On Her Own Ground
She asked him to meet her in the atrium, because it was the one room in the city that belonged to neither of them.
He was already there at two, at the same table near the ficus trees, with a paper cup he had not drunk from. The cleaner was running a machine along the mezzanine. The coffee cart man was arguing with a courier, possibly the same courier.
Jo sat down across from him.
“I’ve done it,” she said. “Both of them. That’s why I wanted today rather than last night.”
“All right.”
“I turned down the Lasker job yesterday afternoon. In person, at their office, with reasons. And on Monday morning I’m resigning from Kade Group.”
Alexander did not move.
She had thought about this part for eleven hours and had decided that the only honest way through was to give him the whole thing at once and then stop talking, so she did.
“I turned down the job because of what Vivienne did on Wednesday. Not because of you — you told me to take it three times and I believe you meant it every time. Because if I’d signed yesterday then the timing worked, and I’d have spent the next four years knowing my life turned on a sentence she said in a dining room.
That’s the same problem I already had. Better paid. ”
“And Kade.”
“Kade is the actual problem and it always was.” Jo kept her hands still on the table.
“You built me the best structure that company can produce. Doyle went on record. Naomi went on record. Legal put conditions on you and you took them. There is no better version of it available and it still doesn’t work, because in two years, when I’m good at it, somebody will say I got it because of you, and they’ll be wrong, and it will still be sayable, and there is no memo that stops a thing being sayable. ”
She stopped.
“That’s it. That’s what I’ve done. I’m not asking you for anything and I’m not asking you to agree.”
The atrium went on around them.
“Ask me the practical questions,” Jo said. “You’ll be better once you’ve got some.”
“All right.” He did not need a second invitation. “Notice period.”
“Two weeks, which I’m going to work, all of it, properly.
I’m not doing the thing where somebody resigns and spends two weeks being gracious at a desk.
I’ll hand over Warrick Street to Doyle with a proper file, and I’ll write the October board note before I go because I know what’s in the annex and he’d have to reconstruct it. ”
“He’ll say that isn’t necessary.”
“He’ll say that and then he’ll take it, because he’s not an idiot.” She turned the cup and did not stop herself this time. “I’m telling Priya on Monday morning before I tell anyone else. Before HR, before Doyle. She’s earned that and I owe her considerably more than that.”
“Does she know already?”
“She’s known since Twenty-Sixth Street in July.” Jo watched him take that. “She saw me coming out of their office. She asked me one question and she never told you, and she told me to my face that she wasn’t doing it as a favor to me. She’s been carrying it for five weeks.”
Alexander sat with that for a moment.
“I’d have been very unfair to her,” he said, “if I’d found out from anyone but you.”
“You’d have been extremely fair to her out loud and never trusted her the same way again. She said so. In a room with no glass.” Jo put the cup down. “That’s on my account, not hers. I’d like that noted somewhere.”
“It’s noted.”
“When did you decide?” he said.
“Between six and nine yesterday morning, on my kitchen floor, having cleaned a kitchen that was already clean.”
He did not comment on it, and she was grateful, and she also understood that he had recognized the reference, which meant he had been carrying her mother’s story around since a Wednesday in an atrium six weeks ago.
“Right,” Alexander said.
And then he sat there.
Jo waited for it. She had built the version where he argued — where he said Warrick Street is real and you’re throwing away a seat you earned and at least take the ninety days — and she had answers ready for all of it, and she had been carrying the answers up Sixth Avenue since three o’clock the previous afternoon.
He did not say any of it.
“You’re not going to argue,” she said.
“No.”
“You want to.”
“I want to enormously.” He turned the cup a quarter turn and stopped.
“I have about nine things and every one of them is good and two of them are probably right. And I’m not going to say them, because you’ve already done it, and a man who argues with a decision after it’s executed isn’t arguing, he’s asking you to undo it in front of him. ”
“That’s the most restrained thing I’ve ever watched anybody do.”
“It’s not restraint, it’s arithmetic.” He almost smiled and did not commit to it.
“I did the version where I argue. On the way here. It ends with you doing exactly what you’ve already done and me having spent our first honest conversation in a month trying to talk you out of the first decision you’ve made all year that didn’t have me in it. ”
Jo looked at the table.
