“Sloane?” Ardie walked toward her, but Sloane didn’t stop. She couldn’t. “Are you o—” Sloane looked straight through her and passed her in the hall.
Through sheer force of inertia, Sloane reached her office and slumped into the familiar desk chair. Rage roared in her chest, but it was muted by so many other emotions.
Ardie was in her office, around the desk, crouching beside her chair.
“What happened?” Ardie’s voice was a low, threatening rumble.
“Nothing.” Sloane closed her eyes. It pushed a flood of tears over the hills of her cheeks.
Footsteps came from the hallway and Ames Garrett appeared in the door. “Sloane.” His voice teetered along the edge of a command and a plea.
Ardie stood slowly from behind Sloane’s desk. Sloane would remember the look in her friend’s eyes until the day she died. It was the look nightmares were made of. Just not Sloane’s.
She would remember the way that Ardie walked around the desk and how Ames’s Adam’s apple leapt. She would remember how Ames held out his palms.
“Ardie. I didn’t—”
No words were exchanged—or were they? Sloane couldn’t remember that part. Only that Ames began to walk backward. That somehow the force of Ardie was enough for him to leave Sloane’s office and that once Ardie had closed the door on their boss, there was silence and the questions that would linger for months thereafter: Would he have left his wife? Did he love Sloane? Did he hate her? What would happen to her? Had she hurt him?
That evening, Ardie had pushed a stiff drink into Sloane’s hand and Sloane had hoped that would be the end of it.
But there were phases to stopping sleeping with a man you no longer liked and the final one could last more than a dozen years. But Sloane was okay. They’d done “all right,” as Ames had put it.
Ames would give her what she wanted. But, in the end, would it really be enough?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
30-MAR
We never cried at work, almost never, although when we did cry, once at home or maybe before that, in the car with our sunglasses on as we corkscrewed slowly down through the parking garage floors, it was usually about work.
Everything was about work, even the things that weren’t: Would we continue to work after children? Would we put our work goals ahead of having a family? Were we working enough? Were we working too much? Were we being paid the amount our work was worth? What were we doing this weekend, did we want to have brunch or did we have to work?
Inescapable low-grade thought spirals that manifested in the at-least-once-a-week clammy feeling that spread out in our guts while we rode the elevator down to the lobby, the slow sense of dread building, that we’d left something undone, mishandled a situation, or fucked up royally. Not that we could quite put our finger on what, exactly, it was that we’d done wrong. And that made it worse because it left 480 minutes of possibilities to rifle through, searching for the root of the problem that poisoned the memory of our day.
And then the next morning, we would stuff Dr. Scholl’s pads into the bottoms of our high heels and sign up to chair another Junior League luncheon and pretend the only emotions we felt were happy, pleasant, and competent.
And maybe that was why none of us grasped the importance of Bankole’s death to the extent that we should have. We were too busy doing the happy-pleasant-competent dance, smiling while we prayed no one would notice if we missed a step.
But we couldn’t go on that way forever. What’s amazing now is that everyone expected us to.
When Grace finally cried at the office, it was over spilled milk—literally. By the time she noticed the damp spot seeping through the fabric of her monogrammed tote, it was too late. Her pencil skirt and blouse were wet, not that she cared about that. She dropped to her knees in the middle of the hallway. The texture of the rough carpet punctured her kneecaps as she pulled out the storage bag from which a trickle of breast milk streamed silently through a leak in the plastic.
“No, no, no, no,” she murmured.
Her brain rifled through expletives, but none rose to the surface. Instead, she felt her heart bleeding out as she cupped her hand beneath the bag. She tried cradling it to the kitchen sink, getting there only in time to realize that there was nothing sterile in which to store the milk as the final few milliliters of it dripped through the cracks between her fingers. Liquid gold.
And that was it. One hour of pumping. Lost. Please, God, just rip her freaking breasts off and give them to someone else who was more responsible. She blamed the manufacturing company. She blamed her husband. She even blamed her daughter. And if that was wrong, she didn’t care.
