Someone Saw #2
“It’s a good job,” Priya said. “I looked it up. I looked it up at half past midnight in my kitchen like a lunatic.” Her mouth went sideways for a second. “You’d be extremely good at it, and this building will be considerably worse off, and both of those can be true while I’m still not over it.”
They went back to work.
There was no rupture and no cooling and no meaningful change of any kind: Priya came back at two with a redline, and at three they spent twenty minutes reorganizing a travel week, and at four she said something dry about the facilities man’s standing desk that made Jo laugh out loud for the first time in a week.
Nothing was different, and everything had a second person in it.
Twice that afternoon Jo did the same thing without meaning to: checked Priya’s face after Alexander spoke.
Not for signals. For damage. She was auditing the cost of something she had imposed on a person who had not been consulted, and she could not make herself stop, and Priya either did not notice or was better at this than Jo was.
Probably the second one.
At half past five Alexander came out of his office and stopped at Priya’s desk on his way past.
“Did the Frankfurt call move?”
“Thursday at seven, your time. I’ve put it before the board prep, which you’ll hate, but the alternative was Friday.”
“I’ll hate it correctly. Thank you.” He looked over. “Jo. Do you have the Warrick two-pager?”
“Doyle’s got it. He’s taking it in himself on Monday.”
“Good.” He was already half turned toward his door, and he stopped there. “That’s the right call, him taking it. It’ll land better.”
And he went, and Jo sat at her desk twelve feet from his office with the ordinary sound of the floor going on around her, and did not look at Priya, and knew that Priya was not looking at her either.
Two people on this floor now knew.
The one who did not was the one it was about. He had stopped at a desk on his way past to say a kind and accurate thing about a document. Tomorrow he would do it again.
At six she packed her bag and put her coat on and got as far as the elevator bank.
She stood there for the length of two cars. The first one came and went with three people from the fortieth floor in it. The second one came and she let the doors close on an empty car, which the man from facilities saw her do and elected to say nothing about.
The thing she was weighing was not whether to tell him. That had stopped being a live question in a conference room with six chairs and no window, somewhere around the moment a woman she had worked beside for five months told her she was disappointed and then went back to work.
What she was weighing was whether she could do it tonight or whether she needed the weekend.
And she watched herself weigh it, and recognized the shape of the weighing, because it was the same one as Thursday and the same one as the Tuesday before that, and it had a name now.
She was going to do this for the rest of her life if nobody stopped her.
Nobody was going to. The only two people who could had both just declined.
She turned around.
The floor had gone to its evening quiet. His door was open. She stood in it.
“Have you got twenty minutes?”
He looked up from the screen, and looked at her a second longer than the question warranted, and put the screen to sleep without being asked to. That was an answer before he gave one.
“I’ve got as long as you want.”
Jo stood in the doorway with her bag on her shoulder and the folder in it and twenty days behind her and a woman four desks away pretending hard to be finishing an email.
“Not here,” she said. “Tonight. Upstairs. I need to tell you a thing and I need to do it sitting down, and I’d rather it wasn’t in a room with a glass wall.”
He did not move at all for a second. Then he sat back and put his hands flat on the arms of the chair, and did not ask her what it was about, which she could see him choosing not to do.
“All right,” he said. “Eight.”
“Eight.”
She made it to the elevator. She made it down thirty-eight floors and out through the lobby and two blocks north before her hands started, and she stood at the corner of Fifty-Second and let it happen, and the last working part of her brain filed it as the first thing her body had done about any of this in twenty days.
She had told six people about the offer, in some form, before she told him. Dani. Reagan. A woman in Stamford, an analyst who had left, a headhunter she had turned down eighteen months ago. Priya, by accident, on a curb.
Six. She counted them standing on a corner in the fifties with her hands not working properly, and the number was worse than any single one of them, because it meant this had stopped being a secret about nine days ago and had become something with a longer word attached.
She could see the next two hours in full.
She would go home first. Change. Assemble it.
Write the three sentences on a legal pad in her own shorthand, rehearse them on the train, arrive at eight with a document and a plan and the whole thing shaped into something she was presenting rather than something she was confessing.
She knew exactly how good she would be at that. She had two hours, a bag, and every skill the job required.
Jo got her phone out and texted Dani: telling him tonight, 8. She put it away without waiting for the reply, because waiting for the reply would have been the first move in building the version with the plan in it.
Then she walked. She did not go home, because going home would have been the same avoidance in a competent costume, and she had run out of room to do that in.
From Fifty-Second she went up to the park and around the bottom of it and back, forty minutes, in her work clothes, with the folder in her bag, rehearsing nothing.
She had a deadline now. She had given it to herself out loud, in front of a witness, in a doorway.
Eight o’clock.