Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

  And then Ardie pushed the door. She held her back against it. “Sorry we’re late.”

  Cosette glanced up and did a double take as Rosalita and her son, Salomon, entered ahead of Ardie. “Excuse me.” She tapped the table. “This is a private meeting. We’re live, here. Cleaning later, please.” Cosette licked her finger and flipped a page on the documents before her.

  “Hello, Ms. Sharpe.” Rosalita came to a stop in front of the conference table. “My name’s Rosalita Guillen. My son, Salomon, will wait in the hall while we talk. Salomon, come, come, manners, please. Take off your hat when you come inside.”

  The boy removed his hat. “Nice to meet you,” he murmured, staring at the floor, ears turning red, while the room turned in on him.

  It was like an invisible atomic bomb had gone off—silent, foreboding, billowing—swelling out to transform the faces of everyone in the fallout radius. The silvery line shone like lightning through the boy’s dark hair.

  Even having expected the explosion, it took Sloane’s breath away.

  “Cosette,” Sloane started as Ardie helped to usher Salomon from the room, “the truth is we never would have uncovered our friend’s story if it weren’t for you.”

  Cosette’s lips parted, teeth white as a shark’s.

  Sloane was surprised to find that she didn’t feel the jolt of triumph that she’d been expecting. Mostly, Sloane felt a tired melancholy worsening in her bones. It was like declaring your favorite war was World War I when what you meant was that World War I was the one you found most fascinating. No one actually had a favorite war. So yes, it was that way with Rosalita. It was an inability to stop staring at the woman she had looked over so many times. (Though Sloane had been nice to her at Michael’s birthday party. Everyone had to give her that much.)

  And, of course, this had happened to Rosalita in Ames’s own office, with its hulking desk and that navy leather chair. If she thought about it too long, she swore she wanted to kill Ames. But, well.

  Rosalita pushed a slim folder of documents over to Cosette, whose mouth had converted into a pin. “I came today because Ames Garrett assaulted me in this office building eight years ago. He told me he knew I wanted it. I didn’t. I never did.” Sloane imagined what it must be like for Rosalita to address this room, to address these people—a member of the board of directors, New York lawyers, an HR officer—and not only to address them, but to say these words in this order. Ames Garrett assaulted her.

  But Rosalita showed no signs of distress. She seemed perfectly collected. The woman had moxie. Then again, Rosalita had already said as much to Desmond Bankole, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, all those years ago. She’d had practice. Unlike the rest of them.

  “Ames Garrett was Salomon’s father,” explained Rosalita.

  Ardie leaned in. “Are you familiar with Waardenburg syndrome? It’s a hereditary syndrome. Relatively harmless, though it can cause discoloration in the forelock and some hearing loss. Ames, as I’m sure most of you are aware, had Waardenburg syndrome.”

  “So, Ms. Guillen could have had a consensual relationship with Mr. Garrett.” She looked around the room to show how completely obvious this was. But if Cosette was treading water now, no one came through with a life preserver.

  “A consensual relationship for which Truviv paid her more than twice her previous income?” Grace asked. “A consensual relationship that caused Desmond Bankole to personally sign off on a single cleaning staff member to receive an unheard of spike in pay following the assault? I don’t believe that CEOs are usually in the business of reviewing cleaning staff pay, do you?”

  Sloane had been sad to hear about Desmond. She’d expected more from him.

  “Not to mention,” Ardie pressed, “that if you review the company’s history surrounding the time at which the increase in pay occurred and the time at which Salomon,” she lowered her voice, “would have been conceived, Truviv would have been at the precipice of closing on the Run Dynamics acquisition, a process which Ames Garrett himself was leading at the time and which, as projected, has been astronomically lucrative for Truviv.”

  Rosalita intertwined her fingers and rolled her chair closer. “I love my son very, very much.” She searched each of the faces. “That’s why I have not said anything until now. Until Ardie.” They shared a look. “Until Ardie and I spoke and I decided—I decided—that I want to come forward to tell my part of this story. I let them speak because of my English. But I am here because I know what matters. And I know what’s right. And what you are doing, it’s not right, Ms. Sharpe.”

  Sloane’s throat felt suddenly swollen. If Ames had sought to put Rosalita in her place, he’d failed.

  Cosette looked as though she were waging an internal battle in deciding whether she should say what she wanted to say next. “Because you want to get paid,” she spat out.

  Even Al Runkin twitched.

  “Yes, it would be nice to get paid. Sure. But they are telling the truth. I cannot let them lose their jobs and money and everything because they tell a truth that is also my truth.” Rosalita pushed a fist into her heart. Sloane’s eyes watered, goddammit.

  Sloane pushed the small pile of papers back across the table. “So, while we do appreciate the extra time you put in flagging where we needed to sign, we’re going to go ahead and not. The press has already been contacted. In case you had any ideas about—I don’t know—going on the offense again.”

  The woman whom Sloane had named Peggy chose this moment to speak up. “You’re under confidentiality agreements with the company.” She glanced sideways at Cosette for approval. “You’re not allowed to say anything. You’d be in material breach.”

  “That’s right,” Cosette added hastily. “You are.”

