3-MAY
We had long seen the problem at the heart of it all: being a woman at work was a handicap that we’d been trying to make up for by erasing our femininity in just the right ways. We pretended to agree that an interest in makeup and romance novels and Real Housewives was any more empty-headed than an obsession with sports and craft beer and video games. We joined Fantasy Football leagues. We policed ourselves into removing verbal upticks from our sentences and erasing the word “like” so that we could sound more “professional,” when what we were really trying to do was sound more male. Since sexual harassment was a thing that happened to women, believe it or not, we didn’t want to admit that we had been harassed. It would be admitting that we were women in a way that mattered. So our insistence on speaking up at last ought to have been a clue of what was to come. We were going to start mattering.
Likewise, the fact that Sloane wasn’t a puddle should have been a clue, too. It was, at the very least, a goddamn miracle. She was waiting for someone in this room to remark: Sloane, you are so stoical. How do you do it? And, oh, by the way, can I get the number for your hair stylist?
But instead, everyone besides her and Grace looked like their stomachs were upset. She considered offering them Pepto-Bismol just to be cheeky, but, well, she probably shouldn’t.
They occupied the twentieth floor conference room, the Important One, as Sloane thought of it because this was where she’d done her legal liability presentations for Desmond and the board. She herself had become a legal liability, she realized. She would have made the presentations. Life was funny that way.
Puffy leather rolling chairs circled the slick mahogany oval around which Cosette, her two henchmen (whom Sloane had named Peggy and Brad without having ever actually learned their names), a staunchly spectacled member of the independent review committee, Al Runkin, Helen Yeh, and Grace sat. From the corner, an enviable fiddle leaf fig fanned impressively large leaves from its trunk and probably retailed for five hundred dollars, a fact which Sloane had learned the hard way when she killed two of them in her own living room.
Cosette made a big show of checking the time on her Rolex, as if that were the way anyone really checked the time. Sloane figured the Rolex was probably like purchasing a boat. Once you bought it, you were required to log the number of times you used it to justify the cost. “Have you heard from Ardie?” she asked, like they were waiting for one of their friends to arrive for brunch. A mimosa might be nice.
“I’m sure she’ll be here soon.” Sloane drummed her fingers on the countertop while a silence that threatened Sloane’s conversational impulses stretched.
To occupy herself, Sloane wondered at Cosette. Silly things, like whether she was the sort never to have dirty dishes in her sink. (Probably.) Her apartment in New York presumably was feng-shui-ed, a copy of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up half-read on her pristine nightstand, as though the reason her home was in such immaculate, anally retentive order were that she was enlightened and not, say, because she billed twenty-five hundred hours a year.
Cosette gave a perfunctory double-tap of the diamond-rimmed watch face. “Maybe we should go ahead and get started on the housekeeping parts of today’s meeting.” She pushed three sets of documents over. One for Sloane, one for Grace, one for Ardie. “We’ve gone ahead and put together the settlement papers. I’ve used yellow tabs to mark where you need to sign. We wanted to make this as pain-free as possible.” Her lips pruned as she leaned across the table.
“How considerate of you,” Grace said, her tone minty-cool.
Cosette, bless her, crumpled her face in an appreciative nod, apparently taking it as an actual fucking compliment.
Sloane had read somewhere that it would be impossible to kill someone with a thousand paper cuts, despite the old saying, “Death by a thousand paper cuts,” but that a million might actually do the trick. She probably shouldn’t think about that sort of thing after all that had happened.
“The thing is, Cosette,” Sloane started, “you could have just offered to let us drop the lawsuit. We might have considered that.”
“Sloane, I wish.” Cosette clicked open her pen. “Given our history. But the board felt very strongly—and I agreed, to be honest—that we needed to set a precedent. To discourage frivolous lawsuits.”
“Right. Precedent.” Grace frowned at Sloane, shrugged. “Makes sense.” In another room, Grace and Cosette might have passed as sisters.
Sloane wondered how cocksure—we hated that word—one had to be not to wonder why the two women who were preparing to fork over a gut-churning sum of cash, along with all their stock options and their jobs, didn’t have an eyelash out of place.
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.”