Grace would like to outsource the whole thing—what was that called again? Oh, right, “formula”—but she just knew that the second she did, Emma Kate would develop childhood diabetes or terrible allergies and the doctor would turn to Grace and ask: Were you breastfeeding? And Liam would look at her all: I support your decision while silently wishing he’d had a baby with somebody else.
She rested her elbows on the edge of the stainless-steel sink and clawed her fingers through the base of her chignon. She knew that if she looked into a mirror, her eyes and nose would be red. This was the thing about crying in the office. The more you wanted not to cry, the more likely it was that you would.
“Excuse me, Grace?” The voice of Ames Garrett came from behind her. “Is this yours?”
She turned her chin barely past her shoulder, noting the wet, traitorous tote with her initials stitched to the front. “Yes. Sorry.”
The two of them stood there for an uncomfortable moment. An employee obviously on the verge of some completely-inappropriate-for-work emotional breakdown and her boss. Congratulations, Grace, you are singlehandedly sabotaging the cause of your gender.
Before she and Emma Kate were two separate people, she’d always been slow-burn furious when someone had asked her, “Will you come back to work after the baby’s born?” No one asked Liam that, so why should they ask her? But, behold! Here was Exhibit A.
Ames rocked back on his heels. Coins shifted in his trousers pocket. “You know what you need?” he asked. Sleep, she thought, immediately. Definitely sleep. “A smoke,” he supplied.
She turned her back to the sink and ran her fingernail along her lower eyelids. “I’m breastfeeding. I can’t.”
“Looks to me like you just finished. You’ve probably got, what, another three hours? You’re fine.” Ames extracted a pack from the inside of his jacket pocket and tapped it twice against the heel of his hand. “Trust me. I’ve got two kids who slept but never at the same time and a wife who saw being a new mother as a competitive sport.” Ames lowered his voice. “It wasn’t pretty.”
Grace touched the damp spot on her skirt, wondering when she’d manage to make it to the dry cleaners. Probably not before she wore the skirt again. She could buy a new one online, which would be easier, even have it overnighted, but Grace liked to pretend—especially to herself—that she had normal, working-woman financial concerns. Because the only socially acceptable reason a woman could work as hard as Grace did was out of necessity. She blew out a slow calming breath while Ames waited patiently in front of her.
A chance for one-on-one time with the General Counsel didn’t come around every day. And even if it did, Grace wouldn’t have known how to turn down the offer. So she left the drained bag in the sink, collected her tote, and followed Ames up to the eighteenth floor balconies.
Truviv relegated smokers to balcony corrals, little squares of outdoor space that echoed those near-extinct airport lounges and similarly reeked of lung cancer.
The building cast a shadow over the square of open space, leaving a slight chill in the air. She squinted out at the sun-soaked city beyond. She would kill for a bit of that sun. She felt so clammy since having a baby. The film of urine and runny feces and spit-up and drool and milk never quite washed from her body.
Ames pulled out a cigarette and handed it to Grac
e. She’d never smoked one before, but reasoned that if fifteen-year-olds loitering in front of malls could do it, a thirty-eight-year-old woman with a doctorate degree ought to be able to figure it out, too. She placed the papery tube in the “V” between her fingers and held it to her lips, like she’d seen done in movies. Ames spun his thumb over the lighter and a flame erupted. She leaned forward to meet it and the end of the cigarette smoldered. A satisfying curl of smoke slipped out from the tip.
She sucked gently, careful not to breathe in the smoke, while Ames expertly balanced a cigarette in his own mouth and lit it.
It was remarkable, really. One puff, and his body visibly relaxed, his shoulders retreating from his neck. He glanced sideways at her and raised his eyebrow, his mouth toying with the idea of a smile, as if to acknowledge his vice with a chagrined, What can I say?
It struck her that he didn’t know about the list yet. She felt a bit bad now standing directly across from him one-on-one, knowing that his name was being passed around Dallas behind his back. Though Grace knew enough to know not to be the messenger.
