He leaned forward slightly. Why does a woman like you, connected, obviously smart, obviously capable of solving most problems she encounters, not have a single person in her life she could call for this? No old friend, no trusted colleague, no one. Victoria was quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortable quiet, just the quiet of someone deciding how honest to be.
There are people I could have asked, she said finally. Men I know, men who would have said yes immediately and expected something in return that I didn’t want to give, or men who would have agreed and then leveraged the position. She wrapped both hands around her coffee cup. The problem with operating in my world is that everyone has an angle.
Everyone wants something. When my father died, I spent the first week trying to figure out who I could trust and came up with a very short list. She paused. You weren’t on any list. You were just a man packing my father’s books who didn’t break anything and didn’t look at me like I was a problem to be solved. Ethan was quiet.
That might sound like a strange reason to trust someone, she said. No, he said. It actually makes sense. He picked up the pen from his shirt pocket, a regular ballpoint, the kind he used for work orders. He flipped to the signature page of the contract. He looked at it for a long moment.
He thought about Lily’s dream, her voice at 5:00 in the morning, still half asleep, crying for someone who wasn’t coming back. He thought about the $50 a month in the college fund. He thought about what $500,000 meant in a life like his. He signed. Victoria Sterling had not grown up soft. People assumed she had because of the house and the schools and the name.
They assumed Richard Sterling’s daughter had lived a life of ease and privilege. And in material terms, they weren’t wrong. She’d never wanted for anything that money could provide. But Richard Sterling had been a demanding father in the specific way of self-made men who believed that anything given freely is never truly valued.
He’d pushed Victoria harder than her brother had ever been pushed. Partly because he’d recognized something of himself in her, and partly because he’d believed the world would push a woman harder than it pushed a man. And he wanted her ready. She’d been ready. She’d graduated top of her class from Wharton. She’d come back to Sterling Capital at 24 and worked her way up through positions that weren’t given to her.
She’d earned them, sometimes against active resistance from board members who resented a young woman with the founders’s name and the founders’s impatience. By 28, she was CFO. By 29, her father’s health had begun to fail, and everyone in the building knew he was grooming her for succession. What nobody knew, including Victoria herself, until the will was read, was the marriage clause.
Her father’s lawyer had explained it with the careful neutrality of someone delivering bad news. The board has been anxious about stability. Your father believed a demonstration of personal stability would help consolidate your authority. as if an 80-year-old man had sat down and decided the best way to protect his daughter’s inheritance was to legally require her to find a husband in 60 days.
She’d sat in that lawyer’s office and felt something she almost never felt, helpless, not for long. She was her father’s daughter, and she’d started solving the problem within the hour. But six weeks of calls and calculations and rejected options had brought her to the library where a man on a ladder had nearly dropped her father’s Princeton diploma, caught it, and then handed it down to her with hands that were steady.
She told herself it was pragmatic. She told herself she was evaluating a candidate, not making a personal choice. She told herself a lot of things. The first week was logistics. Victoria’s house in Princeton was large and well staffed enough that incorporating two additional people was operationally simple. What was not operationally simple was the adjustment of a six-year-old who had never lived anywhere but a modest rental house in Milbrook and was now standing in a foyer the size of her entire apartment holding her father’s hand looking up. “It’s
big,” Lily said. “Yeah,” Ethan agreed. “Does someone clean it?” “Yes,” Victoria said. “A woman named Donna. She’s very nice. Lily considered this. Our house daddy cleans it. Sometimes I help with the low parts. That’s an important job. Victoria said. Lily looked at her seriously. I know. Victoria had been around children occasionally at family events, at company functions with employees who brought their kids.
She did not have extensive experience with them and had never particularly sought it. She was aware in the way that competent people are aware of gaps in their knowledge that she didn’t know what to do with a six-year-old. She discovered this more concretely that evening when Ethan’s phone rang during dinner, a work call he had to take, stepping outside onto the back porch, and Victoria was left at the dining table with Lily, who was eating pasta and studying her with the frank curiosity of a child who hadn’t yet
learned to pretend she wasn’t staring. “Are you daddy’s girlfriend?” Lily asked. Victoria set down her fork. We’re friends, she said. Good friends. Adults who are good friends don’t usually live together, Lily said with the particular authority of a child who had been listening to adult conversations her whole life. Victoria looked at her.
That’s fair. We’re figuring things out. What things? Grown-up things. Lily wrinkled her nose. That’s what daddy says when he doesn’t want to explain something. Your father is a smart man. Lily seemed to accept this and went back to her pasta. Then, after a moment, do you have a mom? Victoria went very still.
She passed away a long time ago. Lily looked up immediately with the kind of direct empathy that children have before they learn to be awkward about it. I don’t have a mom either. She died, too. I know, Victoria said quietly. I’m sorry. Daddy says she’s still with us because she’s in our hearts.
