Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

  And how long have you been with the company, Ms. Valdez?

  Respondent 2:

  I’ve worked at Truviv a little less than twelve years.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  Impressive. How long did you know Katherine Bell before the incident?

  Respondent 2:

  About a month, I think.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  What was your impression of Miss Bell at the time you met?

  Respondent 2:

  She was pleasant enough. She seemed bright, young, driven. She wasn’t the super warm and bubbly type, but neither am I. I thought I understood her.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  Would you say that over that month, you became friends with Miss Bell?

  Respondent 2:

  I’m not sure whether I would say that or not.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  Can you elaborate?

  Respondent 2:

  I believed that we developed a friendship at the time. However, certain things have come to light since.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  Can you be more specific?

  Respondent 2:

  Okay. Katherine lied.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  21-MAR

  It was lunchtime and Sloane was very close to running late to her personal training session with Oksana downstairs. She swung by her office to pick up her gym bag and collect the files she’d been intending to give to Katherine all morning. At drinks, Katherine had seemed eager, as though she could think of almost nothing but work. She wanted to parse the nitty-gritty details of deals on which Sloane had worked, how Sloane had started her career, the layout of the corporate legal structure. Katherine asked the same of Ames and he basked in the chance to tell war stories of long shot transactions that closed at the bottom of the ninth inning.

  I want to be like you. Had Katherine really said that, as Sloane snatched a couple of mints from the hostess stand on their way out? They’d had two, maybe three drinks. Why had she agreed to have so many? Ames had that effect on her. And then Katherine’s face had been close to hers, expectant. Sloane might have misheard; she didn’t want to ask her to repeat the compliment. And, well …

  Katherine’s office was empty now and Sloane’s brain felt tender.

  She stopped at the glass front wall of Grace’s office. The glass, from which the corner-office types were conveniently exempt, was designed to make the building feel more open-concept, but was actually intended to reduce their privacy. Grace’s door sat only a few paces down from Katherine’s.

  Sloane tapped on it. “Have you seen Katherine?” she asked.

  Grace looked up. “Oh.”

  Grace’s skin looked a little gray ever since she’d returned from maternity leave, like she’d been ill or living in an underground bunker. Not that Sloane would ever mention it. She’d once had to explain to Derek that telling a woman she looked “tired” was the same thing as telling her she looked awful. Just don’t.

  “She’s in with Ames.” Grace went back to typing. “How’s Abigail doing?”

  Sloane stared down the corridor at Ames’s closed door, Katherine behind it.

  Doing what? She shook her head, frustrated. It was nothing. Ames was their boss. Their. All of the lawyers in the legal department. But, then, Sloane knew what could happen with Ames behind closed doors.

  She ducked back into Grace’s office. “Sorry, what’d you say?” Sloane turned back.

  “I asked how Abigail was doing.”

  Sloane had been a teensy bit cagey about Abigail recently. Well, Grace, Sloane imagined saying, she rolled her eyes at me for the first time this morning. Over a bowl of oatmeal, no less. At me, if you can believe it. Her super cool, super fun mother. And Grace would laugh good-naturedly and say, Oh, god, they grow up fast, don’t they? Only that wasn’t it, because Abigail did not grow up fast. She grew up slowly. Painfully so at times, it had seemed. She didn’t walk until she was eighteen months. At ten, she still enjoyed watching the Disney Channel and weaving colorful potholders on a loom. She tended to be dreamy and liked to fold herself close to the ground to push pill bugs around with sticks. And Sloane was just supposed to believe that this new, sulky Abigail chose to emerge directly after the school Incidents, those nasty, ugly text messages, by—what?—coincidence?

  She was overreacting, that was what people wanted to say to her face. Maybe she was. That was the problem with being a parent, wasn’t it? All the schools of thought floating around—Stop bullying! Prepare your child for the bullies! High fructose corn syrup will literally kill your innocent children in their sleep!—and apparently you were just expected to pluck one from the sky and go with it.

  She might have told all this to Grace, but stopped short. Grace Stanton had never been picked on. She’d been a literal pageant queen back in middle school. And though Grace was kind, telling Grace, of all people, about Abigail felt like a betrayal of her daughter. She couldn’t bear the thought that, even for the most fleeting of moments, even just in her own mind, Grace might think a little less of Abigail.

