And Victoria walked away from the conversation with her composure intact and her expression doing something he’d never seen it do before. “Where did you learn to do that?” she asked low as they moved through the crowd. “I told you difficult clients. That man is a journalist. He’s also a person who likes being recognized for his work. Same principle.
” He moved his hand from her back. you okay? She stopped. They were in a relatively quiet corner of the hall, away from the nearest cluster of guests. How did you know to come over? I was watching. You were across the room talking to the Ellery family. I was also watching you. She looked at him with that unreadable expression and then something happened to it.
The readability increased briefly, and what was underneath was something that Ethan found difficult to look at directly. Not because it was bad, because it wasn’t. Thank you, she said. You’ve said that before. I’ll probably keep saying it. You don’t have to. Ethan, his name in her voice with something underneath it. I know I don’t have to. That’s why I want to.
Harrison Ellery materialized out of the crowd at that exact moment and saved them both from whatever was happening in that corner of the museum. The rest of the evening was a success. Victoria spoke to the skeptical donors without performing and without calculating. She just talked the way Ethan had suggested about what the foundation had actually failed to do and what she intended to fix.
One old woman, 80 at least, with the posture of someone raised to have posture, took Victoria’s hands afterward and said something too quiet for Ethan to hear. Victoria came back to him with her eyes slightly brighter than usual. “What did she say?” he asked in the car. She said my father would have been proud of tonight. She looked out the window.
Margaret Ellery. She’s known my family for 40 years. She never says things she doesn’t mean. Good. She also said you had kind eyes. Ethan said nothing for a moment. That’s a nice thing to say. She’s a good judge of character. He kept his eyes on the road. In his peripheral vision, he could see Victoria watching him, and he let it go.
and they drove home through the dark with the radio very quietly playing something he couldn’t quite identify. Mrs. Caruso had put Lily to bed and left a note saying there had been a request for one extra cookie, denied on health grounds, a request for a second story, granted it was short, and a report that Lily had said Victoria’s house had the best bathtub because it was big enough to swim in. Ethan read the note.
She’s not wrong, he said. It is a very big bathtub. Victoria was sitting on the kitchen counter, shoes off, which she did sometimes when she thought no one was paying attention. Tell her she can use it anytime. She’ll hold you to that. I know. There was a warmth in how she said it that caught him. Not warmth as performance, just warmth, real and unconstructed.
The kind that slips out when someone stops thinking about whether they’re letting it show. He looked at her sitting there, blazer still on, hair starting to come loose from wherever it had been pinned, the careful billionaire partly dismantled into just a person on a counter in her kitchen. And he thought, “This is going to be hard.
Not the arrangement, not the contract, not graves or the board or the 60-day clock that had already counted down past the halfway mark. This specific thing, this was going to be hard.” He turned and put the kettle on. T. Yes, she said please. They drank tea at the kitchen table at midnight and talked about nothing important for an hour, and it was the best hour of Ethan’s last two years, and he didn’t tell her that, and he went to bed carrying it.
The fifth week of the fourth month, Marcus called. “How’s the rich life?” he asked when Ethan picked up. “Same as regular life, more square footage.” Pete says, “You sound different.” Pete has never heard what I sound like on a phone call. He says, “You sound like a man who’s thinking about something he’s not saying.” Ethan was quiet for a moment.
He was in the truck parked outside a job site in Milbrook eating a sandwich. Pete should mind his own business. He’s 51. Minding his own business gives him too much time to think about his knees. How’s the schedule? Marcus let him change the subject, but Ethan knew he’d been read.
Marcus had a way of seeing things without pushing, which was more useful than it looked. The schedule was good. The business was fine. He’d been afraid when he’d agreed to this that his being less present would damage what he’d built. But Marcus had stepped up in a way that Ethan hadn’t fully anticipated. And Pete had started training the new kid, Dany, with the patient thorowness of someone who understood craft.
The company was running. It didn’t need him less. It just didn’t need him constantly. He wasn’t sure if that felt like freedom or loss. He drove back to Princeton with the radio on and thought about the contract. Four months done, two left. He thought about it practically, the way he’d tried to think about all of this from the beginning. The money was real.
The benefit to Lily was real. The arrangement was working. Sterling Capital was stable. The foundation gala had reset some important relationships, and Graves had been quieter in the past month, which meant either he was retreating or he was building towards something. The arrangement was working, which was the problem in a way because the arrangement working was not the same as the arrangement being easy.
And it had not been easy for a while. Victoria was she was difficult in the ways that certain kinds of people are difficult. The ones who run so hard and so organized that they’ve forgotten how to let anything catch them off guard. She was occasionally impatient. She sometimes reverted to the CEO version of herself in moments that didn’t call for it, giving instructions when a conversation would have done better.
