“Joss.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to think about your answer before you give it. Take your time.”
“Sure.”
“Are you doing okay?”
I didn’t answer.
That was, in itself, the answer. I knew it. She knew it. The two of us sat there with the question between us and the silence stretching, and I made myself look her in the face because if I looked away I was going to start crying. I had not given myself permission to cry in this building.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.”
“Try again.”
I closed my eyes for one second. I opened them.
“I don’t know,” I said.
It came out smaller than I’d meant it to. The truth, when I finally said it, sounded like a child’s voice in my own mouth.
Mira nodded once. “I’m not going to ask you what’s going on because I don’t need to ask. And because if I asked, I’d be putting you in a position I don’t want to put you in. So I’m not going to do that.”
“Okay.”
“What I am going to do is tell you a couple of things.”
She uncrossed her arms. She clasped her hands on the desk between us. Her wedding ring caught the morning light coming through her window.
“I was twenty-five when I started at the first real company I worked for,” she said. “Not here. Years ago. And there was a man there—not the CEO, but senior to me. Way senior. And I was good at my job, and he noticed, and he made it very clear over a period of about six months that he noticed for more reasons than my work.”
I didn’t move.
“Nothing happened,” she said. “Nothing happened because I was lucky, and because I had a mother who’d told me what to look for, and because the man in question made a clumsy enough move that I could see it coming and step out of the way. But the thing I want to tell you is what happened after.”
“What happened after?”
“After, I spent the next four years at that company knowing that every other senior man in that building had heard about it. From him. From whoever he’d told. And the version they’d heard was not the version that was true. So when I got promoted, people wondered. When I got a good review, people wondered. When I closed a deal, people wondered. My work was no longer just my work. It was my work plus a question mark, and the question mark had been put there by a man who hadn’t even succeeded in doing anything to me. He’d just talked like he had.”
She let the silence drag between us. I sat with my notebook in my lap and my heart in my fingertips and I felt the words land one at a time.
“I’m not telling you this,” Mira said, “because I think what’s happening here is the same thing. I don’t. I’ve been in rooms with both of you, and I have eyes, and what I’m watching is notthat. What I’m watching is something else. But the something else has the same problem, Joss. It has the exact same problem. Because when people start to notice—and they’re noticing—the version of the story that gets told isn’t going to be the true version. It’s going to be the easy version. And the easy version is always the same one when the woman is twenty-three and the man owns the company.”
“I know,” I said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you also know that you’ve worked harder than most of the men on this floor to be in the room you were in last Friday. You came in here on day one and you outworked your entire onboarding cohort, and I told the head of engineering after that meeting last Friday that I wanted you on the executive track. That conversation happened, Joss, that conversation actually happened. And now I’m sitting here trying to figure out whether the conversation I had with Sutton on Monday is going to be the last conversation I get to have about you that’s only about you.”
I felt tears well in my eyes. I made myself blink them back.