  “She’s doing great. She’s playing Bach’s March in D Major for her piano recital next week.” Or maybe it was Beethoven’s in G Major. “Anyway, I’ve got an appointment.” She turned to go and hesitated. “Oh yeah, did you ever get that spreadsheet?”

  Grace pressed her knuckle into the corner of her eye and blinked. “Nothing’s shown up in my inbox.” She yawned. “But I forgot to ask around.”

  “Mine, either.”

  “Maybe we’re not cool enough. Maybe we’re too old.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Sloane said. “Tell Katherine I was looking for her, all right? Papers on her desk. Please review with comments.”

  Grace pressed her lips into a thin line and saluted, but even her arm at attention looked wilted. Sloane set a mental reminder to check in on Grace, just as a friend. Sloane was Emma Kate’s godmother, after all. She should tell Grace she was dying to smell Emma Kate’s breath again. Before the baby got too old and sprouted teeth. Or rolled her eyes.

  But Sloane knew she was terrible at keeping up with mental reminders. Her life was empty water bottles rolling around on the floorboards of her expensive car. Unopened mail on kitchen countertops. Thank you cards written but never sent. In the back of her mind, she was already moving on, adding this mental reminder to the detritus of unfinished tasks to be recycled into background stress, where it would serve as fuel for her spotty and unexplained bouts of insomnia, chin acne, and stomach bloating.

  * * *

  Truviv’s corporate gym, a yawning space of indoor track, state-of-the-art machinery, and brightly-colored mats, was located on the building’s eighth floor, where it could mock us as we passed it on the elevator. We hated the gym. We loved it. We escaped to it. We avoided it. We had complicated relationships with our bodies, while at the same time insisting that we loved them unconditionally. We were sure we had better, more important things to do than worry about them, but the slender yoga bodies of moms in Lululemon at school pickup taunted us. Their figures hinted at wheatgrass shots, tennis clubs, and vagina steaming treatments. We found them aspirational.

  So we sweated on the elliptical and lifted ten-pound weights, inching closer to the bodies we told ourselves we were too evolved to want. We knew the men watched us in our yoga pants, knew they believed this was why we wore yoga pants in the first place. We pretended not to notice the feeling of eyes sliding over us. If we heard “I like your form” from one more male co-worker who fiddled with his playlists for ten minutes in between sets, well, we might bash his brain in with a dumbbell.

  Sloane swiped her fob on the keypad and the door to the locker room clicked open. An endless loop of Keeping Up with the Kardashians reruns played on the flat-screen television above the sinks.

  Sloane slipped out of her black, lace-trimmed skirt and hung it inside a top locker. Derek had complimented her on it this morning, running his hands over her hips while she brushed her teeth. Then they’d had nice, married people
sex—quick, satisfying, and to the point—because they were each half-listening for Abigail. Sloane had an orgasm and dropped Abigail off for band practice all before 8 A.M.

  “Sloane!”

  She turned at the sound of her name.

  The woman in the towel and flip-flops walking toward her was Ames’s wife, Bobbi Garrett. Bobbi had a throaty voice and the authentic Southern drawl of someone from Oklahoma instead of Texas. She was a stay-at-home mom of twins, two boys, who filled her time with do-gooder tasks where she raised indisputably large sums of cash for worthy causes and made people like Sloane feel terrible for snarking on the annoying spectacle of charitable social events. Bobbi Garrett was a perfectly pleasant person to be around for anyone but Sloane Glover.

  “I just came to meet Ames for lunch and he let me sneak a quick workout.” Her skin had the red, blotchy quality of someone who has taken a cool shower after a hard workout. “How are you, doll?” Bobbi gently pushed her arm.

  “Oh, you know, hanging in there.” Sloane sounded like a robot. A dull robot. But she didn’t know how else to speak to Bobbi; every time Sloane saw Bobbi, she was transported back in time to an image of a shirtless Ames, hovering over her, his hips pressed into hers. And she was filled with instant shame followed by something subtler. She felt the lies stacked between her and Bobbi wrestling to get out.

