Ardie covered her mouth with her hand and Grace smoothed her lips together.
Katherine looked down at her shoes, and then back up. Something unreadable played on her features. “I’d done work for the company in other capacities, but was brought on that year to help put together the new financials of the combined entity. I noticed a discrepancy in the statistical analysis and brought it to the partner’s attention.”
Sloane had lost her own shoes and she crossed her legs, bare toes bobbing from the leg on which her elbow dug a crater. “Sure, of course.”
She felt the vicarious sense of dread swelling under the narrative of a properly terrifying ghost story. At Jaxon Brockwell, a second-year associate had once left the word “not” out of a crucial sentence in a company’s retirement plan and the mistake had resulted in millions of dollars of additional payouts. Sloane had absolutely nothing to do with it and still hadn’t been able to sleep for weeks.
“He said to run the analysis this year on the right statistics,” Katherine continued. “No one would read them, and if they did, they’d tell them about the error at that point. I wasn’t comfortable with the arrangement.” She punctuated these words. “But it was the section head. At Frost Klein. And, the partner said that if the company asked, we’d disclose the mistake.” Katherine ran her hand through her hair. “But the surviving company with which the original one had merged did read the new report, they did notice the discrepancy, and they sued for fraud. I thought, fine, the partner is going to take responsibility. It made me sick, but the buck stopped with him.”
Grace’s expression had dropped. She lightly held her hands cupped over her ears. It was disaster porn, titillating and horrifying, for the attorney set.
“He had a meeting with the company, to which I wasn’t invited. I went to lunch. When I came back, the managing partner, the section head, and the head of HR were gathered in a conference room waiting for me. I was terminated immediately. The client had demanded the firm take action against me, though I’m sure the partner suggested it. I was confused.” She blinked now, reliving the moment. It made Sloane’s own stomach churn. “I was prepared to argue my case.” Her eyes stayed unfocused. “But the partner looked me straight in the eye and pushed documents across the table, documents they said they’d found in my office regarding the analysis from the year before, which I hadn’t even worked on, I swear. They were those statistics. The partner said I was the one responsible. He said he’d press criminal charges for my fraudulence on work for a public company under securities law. And the other attorneys there, I could tell that this was what they wanted. So I left. There was nothing I could do. They were threatening to disbar me.” Her voice became husky. “It was scary. I almost can’t believe I got out of there alive.”
“Christ,” Ardie said, finally setting down the party platter and dusting off her hands. “You could have made, what, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year if you’d stayed and made partner at Frost Klein.”
That was miles from what an attorney working in-house could typically make. Hundreds of thousands of miles, to be precise.
“Yep.” Katherine’s skin looked dewy, from sweat or alcohol or sun, Sloane wasn’t sure. But Katherine didn’t try to couch the issue by saying that it wasn’t about the money. (We had stopped buying the success-isn’t-synonymous-with-money line years ago when we realized how much less money we were making and, by extension, how much less success. We’d learned the hard way that money predicated success, not the other way around. Money was options. Money was the ability to take risks. To jump to the next level. Money can’t buy everything, we’d always been told. Money can’t buy time. To which we called B.S. We had the Care.com and Instacart accounts to prove it. Money was what we were after.)
Grace pulled her chin back in disgust. “Who was the partner?”
“Jonathan Fielding,” Katherine answered, without hesitation.
“Wow.” Sloane smacked her lips. “You must have wanted to kill him.”
“Sloane,” Ardie warned.
Katherine’s eyes, though, flashed in recognition. “If I’d had the chance, I think I would have.”
“Shoot.” Ardie looked out at the backyard, where the child half of the party was devolving into riot territory as little hands and feet pulled and stomped over the cardboard city. Scraps had begun to litter the fenced area. “I have to get the cake.”
“I’ll help!” Sloane raised her glass and followed Ardie into the kitchen. The screen door clanged shut behind them.
Ardie opened the refrigerator door and Sloane, who wasn’t actually particularly helpful at social gatherings, leaned her torso onto the kitchen island.
“Katherine seems a little unglued today, doesn’t she?” Sloane whispered, peering back over her shoulder through the window. “Do you think that’s really what happened?”
“Yes.” Ardie slid a red, white, and blue cake from the middle shelf. She cradled it in her arms, placing it down carefully beside where Sloane stood.
“She who is always so skeptical. That’s it?”
Ardie opened the drawer and began sinking candles through the icing around the cake’s perimeter. “That’s it.”
“What’s it called when men fail? Failing up?” Sloane eyed the frosting and debated a quick swipe of her finger through the blue swirls.
She struck a match on the side of the box. An orange flame jumped from its head. Sloane tipped it to meet the wicks and watched wax begin to drip onto the cake, until the flame burned just a second away from the tips of her fingers and she puffed it out. A breath of gray smoke curled and dissolved.
“I’ll say one thing,” Sloane said. “This is the booziest kid’s birthday I’ve ever attended. Well, except for Abigail’s first,” she mused.
She held the door for Ardie, who balanced the cake. The guests erupted into “Happy Birthday,” which Sloane sang with conviction. She noticed Rosalita missing from the ring of faces, but only in passing.