Ames drew another breath through the cigarette and let the smoke fall out of his mouth. “My mother was babysitting the twins once and left a container of Bobbi’s breast milk on the counter all day so that Bobbi had to throw the entire thing away. I thought she was going to punch my mother in the face. Instead, she just refused to speak to her for two weeks. It was almost as bad.”
Grace laughed. The smoke stung the inside of her nose, making her eyes water again. “I would have punched her for sure.” She caught a glimpse of the diamond—three carats—on her left finger. It would definitely draw blood if she punched someone.
He frowned. “You probably feel like you’re losing your fucking mind, don’t you?” He took another drag.
Grace didn’t say anything. She could feel the thin layer of ash on the balcony floor, gritty beneath her Cole Haans.
“Never mind,” he said. “You don’t have to answer that.” He tapped his cigarette on the railing, letting the ashes fall. Grace, realizing that her ashes were flaking onto her skirt, followed suit. “Bobbi cried all the time. Bobbi never cries. She’s like a living Hallmark card, this eternal ray of sunshine and optimism.” He smiled and Grace could see that his wife made him happy, which was refreshing. There was this weird fad between men within the office to see who could complain more about their wife. Oh my effing god, she’s making me go to Disney World with the kids, kill me. I get home from work and she hands me the baby before I can even take my wallet out of my pants. I’ll have to work an extra twenty years to pay for her Birkin bag. That sort of thing. It was like they were pretending they were kidnapped from their native villages and forced to buy twenty-five-thousand-dollar cushion-cuts from Tiffany’s against their will. Like, who did they think they were convincing and why did they believe the illusion that they’d made shitty life choices was such a badge of honor?
Maybe this was the real reason why Grace insisted on working despite the fact that Liam, a successful venture capitalist (along with her trust fund), could easily take care of them. She didn’t want to be one of those wives.
“I thought the Body Snatchers had come in the middle of the night and switched her out,” Ames continued. “It was like the Twilight Zone. So much crying. I’m not saying that to be mean. The stuff your bodies go through. I couldn’t do it, that’s for sure.”
Grace folded her arms and rested her elbow in the crook of her left wrist to support her smoking arm. She had a smoking arm now, apparently. The nicotine was already buzzing through her, making her head feel heavy. A gentle ache had picked up somewhere in the center of her skull.
But as the edge dulled on her frustration over the spilled milk, she began to worry what Sloane would think of her being up here with Ames.
“Did you smoke with Bobbi?” she asked, distracting herself. She didn’t want to think about Sloane. Ames wanted to spend time. With her. She felt, she admitted, special.
“I think there’s some rule that says I’m not allowed to incriminate my wife, isn’t there?”
“Rule of Evidence Section 504.” Grace had a memory like a steel trap.
“She doesn’t find my blue-collar roots nearly as charming as she should.” He winked, a gesture that should have been cheesy, but Ames had those squinty eyes that burst into wrinkles when he smiled. It was a good look.
She’d known Ames for six years and she didn’t actually mind him. Even before this. She knew he and Sloane didn’t exactly get along. But she’d always harbored the distinct hunch that Sloane bore at least some of the responsibility for blurring the lines between them. That and, well, nothing Ames had done was exactly egregious. More like open for interpretation. There were rumors. Okay, yes, there were definitely rumors. But weren’t there rumors about everyone? Everyone had someone who didn’t like them. Maybe not Grace, in particular, but most people. He was rough around the edges, at times, sure, but this was a corporate executive who smoked cigarettes and wore his sleeves rolled to the elbows.
Grace walked to the railing, flattened her forearms on the narrow beam. Boxes of grass appeared as miniature putting greens down below. Cars the size of her thumb waited at stoplights, swerved around each other, and disappeared into parking garages. Her heart rate sped as she gazed vertically down at the concrete. It was impossible to look down and not think about falling. Moments earlier, she might have considered throwing herself over the side of the building.
“You’re going to be fine,” Ames said. “You have a good doctor, right?”