  “Is my husband working you too hard?” Bobbi was watching Sloane with concerned eyes. “I swear, I will get on that man. You have a husband and kids, and, lord, well, you know how men can be. They have to be reminded.”

  There were other women in the locker room. Women padding barefoot around them, weighing themselves, poking earrings back through their lobes. But Bobbi didn’t intuit the unspoken protocol of shared workspaces. Sloane gave a silent thank you to those damn Kardashians babbling in the background.

  “No, no, just a crazy time,” said Sloane, pulling on her Truviv-branded running shorts. “No fault of Ames, I promise.”

  It was never the fault of Ames. If there were ever an issue at work, Sloane was, according to him, “irrational,” “hypersensitive,” “ridiculous,” and even, once, “hormonal.” Funny how those words had never come up before she’d slept with him.

  Bobbi’s hand flew to her mouth. The fingernails were perfectly manicured in cherry red. “Desmond,” she said, taking hold of Sloane’s forearm. Bobbi closed her eyes and shook her head with utter dismay. “I can’t believe he’s gone. Are you doing okay?”

  “Yes, I really am.”

  “Good. My Bible study met last night, purely by coincidence, and we prayed over that man’s sweet family.”

  Sloane was trying to hold on to the memory of Derek this morning. The smell of his sandalwood shaving cream lingering on his face. She wished that Grace were here. Grace was so much better at this. She actually went to church, for one, while Sloane enjoyed her family’s Sunday ritual of bacon, eggs, and lounging in front of the television. But every so often, Sloane was confronted with the particular vocabulary of the upper-middle-class Christian women in town. People were always being “called” or having things “laid upon their heart” or were “praying over” one thing or another. Sloane learned years ago to integrate work vocabulary into her own vernacular: she would “liaise directly” with someone or “reach out” or “provide color” or “digest” a report. Easy. But she’d never grown fluent in Bobbi’s language. Now she felt put at a small disadvantage.

  “I wanted to ask,” Bobbi continued. “Have you heard anything about a meal train?”

  “I haven’t heard anything. But…” Sloane said, uncertainly, “I’m sure Desmond’s family would appreciate it.”

  Bobbi held up her hand. “Consider it done. Listen.” She pulled Sloane off to a less populated area of the locker room, where clean, folded towels were stuffed into cubbyholes. Bobbi pressed her face in closer to Sloane, as though they were used to sharing secrets. “I’m sure Ames has already told you, probably even before me. I know how closely you two work together.” She imagined relaying this to Ardie later on, how Ardie would hoot with dark appreciation. “But Ames is on the short list, apparently, for potential replacements for Desmond. He was notified by the board late last night. I just know Ames would make a wonderful CEO.”

  Ames. CEO. Sloane felt her mind wading through quicksand; she focused all her energy on keeping her face still, a talent she’d honed a time or two when, for example, the man whose wife she was speaking to had once reminded her she was still a better lay than she was a lawyer, this despite the fact that she had, at the time, closed a twenty-million-dollar deal almost single-handedly on a one-month deadline. For her efforts that year, she had received only a frozen ham and a crystal coaster with the company logo emblazoned on it. Later, she learned that Ames had “forgotten” to submit the letter approving her year-end discretionary income. When confronted, he reminded her that she had—his words—used him to sleep her way into a high-paying position and considered the bonus snafu a karmic effort to even the score.

  If only that had been the end of it.

  “Honestly,” Bobbi was saying, “it feels like everything has been leading up to this for us. But if there’s anything you think we, or he, should be doing to better his odds? I know he’d appreciate your counsel, even if he’s too proud to ask for it. He’s just under a lot of pressure.”

  “Right, well.” Sloane leaned back on her heels, trying to create physical distance. She felt hot. “It’s a bit above my pay grade,” she said.

  Bobbi’s expression froze ever so slightly.

  “But yes,” Sloane added in a rush, “of course, I’ll be sure to reach out.” She saw the need for an exit plan and she took it. “Bobbi, I have to—I have to get back to the office soon, so I better get to it.”

