“That you’ve earned everything you have here. That the company you’re building isn’t safe if people start thinking you’re being promoted for the wrong reasons. That a man at the top of the org chart sleeping with a woman at the bottom of the org chart is not a story that ends the same way for both of them.”
She was watching me very steadily.
“Did she say all that?” I asked.
“Some of it. She said most of it. She said something else, too.”
“What?”
“She said you’re not paying for this. She said I am. She said to decide if I can afford it.”
I didn’t argue with her. I didn’t tell her Mira was wrong. Mira wasn’t wrong. Mira was, in fact, the most correct person who’d entered the room in the last week.
“She’s right,” I said.
Joss didn’t move.
“I’ve been running this company while you’ve been sitting at your desk eleven floors below me trying to act normal,” I said. “And the company hasn’t noticed anything. And you have. And nobody has called Mira into a meeting to ask her what’s going on with the CEO this week. They’ve called Mira into a meeting to ask her what’s going on with you. That’s the asymmetry. That’s what Mira was telling you. And I’m not going to stand in this office and tell you it’s not real.”
“I know,” she said, very quietly.
“So tell me what you want,” I said. “And we’ll figure out how to get there.”
She was quiet for a long time.
I let her be quiet. I’d cleared my morning. I had nothing else to do. The June sun was coming through my windows behind me and falling across the floor between us, and she stood in it and worked her way through whatever she was about to say.
“I want to leave Myrror,” she said.
I nodded once.
“I don’t want to leave Myrror because you want me to leave Myrror. I want to leave Myrror because Mira’s right, and because I’ve been operating at fifty percent for a week, and because if I stay here, my whole career is going to be a question mark with your name on it. And I don’t want that. I want my work to be my work.”
“Understood.”
“I’m not going to ask you to make calls for me. I’m not going to ask you to introduce me to anyone. I’m not going to take a job at a company you own or a company you have a board seat at or a company you invest in. I’m going to figure out the next part by myself.”
“Okay.”
She looked up at me. “That’s it. That’s the whole ask. Don’t fix it. Don’t engineer it. Let me do it.”
“Okay,” I said.
She blinked. “Okay?”
“That’s it,” I said. “I’m not going to fight you on it. I think you’re right. I think Mira’s right. I think you should do exactly what you just said you’re going to do. And I’m telling you right now that I will not interfere with one minute of it.”
“What do you need from me?” she asked. Her voice had gone smaller.
“Nothing.”
“Sutton.”
“I don’t need anything from you, Joss. I need you to figure out the next part by yourself. That’s the only thing I need.”
She made a small sound. It might’ve been a laugh or it might’ve been the beginning of a cry, and I couldn’t tell from across my desk because she’d put her hand over her mouth in the second it took for the sound to come out.
I waited.
