Chapter 10 #2
This was the only conversation in Simone's life that didn't require her to perform.
She didn't need to be strategic or charming.
She just needed to listen and Nadine just needed to talk, and somewhere in the ordinary exchange of garden updates and neighborhood gossip was the closest thing to warmth that either of them knew how to offer.
Nadine asked if she was eating properly, and Simone said yes, which was mostly true. Nadine asked about the weather in Phoenix Ridge, and Simone described the rain, the late autumn gray, and the way the coastal fog blanketed everything for days.
“That sounds miserable,” her mother said.
Simone shrugged involuntarily. “You get used to it.”
“How much longer will you be there?”
Simone knew the question was neutral. Her mother never asked about acquisitions directly and had no interest in the mechanics of corporate finance.
She regarded Simone's career with the pragmatic respect of a woman who understood that her daughter had built something substantial, even if the specific substance was beyond her.
Except she asked how long, but what she was really asking was when are you coming home?
Where home meant Montreal, the small house in Villeray with the kitchen that was too small and the garden that produced more vegetables than one woman could possibly eat, the place where Simone wasn’t the CEO of anything but was instead just Nadine's daughter, the girl who'd done bookkeeping at the folding table.
That girl was someone Simone didn't know what to do with anymore.
“I'm not sure,” Simone said. “The timeline is flexible.”
“Flexible,” Nadine repeated.
Simone almost said something. She could feel it in her throat, the shape of a sentence she hadn't constructed yet: I've met someone.
Or not that. That was too simple, too much like the conversations other daughters had with other mothers, the kind where feelings were discussed over coffee and advice was given and the whole thing happened in a shared language both parties spoke fluently.
Simone and Nadine didn't have that language.
They had logistics and money and the weekly call with the particular tenderness expressed as are you eating properly and the kale is done for the year.
Simone had never once felt the limitation of that dynamic the way she felt it now, sitting in a penthouse with nothing personal in it, wanting to say there's a woman here who sees me the way you never learned how to, and I don't know if that's a betrayal of you or a consequence of you or just the thing that happens when someone finally reaches the part of me you built the walls around.
She didn't say any of it. She asked about Madame Beaulieu's daughter's wedding plans, and they talked for another ten minutes about nothing that held any real significance.
When they hung up, Simone set the phone down on the counter and stood in the warm, empty apartment and felt the specific ache of being loved completely by someone in a language she could barely speak.
She finished her wine, poured half a glass more, then she called Audrey.
Audrey Liang picked up on the second ring and skipped the pleasantries by mutual preference.
“Linden Capital,” Audrey said. “Tess sent the numbers. Congratulations. You've crossed the threshold.”
“I need you to start restructuring the global portfolio review. We'll be filing within the month, and I want the London calendar clear.”
“Already done. I moved the Meridian meeting to January and pushed the Hamburg review to February. You have three commitments in December that I can't shift: the Zürich dinner, the Ashworth closing, and the Tokyo conference call. Everything else can be rescheduled.” She paused. “Speaking of which.”
Simone knew what was coming.
“You've been in Phoenix Ridge for four and a half months,” Audrey said. “The acquisition only budgeted for three. I've been holding your London calendar open since September, declining engagements and rearranging the portfolio schedule. I need a return date, Simone. Even a provisional one.”
The reasonable answer was January. The proxy filing would be done, the shareholder vote would be scheduled, and the physical presence that Phoenix Ridge required would shift to legal proceedings that could be managed from anywhere.
She could be back in London by mid-January, back in her Chelsea apartment on Cheyne Walk, back in the rhythm of a life that worked for her.
She opened her mouth to say January but didn't. The hesitation lasted two seconds, but it was the most revealing thing Simone had done in front of another person in years.
“I don't have a date yet,” she said.
The line went quiet. Audrey was never silent.
“You've always known when you were leaving,” Audrey said. “That's never been your problem.”
The implication—that the problem was what happened when Simone didn't want to leave—sat between London and Phoenix Ridge like a third person on the line.
Audrey didn't elaborate. She moved on to the Zürich dinner logistics, and Simone answered on autopilot, managing the calendar, the portfolio review, and the Ashworth closing while the rest of her was still standing in the silence Audrey had carved open with a single observation.
They hung up, and the penthouse closed around her with its climate-controlled air, double-paned glass, and the quiet she'd chosen a hundred times over the noise of a life with other people in it.
She needed to move her body, so she put on her workout gear, purposefully leaving behind the headlamp.
The trail at nine-thirty at night was a different place than the trail at five in the morning.
There was no gray light seeping through the tree line, no fog burning off the water, just the thick, wet darkness of a November night on the coast, the kind that erased the edges of things and left only what you could feel underfoot.
A steady drizzle of rain hit her face and her hands and the back of her neck where her hair was already soaking through.
