I closed the door.
I crossed the office and sat down in the chair he’d indicated. I set my notebook on the arm of the chair. I brought my notebook with me everywhere. Hadley teasingly called it my emotional support notebook.
Sutton had three things in front of him on his desk. A laptop, a tablet, and what I was almost certain was a printout of my Outfit Builder deck. It was annotated. I could see the pen marks from where I was sitting.
He watched me for a beat, then followed my stare and said, “I read this over the weekend. I have follow-up questions on the engineering estimate.”
He asked me three questions. They were good questions. They were not the questions a CEO who wanted a polite update would ask. They were the questions a CEO who’d actually sat with the material and thought about it would ask. I answered them as well as I could, and we went back and forth for what was probably eight or nine minutes.
Then the questions ran out.
I knew they’d run out because he stopped asking them. He didn’t say “thank you for your time” and he didn’t say “we’ll circle back” and he didn’t make any of the small CEO noises that typically end a meeting like this. He just stopped talking.
I sat there with my hands on the arms of the chair. He sat there with his hands flat on his desk.
I waited.
He waited longer.
I was about to say something—I had no idea what, but I was about to say something just to break the silence—when his eyes dropped to my notebook on the arm of the chair. Then they came back up to my face.
“You haven’t opened that once,” he said.
I looked down at the notebook, then back up at him.
He was watching me with the same expression he had worn on Friday morning when he’d saidkeep going, Joss, except now I wasn’t standing in front of a screen with my hair pulled back and an audience of four. Now I was sitting in his office with the door closed and no audience at all.
I didn’t know what to say.
I didn’t say anything.
He let the silence stretch.
He didn’t look away.
4
SUTTON
I’d said the thing I shouldn’t have said, and I was now going to have to live in the silence I’d created.
She didn’t move. The notebook sat closed on the arm of her chair where she’d set it ten minutes ago. She hadn’t looked at it once, and now we’d both acknowledged that out loud. I had no plan for what came next. The whole meeting had been a pretext I’d known was a pretext when I scheduled it, and my guess was that she’d known it was a pretext when she walked in.
She finally looked away from me. Down at the notebook. Then back up.
“I didn’t need it,” she said.
“I know.”
“I usually need it.”
“I know that too.”
She held my eyes another second. Then she stood up. She picked up the notebook and tucked it under her arm and smoothed the front of her blouse with the flat of her hand. I watched her do all of that with the kind of focus I should’ve been giving the spreadsheet open on my laptop.
“I should get back,” she said.
“You should.”
