Chapter 4 #2
“More interesting,” Audrey repeated, and the two words were perfectly neutral in a way that twelve years of working together told Simone was not neutral at all.
“I'll send the revised positioning notes tonight, then work on the full model.”
“I'll be here.”
They hung up. Simone stood at the window looking out at downtown Phoenix Ridge through the rain—the low skyline, the harbor dissolving into mist, the headlights of afternoon traffic blurring on wet streets.
It was the same view she'd looked at the day the bid went live, when the exhilaration from it had lasted twenty minutes before the old restlessness replaced it.
Except the exhilaration from the meeting hadn't faded yet. It had been four hours since she’d stood in the boardroom, and she could still feel it.
She hadn't had to work that hard in a presentation in years, hadn't had to adjust in real time to read the room and recalibrate her message to account for an opponent who was doing the same thing from the other end of the table with equal precision.
It was the best she'd felt in a boardroom since she couldn't remember when, and that was the part she was going to need to be careful about.
Behind her, Tess was packing her laptop into her bag and pulling on her black puffy coat. "I'm meeting someone for a drink at that place on Harbor Street. The one with the good happy hour."
“You've been here three months and you already have a happy hour spot?”
“I've been here three months, and I have four happy hour spots.” Tess zipped her bag. “You should come.”
“I have work to do.”
“You always have work.”
Simone knew Tess well enough to know it was a non-judgmental observation.
The door closed behind Tess, and Simone turned back to the window, and she thought about the woman on the other side of that boardroom table who was, without question, the most formidable opponent Simone had faced in a decade.
She didn't stay long after Tess left. The office was the wrong kind of quiet—not productive, just empty—and the financial model wasn't going to rebuild itself tonight no matter how long she stared at the whiteboard. Simone shut her laptop, pulled on her coat, and took the stairs down to the street.
She didn't go back to the penthouse. She wasn't ready for that particular quiet there either, which was different from the office quiet but had the same essential problem: there was no one in it.
She walked through downtown Phoenix Ridge in the drizzle, her hands stuffed in her coat pockets. She had no destination; she walked to think, and when she didn't want to think, she walked to move. Either way the city was just a background. Or, at least, it had been.
After three months, Phoenix Ridge was becoming harder to ignore.
The brick storefronts along Main Street with their awnings dripping rain in uneven rhythms. The smell of the harbor carrying through the wet air—salt and diesel and something green underneath, kelp or seaweed.
The way the streetlights caught the wet pavement and turned every sidewalk into a dark mirror.
She had been in cities more beautiful and more interesting than this one, and she couldn't remember noticing any of them after the first week.
She thought about Tess at one of her bars on Harbor Street, talking to whoever was next to her with the easy openness of someone who made connections without an underlying motive.
What did Simone have? An apartment she could pack up and leave in twenty minutes and a coastal trail she ran in the dark.
The comparison wasn't useful, and Simone let it go.
But what kept surfacing between one block and the next, like a stone she kept stepping on, was a small detail from the meeting that she hadn't examined yet because examining it required a kind of honesty she wasn't sure she wanted to acknowledge.
In the boardroom, Simone had called her Alexandra.
Not Ms. Vaughn, not Chairwoman Vaughn. Alexandra.
It was a deliberate choice she made in every negotiation because first names were a tool; they created a false intimacy, and intimacy created access, and access was leverage.
She had used it on a hundred CEOs and board chairs and managing directors, and it always worked because people wanted to be seen as people rather than titles, even when they knew exactly what you were doing.
She had told herself, walking into that boardroom, that this was the same play she'd run every time.
Yet, it wasn't the same.
Walking through the rain now, four hours and six blocks from that conference table, Simone could see clearly what she'd chosen not to see in the moment: she hadn't used Alexandra's first name because it was strategic; she'd used it because Ms. Vaughn felt wrong.
She had wanted the actual name. Not the position or the role, but the person.
And that wanting had been immediate and instinctive and not tactical at all. She had seen it clearly in the moment, decided it was manageable, and kept moving forward without unpacking it further.
The rain was picking up, and daylight was fading. She passed the café where the barista had started recognizing her face, the one whose name she hadn't learned. She thought about going in but reconsidered without slowing down.
Simone turned onto Monarch Street and walked toward the waterfront, the rain on her face, the city closing in around her with its wet streets and its warm windows and its stubborn, quiet refusal to be just another city she'd leave behind.