The ocean below the cliffs was like sound without a distinct shape, enormous and close yet amorphous.
Her feet knew the path anyway. She predicted the roots at the first turn, the stretch where the gravel thinned, and the grade change past the spruce with the split trunk.
Four and a half months of mornings had stenciled the trail onto her body, and she didn't need to see it to know where she needed to go.
She ran hard, the way she hadn't since her twenties, when running had been less about discipline and more about burning off whatever she couldn't contain. The cold air hit her lungs, and her legs took the downhill section fast enough that a stumble would have meant going over the cliff edge and hitting the rocks below. Somewhere deep in the back of her mind, she knew this but kept the pace anyway. The alternative was standing still in that penthouse, in the sealed quiet of a life she’d designed to keep people out.
The trail was a different kind of solitude, open and wet and completely indifferent to whether she was there or not.
She slowed at the halfway point and stopped, breathing hard.
The drizzle had intensified into a downpour, and the wind was pushing it sideways off the ocean.
She stood in it and let it hit her, the droplets sharply cold and slanting, as she tried to find the part of herself that knew what to do next.
That part had never failed her before. In every city, at every inflection point, she'd known to close the deal, pack the bag, book the flight, and move.
The sequence was automatic. It had carried her from Montreal to New York to London to a dozen cities after that, and the speed of it, the clean efficiency of a life that never accumulated enough weight to slow her down, that had always felt like competence and control to her.
She had won a significant milestone today, and the only thing she'd wanted was to tell Alexandra. Simone suspected she was the only person alive who would understand the emptiness inside the win.
Her mind kept circling back to Alexandra's face at Elements, when the conversation had drifted past acquisition strategy and something unguarded had surfaced between them—a recognition, mutual and startling, like two people discovering they'd been holding the same wound in different hands.
Simone had wanted to stay in that moment and have it stretch around her.
She had wanted to stop performing and let Alexandra see whatever was underneath.
The desire had terrified her, because underneath the performance was a woman Simone had spent three decades making sure no one got close enough to meet.
She thought about Margaux, standing in the kitchen of their Upper West Side apartment with her arms crossed, saying the sentence that had ended nineteen months in five words: You are incapable of intimacy.
Simone hadn't argued back with her. She'd moved out in three days, flown to London, and found another apartment, telling herself that Margaux had wanted something conventional and Simone simply wasn't conventional.
She thought about Diane, who had lasted longer and seen more of her but still arrived at the same place.
Simone had heard the grief in her words and had done nothing besides leave.
It was the only thing she was good at in these situations, and she knew that what Diane was asking for—staying in one place long enough to be truly known and risking that it wouldn’t be enough—was the one thing she couldn't give.
The rain dripped in her eyes, and she swiped it away.
It came back immediately and she let it stay.
She stood on a cliff in the dark on a Thursday night, and the realization that the two women who'd loved her had all seen the same thing—Simone was terrified of intimacy.
She was terrified of standing still, terrified of being seen completely and finding out that what someone saw, without the accomplishments, wasn't enough to make them stay.
So she left first every time. Before they could get a good look and the verdict came in, she was already packed and gone, preferring to call it strength and self-sufficiency.
And now here was Alexandra, and Simone found herself not wanting to leave, and it was doing something to her that she didn't have language for.
Because, she now understood, that what she wanted from Alexandra couldn't be taken or forced. She could force a proxy vote and acquire a company. She could walk into any room in the world and control the outcome, but she could not make Alexandra Vaughn respect her. She couldn’t construct a scenario where Alexandra chose her, actually chose her, freely and with clear eyes and the full option to say no.
Choice wasn't something you could eliminate the risk from.
You had to stand there and let someone look at you.
You had to trust that what they found would be enough, and Simone had never trusted that, not once, not with anyone, and the distrust had kept her safe and free and so alone that winning the biggest deal of her career felt like nothing.
And underneath all of it, underneath the respect and the attention and the terror of being seen, there was something else. Something she'd been keeping in her peripheral vision for weeks because looking at it directly would make it real.
She wanted Alexandra's composure to break. More than that, she wanted to be the one who broke it.
Not just professionally; she'd been doing that for months.
That was the game. What Simone wanted now had nothing to do with that.
She wanted to see Alexandra come undone.
She wanted her steady hands to shake. She wanted the voice that never faltered to falter, and she wanted to be the reason—not the takeover, not the business, but Simone herself, her hands, her mouth, her presence in a room with the door closed.
She wanted Alexandra to surrender something she'd never surrendered to anyone. The desire that had been building since the boardroom wasn’t tender and it sat in Simone's body like heat, and it had nowhere to go.
She doubled back on the trail toward the city and ran, soaked through and shivering. Her unspoken desire carried her forward; the first thing in years that made the direction matter more than the speed.