Due Diligence #3
She walked from the west twenties to the F train instead of getting a cab, because she needed the thirty minutes.
The offer was real. Lasker was real, Ferrante was real, Raval was real and had lost sleep over a management fee.
The governance was tighter than it needed to be.
The money was boring. The work was the work she already did, at three times the seniority and twice the pay, with her name on it and nine people reporting to her and a whiteboard she was allowed to argue with.
There was no trick. There was no version of this she could take home and be righteous about.
So the question had changed, and Jo made herself say the new one properly, out loud, on Ninth Avenue, because a question you will not say out loud is a question you have already answered badly.
“What am I actually worth.”
Not: is this a trap. Not: what does Vivienne want. Those were questions about other people, and she had been hiding inside them for twelve days because questions about other people are free.
What am I worth. Independent of the tower, independent of the man in it, independent of a professional year that had happened inside eight feet of a person she was sleeping with.
What would somebody pay for her if she walked in cold, with a folder of her own work, and no one in the room had ever met Alexander Kade.
Two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars, apparently.
That figure had been sitting in her bag for twelve days and she had not once let it be about her.
She had made it about Vivienne, and about Alexander, and about whether the offer was clean, and about what telling him would do — every one of those a way of not standing still long enough to find out what she thought she was worth, which was a number she had been carrying around since she was nineteen and had never once said out loud.
Ninety-four thousand dollars. That was the number she had said out loud. She had negotiated it herself and been proud of it and opened something with a cork in it.
One-ten to one-twenty-five, the woman had said.
Maybe one-thirty at a fund — the number for the job Jo actually held, which meant she was underpaid by twenty percent even inside the frame she had accepted, and she had not known that, and the not-knowing was not an accident.
She had never asked. Asking would have produced a number, and a number would have required her to do something about it, and doing something about it would have meant walking into an office and saying I would like more than this to a man who had, six weeks earlier, put his hand on the back of her neck in a public atrium.
Then it’s a different question, and you’ve been asking me the wrong one for eighteen months.
Jo stopped at a light on Twenty-Sixth and let it go green without crossing.
There was a thing she had been doing for five months that she could see clearly now, standing still, and it was this: she had been treating the job as a place she had been let into.
Not earned — let into. A door had opened for her in a way it had not opened for the three years before, and the whole time she had been on the other side of it she had behaved like a woman who did not want to be asked to leave.
She had been good, and quiet about being good, and had priced every ask against the possibility of the door.
That was not Alexander’s doing. He had never once made her feel it. He had, in fact, spent five months trying to hand her things she declined to take.
She had done it to herself, out of three years of practice, and she would have done it in any building in the city.
The light went red. She crossed on the next one.
Eighteen months. So this had not started with a bakery.
It had not started with Vivienne, or with a folder, or with any of the things Jo had been able to file under happening to her.
It had started at some point she could not date, in a building she loved, doing work she was good at, while a version of herself she had never met kept quietly compiling evidence.
Jo got to the subway and did not go down.
She stood at the top of the stairs with commuters going around her on both sides and got her phone out and, standing on Twenty-Third Street at ten past eight on a Tuesday evening, in daylight, entirely sober, opened the shareholders’ agreement.
Sixty-one pages.
She read the first twelve standing on the platform with two trains going past. She read the rest on the third one with the folder balanced on her knees, and her stop went by, and she was somewhere around Thirty-Sixth Avenue before it registered, and she did not get up, because she was in the middle of the indemnities.
She got out at Queensboro Plaza and walked back three stops’ worth of Astoria in the last of the light with the folder under her arm.
By the time she got to her own door she had four questions for Lasker, one for Raval, and a note to herself about the abstention clause, and she had stopped — at some point on the train she could not identify and did not go looking for — considering it.