  Rosalita raised her hand from the table. “I’m not.”

  Rosalita had made the call to Cliff Colgate first thing this morning. It was their turn to take control of the narrative and this—Rosalita—would change it. Plus, Sloane thought, it would be a pretty nice scoop for Cliff, too. (You’re welcome.) He’d promised to handle the article tastefully and with discretion and, as a result, they’d have to put their faith in him that he really was, as he’d claimed, one of the good guys.

  “Right, well, we’ll leave you to it,” Grace said.

  Sloane shook her head solemnly. “Sounds like a real PR nightmare.”

  There was absolutely no world in which Cosette was not clenched down to her toned rear end. “We’ll of course advise Truviv about how best to approach this publicly. They’re in good hands.”

  Sloane paused. “I meant for your firm … and for you. Women in law have to stick together,” she said. “Thanks for the advice.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Two pink lines. Rosalita had sat on the toilet, pants still around her ankles as she’d watched the second line steadily darken until there was no mistaking what the test had decided: she was pregnant.

  She’d had a scare once before when she’d phoned her then-boyfriend and told him her period was late. She thought she knew, in the back of her mind, that she wasn’t really pregnant even before she’d held the test up to the light, squinting to see if there was even the faintest hint of a line forming along the grayish indention printed into the white strip. She’d wanted to see her boyfriend’s reaction and, for a couple of days, it had all been very mature and romantic, playing at the idea of a family with him.

  Now, there was no need to squint.

  She’d placed the test into a plastic bag and zipped it tight, beads of urine clinging to the clear sides. Rosalita was Catholic, but that wasn’t the only reason she wouldn’t get an abortion. Over the next nine months, the baby’s father would be haunted by the sight of her growing belly, of her fat swollen body, ballooning and forcing itself out into the world. Without a word from her, he’d remember exactly what he had done.

  * * *

  Before that night, he’d been the man with silk ties, the odd white streak in his hair like a skunk, the
fading blue tattoo mostly obscured by thick, masculine arm hair and the rest by his rolled shirtsleeve, empty cigarette cartons in his trash can. Before that night, she had disliked being invisible, hated the way men like him looked straight through her as though it were a machine and not a person that was dusting the blinds and emptying trash cans. After that night, she would never feel invisible enough again. She would crave the ability to go unseen. But she’d always feel naked.

  He had been working late, night after night, so many of them strung together that it felt as though she and the man were working the same schedule. He took power naps on a couch in his office, which had quietly impressed Rosalita. A couch in the office!

  The word “acquisition” was tossed back and forth and she once thought she’d heard “billion” with a “B” and didn’t know how anyone could sleep at all, even on an office sofa, if he was in charge of something that cost over a billion dollars.

  At first, she had liked the companionship even if they never actually spoke. The hours stretched and the number of upstairs attorneys who hurried back and forth from the printer and shoved sushi into their mouths over their keyboards dwindled until each evening he managed to be the last. This went on for ten days, maybe more. Once, he did register her and had lifted his head to say, “How’s it going,” in a gruff voice that didn’t invite more than a mumbled response. On another occasion, she watched him standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, staring out into the bottomless pit of night, where buildings pressed their jagged teeth into the navy sky. Just standing there. Staring.

  The night that it happened, voices carried in the empty halls. If there was a buildup, Rosalita didn’t hear it. To her, it sounded like a stereo switched on, the volume too loud so that it crashed into the nerves and made the listener rush to dial back the knob. Rosalita kept her head down and worked through the row of offices, her cleaning partner somewhere off on the other side of the floor.

  The fact that she was eavesdropping couldn’t be denied, but that was primarily a function of her having ears. She couldn’t miss the sound of the two men arguing any more than she could have missed the sound of barking dogs at night. In any event, she understood little of what was being said between the man and the other man, whom she gathered was the first man’s—her man’s (as she had come to think of him)—boss. She would have forgotten it altogether, if not by morning then maybe in a week or two. She felt sorry for the man who’d been working so many hours only to be yelled at by his boss. Maybe that was the problem—her impulse to feel sorry for him. Because she would always wonder what the man saw on her face that night and she guessed it was pity. What in her eyes had been intended as benign sympathy, in his had already metastasized into something mean. She supposed that was because there was already meanness inside him, swimming in his blood like cancer cells waiting to glom onto something. He had an underlying condition. Where would it have gone if he hadn’t noticed her seeing him? If he hadn’t already felt the humiliation boiling inside him and acted on that fateful impulse to make his humiliation hers instead.

  If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it …

  Or, That’s the million-dollar question!

  She’d heard those phrases on TV.

  The boss had been gone fifteen minutes or so when Rosalita entered the office, her head down. She would leave the office fifteen minutes later, having learned the difference between being invisible and feeling invisible. She’d have a white scratch puckering along her forearm, transforming itself to red. It would take another nine months for the scratch to scar, having found its way to the soft bit of skin between her hips.

  Between those two points in time, she would finally memorize the name on the silver plate in front of his office. She would call a free lawyer that she learned about on a hotline, because Rosalita was not the woman that he had banked on her being. She would meet with the CEO of the company. She would be told that the man—her man—was in charge of a critical acquisition strategy for the company, that it would be her word against his, that the stockholders would push back hard. She would be given a choice, which would be more than she’d been given before.

