Forget You Know Me
Page 6
It wasn’t a father’s blind denial, as far as Molly could tell. Rosie seemed on first meeting—which with many kids was the worst meeting, where they only hid behind their parents—to be a charming, smiley girl. The silence, he went on to say, could become part of her identity if it wasn’t corrected soon. Which would make it even harder to crack down the road.
“How can we help?” she asked. “‘Brave talking’ sounds like something Nori might benefit from, too.” This was blatantly untrue. The idea of her daughter having any more of a filter lifted was enough to send tingles down her spine. But maybe she could use it herself.
Rick explained part of the trick was to refrain from asking yes-or-no questions. To coax her, in front of other people, to state a preference between alternatives or to suggest a next step for an activity in progress.
“So far, she won’t do anything but point. I’m supposed to wait until she speaks to get her what she wants, but when I feel a scene coming on, I cave too easily. Especially because the other party present is usually my in-laws.” He threw up his hands. “Maybe if you and Nori came over? Or if we could play here…”
Molly thought of the busloads of special needs kids who came through the nature center every week. “Do you two like to hike?”
That had been the beginning. He’d offered to barter. He was a contractor; if they had something that needed fixing, he could help. But Molly waved him off.
If he’d been walled in by grief, her own walls were built of pain, and she’d been content to hide beyond them—until the minute she could see over her flimsy, halfhearted barrier and into someone else’s tougher, sturdier one.
He’d reminded her what it was like to have a friend who was on your side by default, until or unless you gave him a reluctant reason not to be. Where Daniel had somehow become more adversary than partner—someone to whom she always felt she owed an explanation for the inexplicable causes behind her aches, for the frustration behind her persistent failure to just feel good again, to just be normal—Rick was a sympathetic ear who accepted her feelings as valid without requiring a list of reasons, of treatments she had tried that hadn’t worked, of diagnoses she had looked into and ruled out. When he did make suggestions, they were more thoughtful than her husband’s reaching for the obvious, which came off as condescending. Rick knew something of alternative medicine from his wife’s battle and didn’t discount anything or make Molly feel foolish for trying.
And when it came to Rosie and Nori, they were all stronger, they discovered, as a foursome. Rick was patient almost to a fault, even on days he must have been inwardly screaming over all he’d lost. He inspired Molly to follow suit, to do better. They traipsed determinedly through the changing leaves in the fall; they rewarded small victories with hot cocoa from The Nature Shop in the winter. When Rosie started whispering on occasion into Nori’s ear, when the girls bubbled over into giggles, and when Rick played the piano and all four of them sang along, Rosie forgetting herself in the music, her little voice high and thin and happy beneath her father’s easy tones, Molly felt as if she was helping to restore a fraction of the life he’d breathed back into hers.
He’d set out to help his daughter, and he’d helped Molly instead.
Until last night. When everything had come undone.
And now she was hanging from the last, loose thread.
She would have rather hinged every inch of her affection to Daniel. For a time, Molly had tried psychosynthesis—attending weekly consultations with a practitioner who specialized in the intersection of body and mind—and in seeking connections she never found between Molly’s various ailments, the clinician had broached the subject of interpersonal relationships, offering this: that the person who wants less from the relationship holds the power. Molly knew without question that as long as she struggled with pain, and as long as Daniel persisted to deny that it was both significant and beyond her control, she would be the partner in her marriage who wanted more—from herself, from motherhood, from Daniel, from life—and she was so uncomfortable with the implied weakness of her position, she’d never gone back after that.
The beauty in what she and Rick had was in their equal standing, in their give-and-take. And so it had been easy to convince herself that such an arrangement meant that neither of them was left wanting—for anything. She could see now that between her and Rick she might hold the power—and that perhaps she’d sensed that, recognized its appeal. Rick might have brought them to this new, uncomfortable moment when he’d called her bluff, but really she’d been the first one to step out of line, and though she’d done it not with actions but with words, she couldn’t deny that it was on her. Rick wasn’t immune to wanting. And he was no longer bound by a promise he’d made to someone else.
But she was.
The thought of losing Rick and Liza at the same time was almost too much to bear. And yet right now the only one she could think of salvaging things with was Daniel. Funny how it took a new wave of guilt to displace the old hurt that had stopped her from trying.
She pulled his shirt around her, tighter. If he held the power, maybe it did, too.
8
I can give you plenty of reasons to reconsider.
Daniel had been staring at the email on his screen for a full ten minutes, trying to decide whether it was a threat or a bribe. He might have convinced himself it was neither if that sentence weren’t the whole of the message, or if the subject line hadn’t been left blank.
There was no space currently available in his brain to allocate to this worry. He hadn’t come to the office to work. He’d come here to work out what to do. About Molly.
He’d come here, ironically, for a refuge.
“Regret coming back early yet?”
