed it. I kept almost believing it for longer than I probably should have.
The new bio went live on the company website two days later. I didn't read it again after approving the draft. I told myself I didn't need to, that I already knew what it said, which was true in the narrowest possible sense and not at all true in the way that actually mattered.
Laurel mentioned it a few nights later, unprompted, scrolling through her phone at the kitchen table while I made coffee for the next morning. "I saw the new bio's up. Looks sharp."
"Yeah?" I kept my back to her, focused on the coffee maker, more carefully than the task required. "What'd you think?"
"Professional. Very numbers-forward." A pause, and I heard her scroll further. "Where's the part about Ruthie's? I always liked that part."
The question settled somewhere low in my chest, and I took a beat longer than I should have before answering, grateful she couldn't see my face. "Griffin's team thought it read better without the personal stuff. More sophisticated for investors."
"Huh." She didn't sound convinced, though she didn't press either, setting her phone down and reaching instead for the mail I'd left unsorted on the counter.
"I always thought that story was the best part.
Made you sound like someone worth rooting for instead of just another guy with a big number next to his name. "
"It's just a bio, Laurel. It doesn't change anything about the actual story."
"I know. I just liked seeing it written down somewhere official.
Made it feel real, I guess, in a way that's hard to explain.
" She shrugged, already moving on to the mail, entirely unaware of how precisely she'd just described the exact thing I'd let Griffin talk me into erasing. "Anyway. Sharp bio. Good pictures."
I didn't correct her. I didn't tell her the truth, which was that I'd sat in a conference room and agreed, within about thirty seconds, to cut the one part of my own story that had ever actually made anyone feel something reading it.
I finished making the coffee and let the conversation move on to the mail, a bill and a catalog and a wedding invitation from a cousin neither of us had spoken to in years, and told myself, again, that it was just a bio, small and forgettable, nothing worth the discomfort currently sitting low in my stomach.
Laurel opened the wedding invitation and read it aloud, a cousin of mine I hadn't seen in years marrying a man neither of us had met, the ceremony scheduled for a barn venue two hours outside the city.
"We should go," she said. "I love a barn wedding. Free cocktail hour and a chance to see your extended family pretend they remember my name."
"They remember your name. You're the one who beat my uncle at horseshoes two Thanksgivings running."
"That was one time, and I'm never going to stop bringing it up.
" She laughed, tucking the invitation onto the refrigerator with a magnet, and the easy warmth of the moment loosened something in my chest that had been tight since the bio conversation, a reminder, however brief, of how simply good this ordinary life still was underneath everything I was quietly starting to complicate.
I almost told her, right then, about the paragraph Griffin's team had cut, the whiskey and the forty minutes trimmed away for the sake of a more sophisticated narrative.
Standing there in the kitchen with her laughing about horseshoes, the confession felt suddenly, achingly available, a door standing open that I could have simply walked through.
I let the moment pass instead, telling myself there'd be another chance to bring it up later, a decision that felt small and inconsequential in that instant and would only later reveal itself as the first of many doors I'd quietly decided not to walk through when the walking would have been easy.