When the singing finished, slices of cake were cut and served. The sun had just begun to tip the day’s scales over into uncomfortably warm. Though that could have been due to the fact that she’d misplaced her champagne flute in the kitchen. The adults mingled, restless milling as everyone tried to extract themselves from the party in time to run errands, or get ready for a sitter that night, or to take naps.
It was with her mind on her own home and a pair of sweatpants that Sloane located Derek and then started guiding him toward Ardie to say their goodbyes. Grace was already collecting paper plates and shoving them into an open trash bag. And Sloane was considering how maybe it’d be easier if they all just chipped in for a cleaning service. Wouldn’t that be equally nice? If not nicer, she added.
Abigail came to show her a dandelion she’d found in the grass before she made a wish. And it was all such a blur that she hardly noticed who it was that had said to Ardie, “This was such a wonderful party. Thank you,” until Braylee and Tony appeared in front of them and Tony was saying to Derek, “There’s a scotch and chocolate tasting next month at our club, if you’re interested in making it a foursome. Braylee can get with Sloane for the details.”
And, well, Sloane had happened to be craving chocolate that very moment and so nodded enthusiastically and promised to speak soon.
When she turned it was to find Ardie’s face at point-blank range, the expression washed clean off it. “You’re going to get with Braylee for the details.” No question asked.
Sloane was about to press her hand to her forehead and decry the effects of too much bloody champagne. But she would have to do that at home with Derek. Because Ardie Valdez, she could see, wanted to hear none of it.
“It was just one or two times.” Or three or four, Sloane thought. Or five. “Derek ran into Tony at the grocery store one time.” She tried to imbue her tone with a sense of wonder, a what-are-the-odds type story. “And Tony asked him to play tennis at the club. Derek is always wanting to play tennis and you know I’m never
letting him join a club.” Actually, there was a membership packet on the counter and Sloane had been very seriously considering it.
Ardie listened, passing out party favor bags without a word.
Sloane had begun to talk with her hands. “One thing led to another and—I’ve been meaning to mention it.”
Ardie’s mouth was a needle-sharp line. “But you ran out of time in the ten-odd hours that we work together, five days a week.”
Do you know what is worse than a text message? This. This is worse!
Sloane sighed, her posture wilting instantly. “Don’t be like that. I know you hate Tony.” Ardie glanced sharply at Sloane. “But Derek hardly has any guy friends. He works with a bunch of women. And he was a little bit thrilled to be invited, I think.” Derek stood at the fence gate, his hand resting on the back of Abigail’s neck. She swung a party favor bag at knee-level. Come on, he beckoned. “I was just trying to be—I don’t know—supportive.”
“Of whom?”
Sloane held up her finger to Derek. One second.
“Ardie, please don’t be mad.” Sloane had been under the impression that middle-aged people were no longer allowed to get mad at each other. So the slight chill in the air came as an unpleasant surprise.
“I’m not mad.”
“I didn’t intend for it to be some secret.” After that, Sloane wasn’t quite sure what else could be said. Because they were too old for petty grudges—weren’t they? And they’d been friends and colleagues for too long. And they were, most importantly, career women. They weren’t supposed to have time for drama.
“Sloane!” Derek barked.
“I have to go. We’ll talk about it on Monday. Or before Monday. Whenever you want.” Sloane followed Derek and Abigail out of the gate, assuring herself that the interaction had been nothing, that all was well, that Ardie didn’t blame her for what she’d done, but Sloane couldn’t swallow her own lie. Ardie was angry with her. She felt rotten, and in pretty shoes, no less. Her buzz flattened. She climbed into the seat of Derek’s SUV, the idea of a headache beginning to play in the center of her forehead. She stared out the window—the weather suddenly too hot, the birds too loud, the chugging sprinklers wasteful. She had other secrets. Lying dormant beneath the surface, safe from the ones she loved. She always believed that she kept them secret to avoid hurting anyone. But maybe, just maybe, that was another lie that would someday blow up in her face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
3-APR
Mondays arrived for us bearing mixed feelings—guilt, dread, stress, fatigue, and relief. By the end of the weekend, we jonesed for the Internet. Salivated over a chance to peruse online shopping websites and sip company-sponsored coffee without interruption. We knew we should have run more errands on Sunday. That we should have changed the bathroom light bulbs and paid the doctor bill that had been sitting on the kitchen counter since last month. On Mondays, we were bitterly aware that we had long since outgrown summer vacation, that the monotony of work flowed straight through the four seasons without stopping, that a weekend was, at its core, only one real day off followed by a day of steeling ourselves for the coming onslaught of the week ahead, because we hadn’t used our free hours to catch up on expense briefs like we’d planned. We had accidentally marathoned episodes of Jane the Virgin instead. Mondays arrived with the same promise of New Year’s Resolutions—we would eat healthier, exercise more, procrastinate less, not let our children watch so much television. They arrived with the gut-level, self-effacing instinct that by Friday we would have failed on at least half those counts.