Not bothering to wait for Daniel to answer her knock on the open door, Jules carried the stack of folders right in, bringing with her an apologetic smile, a waft of the coffee she brewed fresh every afternoon, and the ridiculously on-point question. She’d been surprised to see him this morning but adjusted quickly, not prying when he told her the meetings had been a bust, canceling out today’s agenda, not asking why he’d rushed home. He bit back a sardonic laugh as she plopped the pile onto his desk, and instead offered a what can I say, I’m a glutton for punishment sort of shrug.
His most tolerable days in the office were the ones when Daniel managed to talk only to Jules. The administrative assistant shared by his department had a cut-the-crap efficiency and dry sense of humor he appreciated. She seemed to favor Daniel over his counterparts who looked a little too long at the plunge of her neckline. She also, he suspected, knew everything there was to know—and then some—about his colleagues, yet kept most of the intel to herself.
Most of it.
In other words, not even Jules was safe.
“Ask me again after I get a look at what’s in there,” he replied.
She laughed but didn’t stick around to banter. He took that as a bad sign. The screen in front of him went black—back to sleep—as she closed the door behind her, and he swiveled his chair to look out the window, ignoring the new stack of paperwork.
He’d liked the job, once. Sure, he’d always known the guys in charge were assholes, but what company didn’t lack compassion at the top these days? It wasn’t so hard to separate what he was doing—pushing numbers, his old, reliable friends—from whom he was doing it for. Even when he reached a level where there were fewer hierarchical buffers between him and said assholes, where he no longer just pushed the numbers but signed off on them, even presented them to prospective partners, he still compartmentalized the two, the sum of Column A and Column B being a good living for quite a few years. He wished now that it hadn’t been so easy to go along, get along, wished something had prompted him to move on before he’d started noticing things that didn’t add up. Literally.
And before his inbox had become occupied by this reminder that Daniel’s wordlessly complicit role in that bad math wasn’t wordless anymore.
Right around that time, Molly had been going on about wanting to reduce her own hours. He thought it an overreaction to a difficult stage she could have waited out. Nori was not an easy baby, and Grant’s boundless energy was hard to keep up with, and Molly’s lingering gestational carpal tunnel did make her workdays at the keyboard miserable, but those things would have passed. Her unhappiness seemed surprisingly aggressive, however, and so when his department came up for expansion he pushed back. He presented a plan that made do with department-level analysts and bookkeepers in lieu of their proposed controller to review broader numbers—then made a play for the top financial seat, assuring them it wasn’t too much for one person though he was fairly certain it was. They went for it, nearly doubling his salary even as they saved six pretty figures on their own bottom line.
At first he’d buckled under the load, and it didn’t help that Molly, in spite of all the shifting and convincing and compromising he’d done so she could get her way, was still barely holding it together at home. What busy co-parent of young children had time to be encumbered by pain? She was always needing him to compensate somehow. So he’d shaved away the extra hours he should have put in here—focusing on strategy, which the board was paying closer attention to, and pulling back on oversight—and braced for the blowback.
But none came. He’d discovered the fine art, with a fancy new title and fat raise, of doing what was commonly known as a half-ass job.
Daniel wasn’t used to contemplating words—less trustworthy than numbers, frustratingly unpredictable. But he’d spent a lot of time doing it lately, even before this cryptic email, even before Molly’s evasive responses this morning. Take the phrase human resources. Was it supposed to refer to the humans who worked in that department, helping the rest of them navigate the basic benefits they’d earned? Or was it meant to refer to the employee pool at large, as if they were a breed that had been baited, caged, and brought to this place where they must be begrudgingly provided for?
Either way, the idea of having the word human—which surely went without saying—in your job title was still not as off-putting as the department’s director himself, who barely qualified as one. The other execs—hypocritical enough to pick out the chief asshat among them—snickered that his name was, appropriately, Toby, same as the HR rep on The Office whom boss parody Michael Scott dubbed “the worst.” But Daniel thought the name too good for the real-life Toby. The show’s running gag was that there wasn’t really cause to dislike Toby so intensely, whereas this guy provided plenty.
Many of his failings were readily on display: his passive-aggressive missives implying that holidays off were conditional, for instance. But now that Daniel knew those merely scratched the surface of what Toby was capable of, he wondered if the man actually strived to be so grating, so that no one would ever want to spend enough time looking in his direction to realize he was downright criminal.
Toby, like Daniel, had taken a hands-on approach to his own department’s reorg. Toby, unlike Daniel, had had a long-term plan for doing so, something beyond the instant gratification of get a bigger paycheck to get my wife off my case.
In the new and improved HR, he’d delegated things like recruiting and health benefits, while keeping oversight of the retirement plans under his purview. At first Daniel assumed this was a matter of personal preference. Toby, to his chagrin, seemed to have singled him out for watercooler-type chitchat—in the lunchroom, in the john, wherever mold grew, come to think of it. And even in casual conversation Toby talked about money so much you’d never know he wasn’t working toward a year-end bonus or revenue goal.
The first time Daniel’s head was turned by an exorbitant expense report—exorbitant enough to draw a flag that sent it up the chain—Toby explained it away. He was courting new firms to handle their 401(k) plans—something by rights they should have had a whole committee overseeing, but no one had time for that, not with everything else in rapid-expansion flux. There was nothing wrong with the current plans, per se, but the provider’s website was clumsy to navigate, and there’d been complaints.
