Chapter 37
Chapter
Carol from Legal peers at my phone through her reading glasses, scrutinizing the contract.
“There is in fact nothing light about this NDA, Ruby,” she says, gaze flipping back up to me.
“He had you sign an NDA?” Greg actually looks like he wants to kill someone on my behalf. Regrettably for me, my first and most powerful thought is, It’s kind of hot.
“Why did you sign this?” Carol laughs. “Was the sex that good?”
“Carol!” Rebecca from HR scolds.
Greg’s scratching his neck like he has a rash.
“She can’t tell you without breaking the NDA,” Steve the Project Manager cracks.
“Wow, hostile work environment!” I snatch my phone back and shoot Steve an acid glare.
I’m ashamed enough to last a lifetime already, but the idea of this random dude from high school judging me makes me see red. I want to make him squirm right back. “I’d give him a six out of ten,” I add.
Sarah cackles. “Brutal.” She glances over at Greg, who’s looking very interested in the ceiling tiles. “Sorry,” she says.
“I’m an idiot, okay!” I exclaim. “No thoughts, head empty.”
Morgan nods knowingly. “I remember being like that. It’s relatable. Losing our minds over a hot man who is ultimately kind of terrible—I mean, it happens to everyone.”
Al furrows his brow. “Does it?”
“God, what is this, Melrose Place?” Diane from Complaint Resolution says under her breath.
“Hey,” Greg says. “Ruby’s willing to take a big risk for us now, okay? Ease up.”
“Why don’t we vote on it?” Sarah says. “Whether we trust Ruby to, uh…work with us on this.”
“What happens if we don’t trust her?” Steve asks.
“Then I’ll sign an NDA about this too, and you can sue me if I break it.”
Everyone laughs, and I feel lighter for a second.
“All in favor of trusting Ruby,” Sarah says, “raise your hands.”
The moments when everyone is thinking about it, trying to make a decision about me, seem to stretch on forever.
And suspended in that moment, even though I’ve been settled on breaking up with Mark Winterson for days, a pang of guilt hits me—because of all the things I’ve tried, dating him is far and away the one Mom has been happiest about.
A panicked, lizard-brained part of me squeaks, What if marrying him was the thing that could make her move on?
But hands start going up, one by one. Morgan’s and Al’s and Sarah’s. Rebecca’s, tentatively, then Carol’s too. All the accountants, Grace and Sam from Sales, some people on other teams I haven’t seen since school.
I twist backward to look at Greg, who’s been pacing the whole time and is once again hovering by the pies. His hand goes up, reluctantly. There’s something complicated in the way he’s staring at me, and I can’t tell if it’s directed at me or himself.
In the end, there’s only a handful of detractors. It almost makes me tear up—a literal vote of confidence.
“The ayes have it,” Sarah says.
Greg lowers his arm. “Okay, I think we’re good here. Ruby, let’s talk? I can fill you in on everything.”
In the time it takes us to get to the playground, an evening fog has rolled in, and the glow of the streetlamps in the distance is all fuzzed out and hazy.
You can’t even see the school building on the other side of the field.
It’s like Greg and I are in our own little world, pushing ourselves back and forth on the swings, wondering where to start.
“You should break up with him,” he mumbles.
“Excuse me?”
“Just break up with him!” Greg exclaims, an unfamiliar edge in his voice.
A contrary impulse overtakes me. I want to shout, Don’t tell me what to do!
He tugs at his hair with both hands, like he’s losing his mind. “I felt like I needed to defend you back there, but…” His hands drop into his lap. “This is ridiculous. It’s a bad idea.”
I take a deep breath. Maybe we should reset. Find a different way in to talking about this. “How did you even end up organizing a union?”
“Kind of by accident? A bunch of us were talking about how things had been going at work, and I said we should form a union, half as a joke.”
“Nothing like living out your joke suggestion.”
He laughs and shakes his head like it’s the craziest thing.
“But Sarah went to college with someone who works for one of the big unions who could represent us. We met with her, and I talked to people at work about it, and I started to realize…people wanted to listen to me? And I started to think, the more I talked to everyone…maybe there’s something we can do here. ”
“So capitalism isn’t a meritocracy, and we’re not really in control and things don’t make sense—but you believe in the union?”
Greg’s smile gets wider, recognizing his own words thrown back at him. “I like it better than the alternative. Wherever things are going, we’re here in the meantime, with one another—all of us, day to day. We’re all we’ve got. We’d better make the most of it.”
