Nora Carleton took a drink from her travel mug and stared out at the Long Island Sound, which was like yellow glass in the morning sun. She really should be getting to work, but the same thing that made her turn right instead of left from her driveway was keeping her from getting off this bench at Southport Beach. She lifted the steel gray mug toward her mouth again, but stopped short this time to study the faded gold and blue circular logo. The eagle in the middle was almost gone. As was the red, white, and blue shield. God, I miss that work.
It had been two years since Nora left her job at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. She moved only fifty miles away, but it seemed like another planet—Westport, Connecticut, and a job at the world’s largest hedge fund. She liked the people at Saugatuck Associates. They were brilliant, honest, and sometimes funny, but most of them had never known what it was like to have a job where you were supposed to do good, to rescue the taken or stop evil people from harming the weak. They had never been the organized crime prosecutor she once was. They worked ridiculous hours, as she had in the government, but it was to make money for the firm’s clients, and for themselves. Sure, many of the assets were retirement funds for teachers or firefighters, and making money for those folks was good, but even that moral bank shot required squinting past clients like Middle Eastern oligarchs and genocidal authoritarian governments.
Nora was careful how she talked about this at work—it wouldn’t do for the firm’s general counsel to be badmouthing the business—but some of her friends there knew what was eating at her. Her mentor and boss, Chief Operating Officer Helen Carmichael, urged her to try to find meaning through the “kibbutz theory.” There was a moral purpose, Helen argued, in the collection of people who had come together to work at Saugatuck. They cared for one another, shared a goal of excellence, and promised to tell one another the truth at all times. Whether they made shoes or invested money, she said, the community itself was a source of meaning. And in a world where lying seemed to be epidemic, a culture based on truth above all else intrigued Nora. She took the job mostly for the money and the location, but it was a benefit that the place apparently despised liars as much as she did.
Nora liked and trusted Helen, who was kind and protective of “her people,” but she wasn’t persuaded by the kibbutz argument. Of course, even with Helen she didn’t say so. But she didn’t have to. After all, the company’s founder, legendary investor David Jepson, had explained the shared commitment to honesty this way: You don’t need to say everything that’s on your mind, but if it’s on your lips, it better be what’s on your mind. So Nora couldn’t lie about it, but she kept quiet about her growing doubts, the ache that kept her staring out at the Sound when she should be making the short drive to her office. It wasn’t on her lips, but it was eating a hole in her heart.
Still, the money was damn good. She ran her fingers through her hair and smiled. With Nora’s starting bonus and the money her mother made from selling the family town house in Hoboken, New Jersey, they had purchased a big house in Westport. Sure, it was close enough to Interstate 95 that the dull roar of traffic was a constant feature. But it was a “water feature,” Teresa Carleton routinely insisted, with a smile. “Our waterfall.” Nora didn’t find it so charming, but the third generation of Carleton women in the house—eight-year-old Sophie—did. “Nana’s waterfall,” she called the noise, which grew louder on her short drive to school, then somehow disappeared as they passed under I-95 to the lush campus of Greens Farms Academy on a former Vanderbilt estate overlooking the Sound. Nora liked to joke that rich people had found a way to pay the highway noise to move only inland, so as not to mar the sparkling vistas along Beachside Avenue.
She took another sip from her aging Department of Justice mug and laughed at her own moping. There was no disputing that life on Connecticut’s “Gold Coast” had been good to them. Sophie was thriving in the second grade at GFA, with small classes and deeply committed teachers. Sophie’s father, Nick, lived nearby with his new wife, Vicki, and had the good grace not to mention that Vicki’s extremely wealthy father had helped Nora get her job at Saugatuck Associates and paid Sophie’s tuition at her fancy private school. But Nora knew it, and was grateful, both for the help and that it went unspoken.
She and Nick had never been a great couple, even when they were dating in Hoboken and created Sophie by accident. But they agreed Sophie was a gift and easily cooperated to move her between their Westport homes on alternating weeks. She missed the “nesting” days in Hoboken—before Nick got married—when Sophie lived with Nora’s mom, leaving Nora and Nick to take turns staying in the “nest” with Sophie. Teresa continued to be a huge help with Sophie, while also volunteering in Bridgeport, a less wealthy, very diverse city nestled up against the rich, predominantly White towns that gave the Gold Coast its name. Her family was happy and thriving. Things were good.
Nora imagined her mother’s voice. C’mon Debbie Downer, time to get to work. Smiling, she levered her six-foot frame off the bench and stepped to the sidewalk, stomping her feet to get the sand off her shoes. She backed the car out and steered down Beachside. She would drive past Greens Farms Academy—Sophie was at Nick’s this week, so he had taken her to school—and parallel to I-95 until she reached the Saugatuck, and the firm’s modern fieldstone and glass offices on the bank of the river.