“Shouldn’t the firms be courting us?” Daniel asked, eyebrows raised.
“It goes both ways.” Toby’s smile was a bad fit for his face, like a shirt stretched too tight. “I’m trying to get them to give us a premium upgrade we’re not quite big enough to qualify for. And if we get it, it’ll be worth the cost of a few five-star dinners, I assure you. Think ROI.”
I assure you was in the top ten of Daniel’s way-more-than-ten pet peeves in the world of condescending corporate speak, and ROI was on his separate list of hated acronyms, though at the EOD he had to use a lot of those himself, what with all the EBITDA and YTD reports. Daniel had mocked Toby to Molly that night, but instead of laughing with him, she’d turned her disdain on Daniel, saying he should either get involved with the provider selection, given his own expertise, or report Toby’s abuse of their meals and entertainment policies. Daniel, who’d grown to like coasting in the half-ass zone, wanted to do neither. Besides, Toby’s selection and its implementation would be accountable to auditors—eventually. Daniel had gone to bed stewing that she’d lost her sense of humor so entirely he couldn’t even complain about a colleague without ending up in the hot seat.
Still, he didn’t have the good sense not to do it again. When Toby’s next visit was to a Florida-based provider and included two days on a world-class golf course, Daniel marveled once more to his wife at the man’s audacity—and Molly again made her displeasure clear, her moral high horse putting his to pasture. Both were gnawing at the wrong thing, but he didn’t know it yet. He finally wised up about talking Toby at the dinner table when a meeting in New York City somehow ended with orchestra seats at Hamilton. How often do we switch providers? Daniel reasoned. Let the guy have his fun, if it’ll work out better for everyone else in the end.
But when Toby finally landed on an investment group—and indeed a boutique one Daniel had thought out of their league—Daniel wished he had enforced some sort of approval over the director’s choice. The administrative fees seemed prohibitively high, without above-average returns, as far as Daniel could see, to justify the expense.
More curiously still, Toby’s own expenses didn’t exactly stop. For a while, they kept Daniel focused on the wrong columns of the spreadsheets.
Until, at last, he began looking at the right ones.
The esteemed HR head had accurately calculated his subordinate humans’ blind spots. The staffers were people who were passionate about the environment, or design, or public health. As such, they were not particularly bottom-line driven, nor were they the sort who moved investments from fund to fund for kicks or questioned the size of routine-sounding fees. They’d set the percentage to be deducted from their paychecks and let it be, barely glancing at the reports, trusting that the rest would take care of itself.
Trusting, in other words, that they could trust Toby.
No one had noticed that loose change was being skimmed off of investment earnings and deposited into a fund that did not in fact exist. No one had seen further evidence of certain arrangements reached between Toby and said provider—in the mysterious fees, in the continued clandestine meetings, and even in the weasel’s shiny new car.
No one but Daniel. Because while the others could have been paying more attention, it wasn’t their job to notice.
It was, arguably, his.
When Daniel started to see the real red flags, he hadn’t wanted to look cl
oser. By then, if his suspicions were true, they’d escalated to a level that would reflect badly—worse than badly—on him as well. But his curiosity wouldn’t be quieted. And so, just days ago, he’d found himself running his finger over it with dread and disbelief: the residue remaining after layers of scrubbing, faint but visible, in black and red.
Daniel still wasn’t sure exactly how Toby was doing it. His guess was that someone in payroll must be involved—as well as the third-party administrator grooming them for the audit. He only knew that it was happening, and this knowledge was new enough that he hadn’t processed it fully. In fact, he’d been only 98 percent sure—might he be reading the discrepancies wrong?—until just after his discovery, when Toby, who could not lock the files down but could see who accessed them, preempted his conclusion with a vaguely but transparently worded invitation. To participate.
And it appeared Daniel’s brusque, ignorance-feigning decline—I don’t know what you’re talking about, but even if I did, I’m confident I would not be interested—had not satisfied.
It appeared he could be given, as this morning’s email proclaimed, plenty of reasons to reconsider.
Daniel had never had much contempt for employees who siphoned money away from greedy companies. But from their coworkers? From retirement funds, for Christ’s sake? He’d never be swayed to that kind of activity—never. But if he were to blow the whistle now, everyone would rightly wonder how Toby had gotten this far. Hating the boardroom admonition to get more granular was one thing; failing to follow it was another. Exposing the fraud at the risk of his own negligent hide was something Daniel had to consider carefully, and he hated himself for that.
For all Molly’s misdirected anger in his direction, on this matter she’d been right to call out his complacency from the start. She’d be horrified if she knew the worst of it. His inaction had put them at risk, and for what? A part of him wanted to blame her, for having a hand in making him so damn complacent in the first place, but that wasn’t fair. If anything, the wall she’d been erecting at home should have made him eager to tackle something he could actually fix. It had become habit, assuring her things were no big deal, under control, assuming she was blowing them out of proportion.