“You said you’re close to going public with it?” I prod. “How close?”
Greg rocks himself back and forth in silence. And then, with a deep sigh, he pulls out his phone.
“You know TKCORP is massive,” he says, tilting the screen horizontally and holding it out in front of me. It looks like he’s pulled up the same spreadsheet Morgan had on her screen earlier.
“Maybe fifty thousand people?”
“Yeah, across all offices. We’re starting by unionizing headquarters first, and hopefully other offices can follow, one by one. But even that’s like five thousand people. Huge. That’s why it’s taken years. Kind of a miracle we’ve managed to keep it a secret this long.”
He scrolls down the spreadsheet with one finger. “We’ve been going around to everyone we can, getting people on our side in different departments.”
Every row in the spreadsheet is a name, and beside each one is a number and some notes. It seems like every single person who works at the main office is in here.
“Can I see?” I ask, and he passes the phone to me.
“The colors show who’s talking to who,” Greg says, leaning closer in his swing and pointing. “Everyone gets a rating based on how likely we think they are to support the union—‘one’ is most likely, ‘five’ is least.”
I scroll down slowly, skimming the notes about conversations the union members had with each person. They really have been busy.
Finally I reach my name, and there’s a three next to it, with some comments attached.
Five, she’s dating management (Steve)
Two, she’s cool (Greg)
DO NOT CONTACT (Carol)
My heart warms at what Greg wrote, even though the doubt stings at the same time.
“We need half the people in the office to sign cards before we can have an election,” Greg says as I pass his phone back. “And we’re basically there.”
“That’s amazing!”
“But if you go public with only that fifty percent secured, you’ll probably lose. Management is going to pull out all the stops to turn people against us. They’ve already started—you saw.”
Greg looks down at his feet, shuffling them in the dirt.
“Every week we put it off is a gamble. If they find us out, they’ll probably lay us all off before the bigger wave.
We’re holding out until the company retreat that’s coming up, because that’ll be big for us—everyone from the departments we’ve had trouble reaching will be there, in one place. ”
“I still can’t believe you got twenty-five hundred people to sign cards.”
“Helps that a lot of us went to school together. All that social overlap across departments.” The corner of his mouth turns up. “Why do you think the accountants throw so many parties? Good recruitment strategy.”
“Is that why I never get invited?”
“You think I haven’t wanted to invite you?” Greg lets out an exhausted laugh. “I’m relieved you know now, honestly. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, before you started dating…” He trails off and waves a hand.
“Why didn’t you?”
“You were going through a lot. And I figured it didn’t exactly fit with your mission?
Trying to live the way your mom wanted. I didn’t want to derail you.
” He sighs again, staring out into the fog.
“Maybe like a week or two before that all-hands, we realized Mark Winterson was going to be a problem. He started showing up to every work-adjacent social event he could, trying to catch any union gossip, figure out who was involved. He’s Erickson’s guy. The one doing his dirty work.”
I stop swinging, all these weird moments from the recent past flashing back through my mind. “Okay, what should I be looking for?”
“I don’t want you looking for anything.”
“Greg, I’m doing this!” My grip tightens on the swing, chains digging into my skin.
It’s hard to explain, but when everyone’s hands went up, it was like I could see the answer to Trisha’s question shimmering just out of reach: the outline of who I want to be.
“I’m always going around feeling like I’m this numb host for tasks and unmet goals and failures.
But here’s a mess I made that I can do something with, for once!
” My voice has slowly been getting louder and louder, and now I’m shouting. “So tell me how I can help!”
Greg blinks at me, like he wasn’t expecting this outburst. A little smile creeps onto his face, and I shove him reflexively, which sends my swing rocking from side to side.
He stares at his feet, fighting himself again, but eventually telling me must win out.
“There was something in the books—these recurring payments to a vendor I didn’t recognize, coming up over and over.
Same amount, each time. I tried to get more information about them, my boss ran it up the chain, and we got a bullshit excuse back.
Right after I asked, that vendor disappeared for a while, and another weird one popped up.
But when I mentioned that one, my boss told me to stay in my lane. ”
“How about this for proof?” I ask, pulling up the photo I took of Mark Winterson’s bank account. It looks like it was taken through a screen door, the way the image distorts, but when I pinch to zoom, it’s still clear—all the transactions for $9,999.