  Bobbi smiled her big, chemically whitened smile. “Of course, of course. You look fantastic, by the way,” she said, which was a blatant lie. Sloane did not look fantastic, or even good. A lie for Bobbi, Sloane thought. Another thousand and maybe they could even the score.

  Sloane snatched her gym bag and shut herself in one of the privacy changing rooms, heat crawling up her neck like a fever. She sank down, back to the wall, crouched, breathing heavily. Ames, as the freaking CEO of Truviv—why hadn’t she seen it coming? She bit her teeth into her knuckles. It shouldn’t matter to her, should it? She told herself it shouldn’t matter. But it felt so unfair. She sounded like a preschooler: but that’s not fair! But … it wasn’t. Bad behavior rewarded and whatnot. Of course, whose fault was that? Hers, was it? Certainly she had never been anything but a silent witness on Ames’s behalf. Certainly she had made a decision to let him get away with acting however the hell he wanted to act. Though, it occurred to her, she might not be the only one. She wasn’t the only one. Surely. Definitely. She had been about to call Derek when—better idea—she dialed Elizabeth Moretti’s number. Elizabeth answered on the first ring. “What do you have for me, Glover?”

  Back at Jaxon Brockwell, Elizabeth had a piece of the entire firm’s gossip and Sloane learned quickly to temper what she told Elizabeth, who wasn’t nearly as discreet as she pretended to be.

  Sloane closed her eyes and took a deep breath before answering. “Nothing billable, I’m afraid.” She stood up, turned her back to the locked door behind her, and hunched her shoulders protectively around her phone. “Elizabeth,” she said, voice low. “What do you know about a spreadsheet?”

  “I know nothing about spreadsheets other than I went to law school specifically to avoid them.” Sloane could hear Elizabeth typing on the other end of the line.

  “Something about a spreadsheet of men—sleazy men maybe—in Dallas. Does that…” Sloane’s phone vibrated and she lifted it from her ear to find a notification that her battery was about to die. Shit.

  “Oh. Yes. The BAD Men List.”

  “Bad men?”

  “Beware of Asshole Dallas Men. BAD Men! I may have seen it floating around.”

  “Where’d you get it from
?” Sloane tapped the screen to silence the message that felt like an admonishment: get your life together!

  “You know I never disclose my sources.” Sloane did not actually know that at all.

  She squeezed one eye shut, chewing on a nail, which was getting jagged between her teeth. She just wanted to see it, she told herself. A quick check. Then she’d know.

  She heard Elizabeth stop to chew something on the other end of the line and imagined her former mentor’s horse teeth grinding through her handful of afternoon pretzels. “Sloane, do you want me to get it for you? This list?”

  “Only if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Consider it done. But don’t tell anyone you got it from me.” They were both quiet. Then Elizabeth started typing again. “Hey,” she asked, “is it true Bankole died in his shower?”

  * * *

  As Sloane left the locker room to meet her trainer, Ames stood at the entrance of the gym, leaning against the wall, with his arms folded over his tie, waiting for his wife. Their eyes met. He flattened his lips together into what could pass as a smile of acknowledgement without actually being one. And again, like yesterday, Sloane felt the old fury stirring at the sight of him, like a soda bottle shaken up, the cap still secured.

  The thing that had done it were box seats at a Mavericks game. Ames had scored them from his boss because, back then, he wasn’t quite the boss he was now. They both hated the crab cakes and canapés served upstairs and had wandered down to the breezeway amid a heated debate over the appropriate hotdog condiments. Sloane should have known she was in trouble right at that moment. No two people of the opposite sex argue over subjects as mundane as condiments unless they want to sleep together.

  Downstairs with the masses, they purchased real basketball game fare and felt prouder of themselves than they should have. Ames used to be funny. That was something people forgot. He had been handsome, too. The kind that could make Sloane’s stomach flip. They had returned to the box seats, Ames clutching the neck of a champagne bottle they’d talked the bartender into selling them. Sloane’s sides had ached with laughter. She wore a shiny new engagement ring, given to her by a man who loved her, trusted her, and would need her financially from now until eternity. She felt powerful. She felt like she wanted to blow shit up.