“Emma Kate has the best pediatrician I could find. Dr. Tanaka.” A soggy flake of paper came off on her tongue and she realized she’d been chewing the end of the cigarette like a thumbnail.
“For you, I mean.”
Grace turned her back to the rails. “I’m fine. Just tired.”
“Of course.” He shuffled up next to her, a respectable distance away, leaned his own elbows against the railing. “Bobbi had postpartum depression.” He shrugged. “More common with twins, I guess. She had to go on medication, but thank God she did. I’ll be honest,” he said. “I thought it was some made-up, hippy-dippy shit. A glorified word for ‘tired.’ But I did my research when her doctor diagnosed it. Mood swings. Anxiety. Whole body exhaustion. Suicide. All that from having a baby. Seems like a flaw in the system.”
A flaw in the system.
Yes, Grace supposed it was.
“I hardly think I’m depressed.” She tilted her head. “I’m wearing Rebecca Taylor.” The back of her nose felt dry from the smoke. She hoped to veer the subject away from her fragile mental state. She appreciated the concern, but the last impression she wanted to leave her boss with was that she was one sleepless night away from a mental breakdown. She waited a beat. “So,” she began, “is there anything you wish you’d done differently here at Truviv?” Grace knew that men loved these kinds of questions and, in this case, the answer might actually be useful. He looked up quickly at her. “Professionally, I mean.”
He settled his weight onto the rail again and dragged on the cigarette. “I don’t think so.” He exhaled and hitched his left cheek into a pleased half-grin. “I think I’m in pretty good shape these days.”
“Then how about advice for someone like me? What if, say, I wanted to head up a larger section within the department? You would tell me to do … what, exactly?”
There’d been times in Grace’s life during which she’d let her ambition show, only to have it received amusedly, like a party trick, a cute young girl who knew all her state capitals and could say them on demand. Others when it had felt like a gust of wind had blown up her skirt, revealing her ambition and causing all the men in the room to become simultaneously aroused and embarrassed for her. But she no longer cared.
He nodded thoughtfully, flicked the remaining nub onto the ground, and extracted another finger-length cigarette. “Okay.” He pointed the unlit cigarette at her. “First thing we need to do is to get you
some more interesting work. Challenging assignments. Make sure you can run a deal not just from the regulatory side. I can help with that.” Grace felt a spark of promise. A glimmer of unexpected hope. Maybe she could be more of the Marissa Mayer–type mother. Chronic overachiever. Mom on the side. “Keep a file of any compliment you receive in your inbox.” He set fire to the roll. “Anytime someone tells you in writing that you’ve done a good job, save it. Send an email to me once a quarter with whatever’s in that file and the type of work you’ve been doing for the last few months.”
“You want me to brag?”
He scratched his hairline with his thumb. “I want you to build a case, a case as to why you deserve a promotion. You do all that and in a year we’ll talk about next steps.”
Grace swallowed a smile. She was proud of herself. And just a teeny-tiny bit less exhausted. Though she should probably put a moratorium on the word “teeny-tiny,” a phrase which she must have picked up from Emma Kate’s nanny.
There was a short pause and then—“Want to see a picture of my kids?” Ames asked.
“I thought you’d never ask.” Near-strangers were always asking Grace to produce pictures of Emma Kate like they needed evidence Grace cared enough to take them. It was nice to be on the other end of it.
Ames held up his finger and balanced the cigarette bud on a nearby ashtray while he wriggled his wallet out of his back pocket. “I’m old school. Still like to keep them in here.” He flipped through a couple plastic inserts and held it up to show two side-by-side school photos of his twins. Big smiles. Not at all identical. One of the boys had red hair, the other the dark brown of his father. “Neither of them got my…” He pointed at this streak in his hair. It had become less noticeable since his hair had begun to gray in the last couple of years. “Waardenburg. Fifty-fifty shot.” He shrugged.
His finger held open the leather. A shiny card behind one of the pictures caught her attention and she leaned in closer, pretending to admire his sons. She held her hair back.
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