On this particular Monday, we pressed the buttons on our monitors, listened to our voicemails, checked our emails, filled our staplers, scribbled over Post-its, numb to the cracks fanning out in the glass beneath our feet. This Monday arrived with no more fanfare than usual, nothing to indicate that it was the last Monday on which everything would be normal.
* * *
Grace Stanton had excellent penmanship. She’d made her high school varsity teams in both soccer and tennis. She cooked well enough. She had attended the University of Texas School of Law and graduated not top of her class, but top 25 percent, for sure. She cleaned out her refrigerator on time. She read a book a week. She spoke French.
The point was that Grace Stanton was good at nearly everything.
So why did she arrive to her desk on Monday morning feeling like a failure?
She simply couldn’t explain it. She tried talking to herself as she would to a friend: You’re being too hard on yourself. You are wonderful. Stop beating yourself up over tiny things. No one even notices.
The problem was that, when she said those things to a girlfriend, she actually meant them.
Grace clicked out of The Skimm, a female-centric newsletter that explained the day’s most important news stories, then popped over to an interior design blog she followed before she could avoid her day no longer.
A contraband space heater hummed by her feet as she turned to a summary of recent regulatory updates and began scanning the files for any proposed changes that might impact Truviv. She added notes to a Word document of issues to raise with outside counsel who would run the proper Westlaw searches for her.
She was finally sinking into her workflow when there was a loud thwack on her door. She looked up to see Ames’s hand gripping the inside of the doorframe, as though he’d been walking by and caught himself before he missed his exit.
He reeled himself back into view. “Oh, hey.” He snapped his fingers in rhythm before punching his fist into his hand, a one-two-three rhythm. Her father often did the same thing. “Did you happen to have a chance to take care of that thing we talked about last week?” He scratched his cheek where silver speckled the weekend stubble still lingering there.
Grace was used to men popping in and knew that it happened more frequently to her than it did to, say, Ardie. And if that had caused her more than mild annoyance, she might have considered changing her look. But she came from a family of Southern women who wore high heels to the grocery store. Old habits didn’t die hard. They didn’t die at all.
“Actually, not yet.” She strived to match Ames’s offhanded tone.
He ran his hand through his hair, causing the white streak at his forelock to disappear for a moment. “I see.”
Grace’s fingers still hovered on the keyboard. “But it’s on my to-do list.” It wasn’t as though she’d forgotten about Ames’s favor. And it wasn’t as though she didn’t want to do it.
Why shouldn’t she? Such a small thing. She liked Ames and he saw something in her. She was allowed to like Ames. Wasn’t she?
She smiled back at her boss, allowing herself to remember how to put a man at ease. It was simple, really. A warm smile and an easy laugh and—boom—whatever man she was speaking to instantly felt happier. Look, it was already working.
He folded his arms and leaned his shoulder on the doorframe. “You know I’d never want to ask you to do anything you were uncomfortable with.” He rested a knuckle on his mouth, studying her.
“Right.” She removed her hands from the keyboard and pressed them into her lap. “Of course not.” And, she thought, he would probably never want her to do anything to make him uncomfortable, either.
She could lie. That was an option. But a good one? Not likely.
“Anyway, I have to get going. Comp committee meeting.” For a cynical moment she wondered whether his mention of compensation was a coincidence or a suggestion. Then she recalled again how kind he’d been up there on the balcony, about their plan to advance Grace’s career inside the company, and she felt sorry. “But hey.” He snapped and pointed up. “Maybe after you’re finished we could hit the balcony for a quick…” He mimed smoking. “I have a few projects coming down the pike that you may want to call dibs on. And I’d love to get your input on a few regulatory concerns.”
“Well,” she said, “you know how I love … regulatory concerns.” Inane office talk. She indulged.
/> “I knew I liked you, Grace.” He winked. “I’ll touch base later.” And on his way out, he tapped the doorframe twice.
Her screen had gone to sleep in front of her. She nudged the mouse to bring it back to life. She considered the interaction, considered it and saw little choice but to do as Ames had asked. But was that wrong? Wasn’t the point of business to get as much as you thought you could get away with?
She considered it from another angle and asked herself, if she did have a choice, a choice without consequence, what would she do then?
Perhaps the answer didn’t change. And if that were truly the case, then that ought to be a comfort. Ames was a father and a husband, one with a complicated past with Sloane, but that didn’t make him a monster.
He could be an asshole, she had no doubt. Not to her, but he was, she agreed, capable. But she doubted whether Sloane and Ardie, for instance, had as much experience with men of a certain ilk as she did. Because Grace had grown up in Cotillion, been a debutante, joined a sorority, and at each stop, she’d understood the discreet underpinning at the heart of these men’s behavior. It was entitlement.
Anyway, entitlement wasn’t such a dirty word, not unless you allowed it to be. It just meant that you thought you deserved something valuable.
Grace thought she deserved more money and more recognition. In fact, she believed she was entitled to it. She wondered if this thing was what she needed to do to get it. In order to be something other than “new mommy” Grace.
She opened up a blank document, typed out the date in the upper left hand corner. She hesitated. Her canines chewed the pink flesh inside her cheek. She checked the time. The cursor blinked.
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