  The wrong place at the wrong time!

  Another phrase.

  Eight years later, she would want the man’s money more than she would want him dead. He would wind up dead anyway. She would show up to his wife’s door, something that she had never done before, no matter how many times she’d been tempted. She would have a door closed in her face, telling her to go away and be quiet. And one of those things she would do.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  3-MAY

  “Hi, Katherine.” Ardie hovered in the door, her hands stuffed into her roomy pockets.

  Katherine stared at her from behind the makeshift office on the twentieth floor. A private office on the upper level. Moving on up, Ardie thought, glancing around at the two walls and the pane of glass, blinds drawn, behind her.

  “Hello.”

  Ardie tried to imagine meeting Katherine in another context. In an interview, perhaps. What would she have thought of her then? Would she have hired her? She found it impossible to say. Too much had happened in the in-between.

  “I just wanted to let you know that we didn’t accept the settlement offer.” No inflection. Just the facts. Like an unbiased news source, if those existed anymore.

  The tip of Katherine’s tongue slipped onto her upper lip. “Do you think that’s wi—”

  “There was a shift in the case,” she interrupted. “I think it’s safe to say that we’ll be receiving a settlement offer ourselves shortly. Maybe even today, and that it will be considerable.”

  Katherine blinked up at her. Three red blotches had begun to spread up her long, perfectly postured neck. It was no easy thing being on the losing side of a moral battle, especially when you’d chosen the pragmatic one, the upper hand, when you had sold a piece of yourself for the safer bet. Katherine’s mouth formed an “O” of surprise.

  “Why, Katherine? Why did you lie?” Ardie asked finally.

  Katherine took in a sharp breath. “I—I thought it was obvious. I needed distance.”

  Ardie crossed her arms. “From what? From us?”

  “No.” Katherine massaged her temples. “Not just from you. From all of it. From … what happened.” She swooped her hands wide to demonstrate. Ardie waited. “I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. “At Frost Klein, I didn’t look out for myself and look what happened. And there was even more at stake here. I did what I had to do. Not just for me. It was better—it is better—for me to have been on good terms with Ames.”

  Ardie remained calm. Ardie’s other superpower. “At Frost Klein, no one was looking out for you. And you weren’t just ‘looking out’ for yourself. You tried to ruin us, Katherine.”

  “No.” She looked down, shaking her head. “No, it wasn’t personal.” Supposedly, no one was the villain in their own story, and Katherine, Ardie now knew, could make up stories. What she didn’t know was whether she was spineless or calculating or a liar or whether it was possible to be all of those things under the right circumstances. “I never asked for this. I never asked you guys to sue your employer for me, okay? In fact, I specifically said as much.” Katherine rubbed the back of her head with too much aggression.

  “Okay,” Ardie replied.

  Katherine looked through her eyelashes at her. “It’s not like, it’s not like I went in there planning to say … planning to say what I did.” Ardie made no motion. “I walked in there, and before I had a chance to say a word, Cosette told me I should know that they were going to sue you guys.” She whispered now. “That the detectives were looking closely at anyone who was known to be fighting with Ames. They hoped”—she laughed a little—“they hoped I’d be honest, because they saw such a bright, promising future for me here, and they knew I’d had some troubles before.”

  “And so that was enough to throw us under the bus.”

  “They we
re going to crucify me. Again. My name would be smeared through the papers. I might never work as a lawyer again. For years anyone googling me wouldn’t see how I’ve busted my ass. They wouldn’t see that I was an editor of Law Review or how far I’d come. They’d see that I accused some man of harassment and now he was dead. You didn’t hear Cosette. The detectives were going to be all over me. And I wasn’t going to be at the center of this house of cards.” Ardie thought: You weren’t the center; you were the wind that knocked it down. “They were asking questions, Ardie.”

  “I know.” Ardie had moved not so much as an inch. “They asked me, too.”

  “Your name was already on the filing. That was done before he died.”

  Before he died. Okay, then.

  “So why not tell the detectives more?” she asked. “Why not tell them everything?”

  Katherine fell silent.

  “Ames wasn’t a good person,” Ardie said. What she would remember most about Ames was that conversation she’d had with him in his office, a day or two after they’d returned from the closing in L.A. It was their last conversation of any substance. Buyer’s remorse, he’d called it. Sour grapes. He said she was just mad he didn’t call after. It was a one-night-stand; people had them all the time. He was right. They did. Only she hadn’t. She knew that. She did. She had been drunk, passed out even, sure. But—“Let’s be real for a second,” he’d said. “Look at you. You think I’m just dying to sleep with you? I didn’t do anything that you didn’t want. If anything you came on to me. How many drinks did you order again? You could have just left if you’d wanted to.” The sting of shame that lingered over the years wasn’t that she believed him, it was that she let him believe she had by not telling anyone—other than that worthless Al Runkin—about it. She looked through the years of experience and across the desk at Katherine. “He might have tried to be occasionally,” she continued, “when it suited him or when it wasn’t too difficult, but he wasn’t.”