Chương 3
“No, Dad.”
She shifted the weight against her hip.
“I was obedient.”
She walked past him.
Linda stopped her near the front door.
For the first time since Emily arrived, her mother looked directly at her.
“Your sister needs help with Noah this week.”
Emily almost laughed.
Linda’s expression did not change.
“You cannot be serious.”
“She canceled Miami because of you.”
“She canceled Miami because she lost her babysitter.”
“Family helps family.”
Emily glanced at Lauren.
Lauren was pretending to study her phone.
“Did family help me yesterday?”
Linda’s mouth tightened.
“You are making one bad morning into your entire childhood.”
Emily felt heat rise behind her eyes.
She hated it.
She wanted to leave with perfect composure, as if perfect composure would somehow prove she had won.
Instead, her voice shook.
“You locked the door.”
Linda looked away.
It was such a small movement.
That was the answer.
Emily carried the box outside.
Noah followed her onto the porch.
Lauren called him back.
He ignored her.
“Aunt Em.”
Emily put the box into Marcus’s truck.
Noah held up a plastic dump truck.
“You forgot.”
It was a yellow toy she had bought him at a garage sale the previous summer.
Emily crouched again.
“That’s yours.”
He pushed it toward her.
“You have.”
She smiled despite herself.
“You keep it safe for me.”
Noah considered this seriously.
“Okay.”
Emily touched his cheek.
Lauren stood in the doorway.
For a moment, she looked younger than twenty-six.
Not kinder exactly.
Just uncertain.
“You could still come by,” Lauren said.
Emily stood.
“Maybe.”
Lauren’s face hardened almost immediately.
“Whatever.”
Emily got into Priya’s car.
As they pulled away, she did not look back until the house disappeared behind a row of maples.
Her first week at Harrington was harder than climbing out the window.
She arrived early enough to embarrass herself.
She took notes on everything, including things everyone else seemed to know without explanation.
She mispronounced the name of a senior vice president during a meeting and spent the next hour wishing the building would burn down.
On Wednesday, she spilled coffee across a borrowed spreadsheet printout.
On Thursday, Daniel returned one of her models with so many red comments that the margins looked injured.
At six-thirty that evening, Emily was still at her desk rebuilding the analysis.
Daniel passed behind her.
“You know the market opens tomorrow whether you punish yourself or not.”
Emily did not look up.
“I’m fixing it.”
“You’re rewriting the entire thing.”
“It was wrong.”
“Parts were wrong.”
Emily finally turned.
Daniel had loosened his tie.
He carried a paper cup and looked more tired than authoritative.
“I thought you hired me because I was good.”
“I hired you because you can think.”
“That sounds like something people say when the other thing isn’t true.”
Daniel laughed.
“Go home, Carter.”
“I don’t have one yet.”
The words came out before she could stop them.
Daniel’s expression shifted.
Emily looked back at the spreadsheet.
“I mean, I’m between places.”
He leaned against the empty desk beside hers.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
“That was fast.”
“What?”
“The answer.”
Emily’s hands went still on the keyboard.
Daniel waited.
She hated that he waited.
Most people rescued themselves from uncomfortable conversations by changing the subject.
“I’m staying with a friend.”
“All right.”
“It’s temporary.”
“All right.”
“I’m not unreliable.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
Emily looked at him.
Daniel took a sip of coffee.
“My first month here, I slept in my brother’s dining room in Evanston because my landlord sold the building.”
Emily blinked.
“Why are you telling me that?”
“So you stop looking like I’m about to fire you for not having matching throw pillows.”
She almost smiled.
Daniel straightened.
“Fix the sensitivity assumptions.”
He pointed at the marked-up pages.
“Leave the rest alone.”
Then he walked away.
Emily stayed another forty minutes anyway.
By the end of the month, she had found a room in a two-bedroom apartment in Rogers Park with a graduate student named Kayla who owned three plants and labeled everything in the refrigerator.
The room was barely wide enough for a full-size mattress and a narrow desk.
Emily loved it immediately.
She paid the deposit from her first paycheck.
The night she moved in, she sat cross-legged on the floor eating noodles from a takeout carton because she had not bought a table.
Her phone buzzed.
She had changed the number two days earlier, but the old phone still worked over Wi-Fi.
A message from Robert appeared.
Your mother is sick over what you’re doing.
Emily stared at it.
Another came.
No one kicked you out.
She placed the phone facedown.
Then she picked it up again.
She typed three different replies.
She deleted all three.
Finally, she powered the phone off.
The silence afterward felt unnatural.
She ate another bite of noodles.
From the other room, Kayla shouted, “Do you care if I watch terrible television?”
Emily wiped sauce from her thumb.
“What kind of terrible?”
“The kind where rich people scream near swimming pools.”
Emily looked at the dark phone.
“That sounds perfect.”
Months passed.
Then a year.
Emily stopped checking whether anyone from home had emailed.
She changed apartments.
Then jobs within Harrington.
Then floors within Harrington.
She became good at finding the weak place inside a deal.
Not brilliant.
Not infallible.
Good.
She learned that distressed assets were rarely about numbers alone.
Numbers only recorded what people had already done to themselves.
A missed covenant could begin with arrogance, grief, divorce, a bad expansion, a sick parent, a partner who lied, or simply somebody believing next quarter would be better because they needed it to be.
Emily became suspicious of optimism.
Daniel called that her worst professional habit.
“You price fear too generously,” he told her during her fourth year.
“Fear is expensive.”
“So is missing upside.”
“Upside doesn’t send threatening letters.”
Daniel smiled.
“You’re cheerful today.”
May you like
She had become a vice president three weeks earlier.
Her parents did not know.