His jaw drops. “How did you get this?”
“He literally left himself logged in when he bolted out of the house at two a.m. This isn’t exactly Ocean’s Eleven.”
Greg runs a hand over his face. “I don’t think it’s enough on its own, yet. But it’s definitely something.” He moistens his dry lips in his mouth. “Just be careful, okay? Don’t let him catch you.”
He looks so worried about me, I can hardly stand it—I lean over and ruffle his hair, and he closes his eyes like it’s painful. “I really hate this,” he says quietly.
There’s so much hanging unspoken in the air between us. But I keep thinking about everyone at the diner, and how clearheaded I felt for once, after years of fumbling around in a haze.
“I’ll break up with him after the company retreat,” I say. “That’s two weeks—I’ve stayed in relationships I shouldn’t have for way longer than that. Like there was Owen…Miles…”
“Jamie,” Greg adds, ticking off his fingers. “Brian.”
“All right, stop helping! What are you, my permanent record?” I whack him on the arm. “We don’t talk enough, as a society, about the downsides of having lifelong friends.”
“I’m not that much better?” Greg says with a weak laugh. “Averaging, what? Three or four girlfriends a year.”
I do love some self-awareness.
“Yeah, you’re kind of a fuckboy,” I say wistfully. “Who knows if you’ve ever really liked someone.”
“Ouch. That’s harsh, Ruby.” Greg sounds more wounded than I would have expected.
“I’ve been trying! Every new relationship, I go in hopeful.
But maybe…my heart has just been somewhere else.
” He hesitates for a moment, kicking the dirt under his swing.
“I’m also not dating Sarah, in case you didn’t figure that out.
” He squeezes the back of his neck with one hand.
“I just couldn’t think of another explanation on the spot, when you pointed out we were sneaking around. And I didn’t want to blow our cover.”
There’s a rush of blood to my head, and I feel uncomfortably weightless, like I jumped off something tall. But all those old wounds and years of silence weigh on me; I need more confirmation.
“So when you said he’s not good enough for me—”
“He’s not!” Greg scoffs. “It’s just a fact.”
I give him a playful little shove. “Are you jealous?”
He takes the deepest breath in, lets it out real slow. “Ruby,” he says like this is the most obvious thing. “Of course I’m jealous. I try to keep it low-key, but…there might not be enough adjectives in the world to describe how jealous I’ve been.”
I have to laugh, even though the butterflies I usually keep tamped down are starting to riot. “Greg, I have…a lot to think about right now. It’s—”
It’s going to be hard enough to act like nothing is different when I’m around Mark Winterson. I have to deal with one thing at a time.
“Can you hold that thought for two weeks?” I ask.
Greg stares at the ground for a long moment, but then he nods slowly. “Yeah, I mean…I’ve felt like this for a while. What’s another two weeks?” He reaches for my phone. “You have Signal?”
He adds me to the union chat and shows me how to mute notifications and set it so the messages disappear after twenty-four hours. “Check it when you’re not with him,” he says, jaw tense.
Then Greg stands, tugs me out of my swing, and wraps me in a hug, pressing me tight to him like we’re not going to see each other for a year. His hand cradles the back of my head, fingers in my hair.
“Two weeks,” I say again. “And then we’ll have a long talk.”
Greg huffs out a laugh, a small puff of air against my cheek. “Looking forward to it.”
We go to our separate cars and absurdly follow each other home, mine after his down the same sleeping streets, stopping at the same red lights. When I park in my driveway, he slows, window down, and gives me the saddest little wave.
At home, I open the Signal thread, and there are all these messages rolling in. My first real group chat.
Al:
talked to some guys from the mailroom finally. They’re in.
Sarah:
i had coffee with Lisa from Supplier Relations and she’s working on spreading the word on that team
Morgan:
and hey, look at us
can’t believe we have an undercover agent
Ruby:
LOL
i’ll do my best
And Sarah sends me a side message, individually:
Sarah:
thanks for joining us
here to talk if shit gets weird
and i’m sure it will
My thumbs move to type but it’s like with Mom’s messages—I’m overwhelmed with too much feeling for pixels on a screen, too many things I want to say to tame with twenty-six letters, even with special characters and emojis. But I just write back: thanks sarah!
And then a text arrives from Mark Winterson, asking if I can come over this weekend.