“Say the nine things,” she said. “Some other week. I want to hear them. Just not while they’d count as a vote.”
“That’s fair. I’ll write them down.”
“You will actually write them down.”
“I’ll put them in a memo,” Alexander said. “Four paragraphs. It’ll be devastating.”
And she laughed, properly, out loud, in a public atrium, eleven days after the last time, and then put her hand over her mouth because it had come out closer to a sob than she was ready for.
“Can I say a thing now,” he said. “It isn’t the nine things.”
“Yes.”
“When Grant’s messages came in on Wednesday night, I went downstairs and sat in my office for an hour.” He had both hands around the cold cup. “And I want to tell you what I actually did in that hour, because you’ll have constructed it and you’ll have constructed it worse.”
“Go on.”
“I sat there and I worked out what I’d lose. Properly. On paper, in my head, the way I’d do a deal.” He looked up. “Because that’s what I do when something is coming at me — I price it. And I got about four lines in and stopped, because the list was wrong.”
“Wrong how.”
“It had the wrong things on it.” His voice stayed level and it was not level underneath.
“Warrick Street was on it. The committee seat. Nine months of a joint venture and a cure path and the fact that if you go, the thing I’ve built for the last decade gets marginally harder to run.
” He put the cup down. “And I looked at that list, Jo, and not one item on it made me feel anything at all. I could lose the entire Warrick Street position tomorrow. I would be irritated for a quarter.”
“Alexander —”
“I’m nearly finished.” He met her eyes. “The tower was never the thing. I’ve spent six years arranging a life so that nothing could be taken from me, and I built the whole apparatus around a building, and then I sat in it at one in the morning and found out I’d been guarding the wrong asset the entire time.
That’s it. That’s what I did in the hour.
I found out what the actual exposure was, which is you, and it has been you since about the fourth week, and I’ve never said so in those words because you make it very hard to say things in those words. ”
Jo could not speak.
“You are not a risk I’ve decided to accept,” he said. “You’re the only thing on the list. Everything else is furniture.”
Jo got her hands around the cold cup because they needed a job.
“Say the next part,” she said. “There’s a next part. You’ve got the face.”
“The next part is that I’m not going to do anything with it.” He said it evenly. “That’s the whole of my position and I’ve been assembling it since Wednesday. I’m not going to ask you to stay in New York, or to take a job, or to not take one. I’m not going to buy four buildings in Providence.”
“Don’t you dare —”
“I’m aware. That’s why I’ve said it out loud, so it’s on the record as a thing I have declined to do.
” Something moved at the corner of his mouth.
“I want you to understand that I looked at it. On Thursday. For about ninety seconds I sat there and worked out what it would take to put a small hospitality platform together and hand you the operating seat, and it is entirely achievable, and I could have it structured by October.”
“Alexander.”
“And it would be the single worst thing I have ever done to a person I love.” He said it plainly.
“You’d have taken it. That’s the part that stopped me.
You’d have taken it, and you’d have been superb at it, and every day for the rest of your life you’d have wondered, and I would have built the exact machine you have just spent a month dismantling. ”
Jo could not look at him for a second.
“How long did it take you to put it down?”
“Ninety seconds to see it. About four hours to stop wanting to.” He shrugged with one shoulder. “I’d like credit for the four hours. I’m aware I don’t get any.”
They sat there for a while after that. Neither of them touched the coffee.
“I’m going to be unemployed on Monday,” Jo said eventually. “I want to say that out loud in daylight so it isn’t romantic.”
“You’ll be unemployed for about six weeks.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t know it. I believe it, which is different, and I’d like the record to show I said it in July.” He stood and picked up both cups and put them in the bin, and came back, and did not sit down. “Come to yours.”
Jo looked up.
“What?”
“Your apartment. Astoria.” He said it as though it were obvious, and it was not obvious; it had never once happened.
“I’ve been to that apartment twice in five months, both times for about ten minutes, both times to collect you for something.
Every single conversation we have ever had that mattered has happened on ground I own. ”
“Dani’s on nights.”
“That isn’t why I’m asking.”
“I know it isn’t.” Jo stood up. “It’s a forty-minute train.”
“I’m aware. I looked it up on Wednesday, at about two in the morning, for reasons I’d rather not go into.”