I didn’t love that Doug was a senior executive for one of our client companies. A new client, and not one I worked with, but rules were rules, and romantic relationships between employees and clients were strongly discouraged, outright verboten without disclosure. But the thought of sharing details of my newly burgeoning sex life with HR was simply too much to bear. So I’d decided to conveniently forget how we’d met and remember that I was a partner—I was allowed to bend rules. It helped that Doug was also violating Darden Pharmaceuticals’ policy against fraternizing. Maybe keeping it a secret even made the whole thing a little more exciting for both of us. And we did honor the confidentialities these rules were trying to protect—neither of us talked about our jobs.
I was just so glad to be dating someone I’d met in real life. Online dating had been mostly a disaster for me. Those dates got high marks if I managed to make it through an entire dinner. I found the whole process utterly alienating: “matching” with strangers; the stilted overly intimate messaging with someone you hadn’t even met; the padded profiles that verged on outright lies. It had seemed like a necessary transitional endeavor, though—an ugly, awkward wrecking ball to my old life.
But Doug? He was a genuine possibility. He was funny and kind and incredibly smart. Like me, he’d come from nothing and worked ridiculously hard to get where he was. And, it turned out, we had plenty to talk about besides work. His daughter, Ella, was about Cleo’s age, and Doug, a widower, struggled to connect with her in so many of the ways I did with Cleo. Ella was a singer, Doug a scientist turned businessperson. “A story of opposites,” he’d said somewhat sadly on our first date. “I think it would bother me less if I wasn’t trying so hard to bridge the gap.” Dougwas quirky and charming, too. He was teaching himself to make fresh pasta from YouTube videos and working his way slowly through the American Film Institute’s top one hundred movies of all time. It didn’t hurt that he was also extremely attractive, with thick salt-and-pepper hair, bright hazel eyes, and an infectious laugh. Not as gorgeous as Aidan, true—few men were—or as tall. But he wasn’t nearly as self-centered, either. Doug was also (a little unexpectedly) excellent at sex, gentle in all the important ways and assertive in the right ones.
“You’re awake?” he asked sleepily, turning over and wrapping an arm around my hip, his face still buried in the pillows.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
“Mmm, okay,” he said, hugging me more tightly. “But only if you do.” A second later his breathing had deepened again. Doug was sweet—that was what I liked most about him. Sweet and kind. Sometimes you didn’t realize how much you needed something until it was offered to you. Turned out I was absolutely desperate for someone to be gentle with me.
I quietly lifted my phone from the floor. There would be work messages. There were always work messages, even at 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday. But no Cleo—of course not. She and I hadn’t exchanged so much as a text in three months. Still, I always felt deflated when I scanned my messages and didn’t see her name.
I did have twelve texts from my assistant, Jules, passing on messages from clients, none nearly as pressing as they surely thought. My clients, with their kinds of predicaments, were so fueled by embarrassment and frantic for a quick fix that niceties like respecting weekends went right out the window.
I also had a text from my boss, Mark, asking if I could touch base with Vivienne Voxhall. One of my few female clients, Vivienne was the high-profile CEO of UNow, a new social media platform that was setting the world of college students on fire. UNow was designed to upend the Instagram obsession with likes and curated content. It was also designed to make money, alotof money. Vivienne had run marketing for Spotify and iTunes and Hulu—she was one of the most successful women in the tech world, in part because she was also a coding savant who had street cred with the engineers. But she had an anger-management problem, as well, which most recently had resulted in her threatening to push a middling senior executive’s chair “out of a window” if he rocked in it one more time while she was talking. In Vivienne’s defense, he was apparently categorically awful to the women who worked for him. Vivienne didn’t always have such noble targets for her rage, though. So far, she’d just been lucky enough to keep the stories contained. But now, this executive was threatening to go to the media if he wasn’t given a C-suite role at UNow. Impressive chutzpah by any measure. And the timing couldn’t be worse, given UNow’s impending billion-dollar IPO.
Mark didn’t know any of these details, of course. He was the hands-off firm liaison. I was the hands-on fixer. Given Mark’s role as managing partner at Blair, Stevenson, it made sense for him to have plausible deniability. And I was to keep even the existence of my role confidential. That this was imperative was clear to me, though it was never stated explicitly. Mark no doubt assumed that I’d told Aidan. Spouses were tacitly exempt from most rules about confidentiality. But notably, it had never occurred to me to trust Aidan in that way, not even ten years ago, when I’d transitioned into the position. Nor had it occurred to me to see that lack of trust as problematic. I was used to secrets.
And so we had a system: Mark would give me the name and phone number of what was usually a high-level employee of an existing corporate client. Mark assured the client—generally the employerof the wrongdoer employee—that I would make the problem go away. I didn’t circle back to Mark until the mess was officially cleaned up. What happened in between was my business. But Vivienne wasn’t above calling Mark in the middle of the night to get what she wanted when she wanted it. Typical of her to give me only minutes to respond before going over my head.
I spoke to Vivienne late last night,I wrote back to Mark.It’s already sorted.
Vivienne was losing it over a voice mail from aNew York Timesreporter who was sniffing around. I had assured her, less than eight hours ago, that there was no way theTimeswas going to run a storyaboutVivienne without officially reaching out to her for a comment. One voice mail wouldn’t be enough. The story would be on hold, so long as Vivienne didn’t answer the phone. Another problem solved, at least temporarily.
My job could be satisfying that way, even if it meant regularly wading into some fairly murky waters. Were all of these wealthy, entitled people—some of whom had done some pretty unsavory stuff—deserving of a second chance? Probably not. But then, maybe I wasn’t, either.
Through the vast, sparkling windows, the Hudson River glowed. Doug’s view was spectacular, the apartment an impressive loftlike one-bedroom with polished ash floors. But Doug preferred the family house in Bronxville; the pied-à-terre made him feel lonely. Or it had, he said, until I agreed to stay over last night.
I slipped out of bed and tiptoed toward the bathroom, resisting the urge to put on my clothes first. My self-confidence in that particular arena was a work in progress.
When I came back, Doug was awake but distracted. He was sitting up, feet on the floor, eyes locked on his phone.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
His eyes remained on his phone as he brought his other hand to the back of his neck and shook his head. “I just got the strangest message …”
“Work?” I asked as I walked around to the opposite side of the bed and grabbed my bra and shirt from where I’d thrown them the night before.
“No, no,” he said, looking up at me. “There’s some … We used this college counselor for Ella …”
I waited for him to finish his thought, but instead he rubbed his forehead. I came back to his side of the bed, tugging on my clothes as I sat down next to him.
“And you’re hearing from him now? Wouldn’t that have been, like, three years ago?”
“At least,” he said, quickly darkening the screen of his phone when I glanced over at it.
“Is there … Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t even remember the guy’s name … Advantage Consulting was the company.” His voice drifted again. “Somebody is demanding money for … well, to keep quiet. About something I didnotdo.”
I put a hand on his back. “Oh, I’m sorry. That sounds … upsetting.”
Doug nodded. “Yes, and also … odd. We didn’t pay for anything illegal. I mean, the guy hinted at options, sure. You know, ‘We could do more for a price.’ But wenevertook him up on it, obviously.” He frowned. “We didn’t fire him, either, though. I guess we could have done that. Taken our business elsewhere. That probably would have been the more ethical thing to do.”
“The message said they were going to claim youdiddo something illegal if you don’t pay?”
Blackmail—now that was something I knew a thing or two about. I glanced down at his still-darkened phone. I wanted him to show me the message, so I could see for myself what he was dealing with. You could tell a lot by the way demands were phrased.
