Chapter 22
They walked back into the trees, and Simone let Alexandra hold her hand.
The grade tilted up toward the second-growth section, the one that ran a quarter-mile through Douglas fir trees before the trail broke into headland again.
Simone had run this stretch in the dark, in the rain, and during the early mornings in October when the moss was so green it looked wet, even when it wasn’t.
In all that time, she had always been alone.
The strangeness of having Alexandra beside her, holding her hand without commentary, was a thing that Simone couldn’t wrap her mind around.
Alexandra’s hand was warm. That was the first thing Simone noticed, and it seemed like such a simple observation that it embarrassed her a little.
Alexandra’s palm was drier and warmer than the air, and her long, delicate fingers had threaded through Simone’s easily.
Simone was fifty-one years old, and she had been with women in more cities than she could list quickly.
Yet she could not remember the last time someone had simply held her hand like this, if there had even been a first time.
The trail was her trail. She intuitively knew the give of it, the places where the gravel thinned, the root that came up across the path forty paces in.
Her body intimately knew exactly where to go, but the rest of her was somewhere a half-step behind, watching what was happening but not fully caught up.
They walked together without talking for a while. Alexandra didn’t push her for an answer, something Simone was grateful for. She had a way of going quiet and giving space that wasn’t waiting for a turn to speak.
The light through the firs was the soft, even green that came when the canopy filtered an already-thin February sun.
There was a smell in the air that Simone had come to associate with this trail—wet bark, salt from the water, and the iron notes of mossy stone—and the scent flooded her senses now.
Except this time, her private moment was being shared.
The words Simone wanted and needed to say weren't far away. They were just difficult to start.
“You asked me a question,” Simone said.
“I did.”
“I’m trying to figure out where to begin.”
Alexandra slowed half a step, just enough that Simone could match the new pace without thinking about it. “Take your time.”
Simone’s mouth was dry. She swallowed against it, and the swallow was rougher than it should have been.
She took a steadying breath, then three more.
The trail had risen through a soft bend, and there was a place coming up where the path widened around a fallen alder that someone had left to decompose where it had dropped.
Simone had passed it sixty or seventy times.
She walked toward it now and tried to find the edge of a sentence she could lean in to.
“I came to Phoenix Ridge to take your company.”
She said it. The words went out into the cold air, and she heard them land. Alexandra’s hand stayed in hers, and they kept walking. The only way she would find out if Alexandra would stay was to keep going and find out.
“You know that,” Simone said. “I’m saying it because I need to be the one to say it out loud, not have it stay something we both knew but never addressed.”
“All right.”
Alexandra’s voice was even, and Simone didn’t try to hear what may exist underneath. The fallen alder was on her left as she passed it, and then the trail straightened.
“The work was good,” Simone continued. “I built the strategy for almost a year, and I would have won.”
“I know,” Alexandra said, her voice firm but not cold.
“I’m not going to soften that. I’d rather you hear it from me than wonder later if I was lying about how much I had meant to acquire Vaughn Industries.”
Alexandra was quiet. Simone counted three steps in the gravel trail before Alexandra’s thumb moved across the back of her hand.
It was the smallest gesture, a single movement of maybe half an inch before she was still again, and it almost stopped Simone where she was standing.
She had expected, somewhere in her body, that Alexandra would let go at I would have won.
That was the opposite of letting go and putting space between them.
Simone’s eyes burned with unshed tears, and she forced herself to keep walking.
“What changed?” Alexandra asked.
“Elements.”
There was a pause, and the ground was rising again. Simone could hear Alexandra’s breathing match the climb.
“I called you by your first name that night,” Simone explained.
“I told myself that I did to get access and get you to lower your walls. I do that with everyone. But I came home that night and lay in bed and thought about why I had actually done it. And it wasn’t my usual tactic.
I wanted the sound of your name in my mouth. ”
She heard her own accent come up under the last word. The Montreal warmth she'd spent thirty years sanding down. She didn't smooth it back.
