Chapter 142 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 25

Chapter 142 THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS - 25
COLE

I sat in my kitchen for a long time after she left. Not doing anything. Not even pretending to do anything. Just sitting there with the cold coming through the windows I hadn't closed properly and the faint sound of the city doing its thing outside, which felt appropriate. The whole world just carrying on like I hadn't fucked up the best thing that had happened to me in years.

The thing about making a mistake you can see clearly is that you can't unsee it. That's obvious, probably, but there's a particular kind of torture in sitting with a mistake that's entirely your own, where you can trace every decision that built it. This one, then this one, then that one. None of them individually seemed wrong. And together they made something that hurt someone I care about in a way I could have completely avoided if I'd just made one different choice. Like at one in the morning when I had her name on my phone. Like when I closed that tab and opened the email to Margaret instead.

I've made bad calls before. I've been wrong before. It's not that.

It's that I knew. Somewhere underneath all the governance logic and the firewall reasoning, I fucking knew she would've wanted to be asked. I knew it and I talked myself out of it with the very tidy explanation that she had enough going on and I was just handling it and I'd tell her later. As if later was a thing that worked out for anyone. Ever.

Jordan showed up around nine. I hadn't asked him to, which is how Jordan operates, he just appears when you need him and pretends it's a coincidence. He didn't knock either, just let himself in the way he's been doing for fifteen years, went straight to my fridge, stared into it for a moment, and then closed it and sat down across from me at the kitchen counter.

"You look like shit," he said.

"Thanks."

"I'm not saying it to be mean. I'm saying it because you look like shit and your fridge is still empty and I'm starting to think those two things are related."

He didn't push after that. Just sat there and poured himself a glass of water and looked at me like he was waiting to see which version of this I needed. That's the thing about Jordan that most people don't know, because most people only see the version of him that sends gifs in group chats at midnight and shows up to parties with opinions about guacamole. He can do quiet when it matters. He's actually really good at it.

"She called this morning," I said eventually. "Asked for… for space."

"Ohhh?"

"She was right to."

"Yeah," he said. Not agreement exactly. More like he was giving me room to get there at my own pace.

I told him the whole thing. Not the version I'd told myself at three in the morning where I was being reasonable and strategic and protecting her from board politics. The real version. The one where I was scared and I defaulted to the thing I know how to do, which is solve problems from the top down with access and leverage and closed-door meetings, and I hadn't stopped to think that the problem I was solving involved a woman who had spent her entire career fighting for the right to solve her own goddamn problems.

Jordan listened. He didn't interrupt. He did make a face when I got to the part about the Margaret Coyle email, just a small one, just enough to tell me he'd clocked exactly where it went wrong.

"You meant well," he said when I was done.

"Yeah."

"That's the worst thing about it, honestly. If you'd been an asshole on purpose she could just be mad at you and move on. But you weren't. You were stupid with good intentions, which is harder to forgive because it's harder to hate."

"I know."

"She's not wrong though. To need the space."

"I know that too."

"Does knowing it make it better?"

"Not even a little bit."

He nodded like that was the answer he expected. We sat there a while longer in the comfortable quiet that fifteen years of friendship produces, where you don't need to fill every silence because the silence isn't awkward, it's just two people being in the same room. At some point he ordered food from somewhere on his phone and it arrived and we ate it standing at the counter because I hadn't set out plates, and it was the most normal I'd felt in about forty-eight hours, which wasn't very normal at all but was at least something.

He left around eleven. No speech, no pep talk, just a hand on my shoulder for a second on his way to the door. "Don't sit here all night," he said. "You'll just make it worse."

He was right. I sat there all night anyway.

My phone rang at half past eleven.

My mother's name on the screen. I considered sending it to voicemail. I really did. But my mother can tell the difference between a missed call and a declined one by some maternal radar I've never been able to explain, and the last thing I needed tonight was a follow-up text asking why I was avoiding her.

"Hi, Mum."

"Cole." She had that tone. The one she uses when she's decided to have a conversation I'm not going to enjoy, warm but deliberate, the verbal equivalent of sitting me down at a kitchen table I can't leave. "I heard something today."

Of course she did. My mother moves through a social world I've long since stopped being able to fully map, a web of dinners and phone calls and connections that spans three cities, and information travels through it at a speed that would embarrass most intelligence agencies.

"From who," I said, though I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

"It doesn't matter from who. I heard there's been something going on with the company’s auditor. That it's become complicated." A pause. She's very good at pauses. "Is that accurate."

"It's more nuanced than that."

"Cole."

"Yes," I said. "It's accurate."

She was quiet for a moment. My mother's silence is different from most people's. It has weight to it. She's been using it on me since I was twelve years old and it has never once failed to make me feel like I should explain myself, which I think might be its entire purpose.

"Tell me about her," she said.

That I wasn't expecting. I opened my mouth to say something practical, something about the audit and the board and the professional entanglement, and instead I heard myself say, "She's the most certain person I've ever met. About everything. She walks into a room and she already knows what she thinks about it, and half the time what she thinks is that I'm probably full of shit, and she's usually right." I stopped. "She had me figured out eight months ago, actually, the first time we met. She put me into a box, you know the rich, spoiled, overbearing box, but we’ve gotten to know each other since then and we’ve moved past that. I think."

"You think."

"I did something stupid. I was trying to protect her and I went around her to do it and she..." I stopped again. "She didn't even yell. She just looked at me and said I should have asked her first."

"She's right."

"I know she's right."

"So what are you going to do."

"Wait," I said. "Give her the space she asked for. Finish the audit properly. Not make it worse."

My mother made a sound that wasn't quite agreement. More like she was filing something away for future reference, which with her usually means she has an opinion she's decided not to deliver tonight. "She sounds like she has very high standards," she said finally.

"She does."

"Good. So do you. When you're not being an idiot about them."

"Thanks, Mum."

"I mean it as a compliment. Mostly." She softened, just a fraction. "Don't overthink it into something it isn't, Cole. You made a mistake. Mistakes usually take shapes. You know what this one looks like now. So does she."

We talked for a few more minutes about nothing important. My brother. Something about the house. The usual orbit of family conversation that keeps you tethered to being a person even when you feel like an idiot. When she hung up I sat there holding my phone and turning over what she'd said.

‘Mistakes have shapes. You know what this one looks like now.’

The thing was, I did know. I knew exactly what it looked like. I also knew Vivienne well enough to know that knowing the shape of a mistake didn't automatically mean she wanted to hand the person who made it another chance to make a different one. She was careful. She'd been careful about me from the beginning. Eight months ago she'd looked at my name and closed a door, and it had taken months of conference rooms and gas station coffee and a dying streetlight on a cold night for her to open it again.

She'd opened it. And then I'd fucked up royally and I didn't actually know what came after that. I hoped I did. Sitting here in my kitchen at midnight, I really, genuinely hoped I did.

But I didn't know.

And that was the worst part. Not knowing. Waiting. Sitting in the quiet she'd left behind and hoping it wasn't permanent.