Chapter twenty-three
George
Evelyn stands at the whiteboard, leading the meeting. Tessa sits beside me, legal pad open, pen already moving before Evelyn has finished her first sentence. I notice, without meaning to.
Noah is across the table with his arms crossed and the expression of a man who is physically present and mentally somewhere considerably more interesting. Marissa has already opened her laptop, radiating confidence.
"Let's talk about potential clients," Evelyn says, and the meeting moves from preamble to purpose.
"If we're expanding the portfolio, we should look at high-visibility bachelors." Marissa is already typing before anyone responds.
"High-visibility bachelors,"Noah repeats the phrase under his breath in a tone that suggests he finds it faintly absurd, which it is.
"I don't think we need to do that," I say.
No one looks up.
Tessa writes something on her legal pad, and I find myself wondering, briefly, what she made of Marissa's phrasing. Whether it struck her as efficient or reductive. Whether she has opinions about that kind of thing. I file the question away, which is becoming a habit I haven't examined closely enough.
"Let's see — eligible billionaire bachelors in Firth City." Marissa says this mostly to herself and hits enter with the energy of someone solving a problem that didn't need solving.
I clear my throat. "We don't typically recruit clients by internet search."
Noah snorts. "That's subtle," he says, earning a complete absence of acknowledgment from Marissa, which doesn't appear to bother him.
The results populate in a neat, impersonal column of names and thumbnail photographs, the kind of listicle that gets assembled by algorithm and mistaken for journalism. Marissa scrolls slowly, tilting her head the way people do when something almost registers but hasn't quite landed yet.
Then her finger lifts off the trackpad.
The scrolling stops.
She leans slightly forward, frowning at the screen with the focused attention of someone trying to confirm what they think they're seeing.
Tessa, still looking at her legal pad, says quietly, "You've stopped typing, Marissa," without any particular inflection.
Noah covers his mouth with his fist.
Marissa turns the laptop slowly.
My name is on the screen in clean sans-serif text, beside a photograph I did not choose, above an article I did not approve. The Maddox Foundation is listed beneath it, and then the net worth estimates, which are, as always, both inaccurate and close enough to be uncomfortable. The room holds its breath. I cansmell the faint chemical bite of dry-erase markers and I focus on that, briefly, because it is neutral.
Noah leans forward, elbows on the table, and looks at the screen, then at me, then back at the screen, with the focused attention of a man doing very careful arithmetic.
"Hold on," he says. "Is that you?" Which is a question, technically, though we both already know the answer.
I exhale slowly and say nothing. In my experience, silence is its own kind of answer, and Noah is perceptive enough to read it.
"Wait. Are you—" Marissa starts.
"A Maddox?" Noah finishes, in the tone of a man who has just won something and isn't entirely sure what.
I have known this moment was inevitable since my first week at ERS. I simply hadn't accounted for Conference Room A specifically, or the particular discomfort of watching it happen in front of Tessa, whose pen has stopped moving.
Evelyn cuts in cleanly. "George's family background is not relevant to client strategy." Her tone makes it clear that the subject is resolved.
Noah leans back in his chair slowly. "I feel like it's at least mildly relevant," he says, with the half-smile he uses when he's pushing just far enough to register.
I look at Tessa without meaning to. It's a reflex. The same one I have with everyone when information shifts, when I need to measure the small seismic changes that follow. I watch for the recalibration: the slight widening of the eyes, the new attentiveness, the unconscious lean-in.