“I thought I could manage it,” she said. “I'd been attracted to people I’ve gone up against across negotiating tables before, and it had never compromised anything. I told myself this would be the same.”
“And?”
Simone took a breath, and it caught somewhere below her sternum and stayed there.
“There were weeks when I was lying to myself and didn’t realize it.
Then there were weeks when I knew I was lying and kept doing it out of self-preservation.
I remember there was a night in November when I came out here in the rain and I stopped at a tree on this trail and I couldn't tell myself the lie anymore.
I went home and got on a call with Audrey to accelerate the timeline.
I told her I was being aggressive, but the truth was I was just running. "
“From me,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.
Simone paused to consider her words carefully. “From the fact that I didn't want to leave.”
Alexandra stopped walking. She didn't pull her hand away.
She turned, just her body, and Simone turned with her.
They stood under the firs. The light fell through the branches in those soft, uneven patches, and Alexandra's face was in one of them.
Her eyes were trained on Simone's, and Simone could not look anywhere else.
“You came to my office in November,” Alexandra said. “With the merger offer.”
“Yes.”
“Was that part of your strategy?”
“Yes. And it was me trying to create a structure where I didn't have to leave. I didn't know that consciously when I drafted it, though I knew it when you said no.”
Alexandra's face did something Simone had not seen it do before. The corners of her mouth pulled down, controlled, and her shoulders lowered a quarter of an inch. Simone felt it in their clasped hands—the hold relaxed, then tightened, then settled again.
“Keep going,” Alexandra encouraged.
They started walking again, and Simone had to wait for her throat to open before she could continue.
“The night I came to your office in December. After you refused the merger…”
“I remember.”
“I was furious. And I wanted to hurt you. I'd been wanting you for two months, and you'd said no to the only plan I had for it. That broke something in me, and I walked over telling myself I would feel nothing afterward."
“Did you?”
“No,” she admitted, and the word came out rougher than she'd planned. She kept her eyes on the trail.
“I lay awake afterward. I tried to plan an exit. I'd planned exits my whole life. That night my brain wouldn't make one…because I didn't want one. That was the first time I understood what trouble I was in.”
Alexandra's hand pressed against hers, brief, then steadier.
“I want to ask you something,” Alexandra said.
“What is it?”
“Friday, when you came to my house?”
Simone's chest pulled tight. She knew what the question was before Alexandra asked it.
“Was that part of the strategy too?”
The question landed, and Simone stopped walking.
Alexandra stopped, too, and turned, then waited.
Her face was very still, almost statuesque.
Simone looked at her, and what she saw was a woman who had asked the hardest question knowing she might hear an answer that would squash this before it ever really had a chance to develop, and who had asked it anyway because Alexandra Vaughn did not flinch.
“No,” she said. “It wasn't strategic. I didn’t have an ulterior motive and wasn’t trying to get anything from you.”
Her voice was thinner than she wanted it to be. She made herself keep going.
“Wednesday night I sat down with the file, after Vivian.
I had to write the kill shot. I'd written kill shots before, and I knew exactly what to say and how to say it.
But I sat there for three hours without writing a single word.
Whatever it is that lets me do that to a company, it was just gone.
My capacity had been disappearing for weeks and I'd been pretending it wasn't, and on Wednesday night, it was gone. So I came to you.”
Alexandra closed her eyes. It was a small thing—half a second, no more—and Simone had not seen her need to regain her composure like this before. When she opened them, they were wet. She didn't look away, nor did she try to hide it.
“Thank you,” Alexandra said.
Simone felt the impulse rise to make it light and say, “for what?” in the warm voice she used when a moment got too heavy and she wanted to put it down somewhere lower. She heard the impulse come up. She let it pass.
“You're welcome,” she said.
They started walking again. The trail came around a thinner stand of alders, and the sea opened back in front of them, lower this time, the gray-blue water catching what light was left. Wind hit them broadside. Simone saw Alexandra's hair lift and settle, and Alexandra didn't push it back.