Chapter Text
The moment Logan looked out across the table, the clatter of silverware stopped. The hum of voices quieted, leaving only the sound of the sea, heaving. Logan was looking at Gerri. He was looking at her, and her stomach lurched, a nauseous, seasick feeling, though the yacht was too large to register the movements of the sea.
“You were across the coverup,” said Logan, staring at Gerri with his cold blue eyes, the color of a January sky. “And Baird, before you. You’re senior enough. It plays.” He turned back to his plate, picking up knife and fork, stabbing the steak and sawing through the thin line of gristle at its edge. “And, well,” he said. “The buck has to stop somewhere.”
She felt a strange relief at first, like the moment the glass knocked off the counter falls to the floor and breaks, the test results come back with long-awaited bad news. The part of her that always planned for the worst eventuality saying: oh, of course. Around the table, a shudder of relief: all the survivors exhaling, tension leaving their bodies with the knowledge that it would be her and not them. She hated them for it, knew she’d react the same way, were she in their place.
Gerri was, she realized, holding a knife, her knuckles going white on its handle. She set it down gently beside her plate.
“Dad, seriously?” Across from her, Roman was seated with one foot propped on the seat of his chair, knee pressing up against the table. His fork dangled limply from his hand, a wilted spinach leaf forgotten, speared on its tines. “Gerri? Dad, you can’t.”
“Please,” said Logan. “Tell me more about what I can and can’t do.”
Roman pulled his knee up to his chest, shrinking into himself but standing his ground. “It’s just—I just—she’s been fucking… holding this company together with duct tape and bungee cords ever since I was a baby.” Then, looking around the table, his gaze settling on Karl and Frank: “No offense to the rest of you.”
“You know better, then, Romulus?” Logan leaned forward, planting his arms on the table, rattling the cutlery. “Wasn’t too long ago you were sucking down amniotic fluid and milk, but please, tell me how to run my fucking business. They teach you something back at that daycare in Florida? Something I don’t know?”
That was all it took. Roman shrank back into his chair, staring down at the floor.
“Please,” Logan said. “You have something you want to say? Spit it out.” He picked up a napkin from the table, dabbed at the corner of his mouth. “Anyone else ? Any… input you’d like to contribute? Speak now, or forever hold your peace.”
Gerri had thought maybe Frank—but of course not. Frank stared down into his mashed potatoes, refusing to meet her eyes. Karl, beside him, shoveled food into his mouth at record speed. The man had a stomach of steel. Nothing could put him off his dinner, not even the scent of blood in the air. Blood in the air, a bloody steak, a glass of red to wash it down.
Silence. Logan was looking at her. It seemed he was waiting for her to speak.
“Well,” Gerri said. “I’d like to hash out some of the details, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Maybe… consult with someone. About the legal implications.”
“Uh-huh.” Logan popped a piece of steak into his mouth, chewed. Swallowed. “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “First thing. We’ll get it all settled. Come up with a timeline. A dollar amount.”
Gerri nodded. It seemed this was all the assent he required. Logan raised his glass, saluting her. Around the table, the others followed suit—all except Roman, who sat still, folded into himself, pushing his food around his plate with the edge of his fork.
The steak turned to sawdust in her mouth. She gave up on eating, sipped at a glass of water, refusing the server’s offer of more wine. Wished, stupidly, for Baird. The absurdity of the thought exposed itself almost immediately. The only thing that would change if Baird were here would be that Logan would be doing this to both of them. They could have commiserated, at least, she thought. Baird would look her in the eyes, they would speak to each other.
Contingencies unspooled, tangled together. Sentencing might be anything from a slap on the wrist to months in jail to years. She could weasel out of it, maybe, she was good at weaseling, but any hint of legal trouble and she’d run the risk of being disbarred. Even outside the question of whether anyone outside Waystar would touch her, it could end her career.
And there were the girls, and if something came out about Baird… They seemed, still, to believe that he was the good one. Gerri had hoped to take his secrets to the grave, to let them maintain their illusions. They’d been asking already about the hearings, questions Gerri preferred not to answer. She’d have to tell them this time, before they saw it on the news. Get out in front of it, whatever it was.
When Logan rose from the table at last, the others followed suit. Frank and Karl scattered like roaches suddenly exposed to light. Logan nodded to Gerri, made a face. Vanished down the hall. Standing now, hands gripping the back of her chair, she watched him go.
“Gerri?” It was Roman, circling the table, speaking in a whisper still too loud for her to be satisfied no one could hear: Tom, Greg, and Shiv still loitering at the edge of the room, heads bent together. Connor and Willa lingering over the dregs of a bottle of wine.
“Are you, uh…?” Roman struggled for words, teeth worrying his bottom lip. “Did you need any kind of—ah, did you want me to…?”
It bubbled up before she could stop it. He was a Roy, he was immune, of course he was immune. Logan would throw her overboard if that was what it took to guarantee a lifeboat for Roman, for others like him. “Want you to what, Roman?” Gerri hissed. “Cower under the table like a dog that someone kicked?”
Roman flinched away, looking down at the floor. Gerri couldn’t stand the look on his face: like she’d knocked the breath from his lungs. Like he was the one tossed overboard, struggling for air.
“I appreciate your concern,” she said, schooling her tone back to a cool neutrality, “but I can handle myself.” She pushed in the chair, its legs scraping along the wooden deck. Then she shoved through the crowd of onlookers. They were gawking while pretending not to look. Their eyes bored into Gerri’s back as she followed Logan down the hall.
Gerri had met Baird Kellman when he interviewed her for her first real job out of law school. He looked unremarkable then, another man in a suit staring appraisingly at her across the expanse of his desk. Gerri was twenty-seven years old, in an off-the-rack suit that didn’t quite fit, her resume padded with public-interest law internships and volunteer work. Her late-breaking pivot to corporate inspired by the latest mailing with the balance on her loans, a series of sleepless nights at the rickety table in the New Haven apartment she shared with two other 3Ls, where she bit her nails and crunched the numbers in pencil again and again, failing to make the math come out right.
It was the fall of 1982 and Baird was finalizing his divorce from the wife he’d met at Harvard Law, who’d quit her corporate job when she got pregnant with twins. She was blonde too, a twig of a thing, worry lines standing out on her face. The boys were starting high school now and Baird had moved out of the house in Ossining to a prewar apartment on the Upper West Side, overlooking the park. He hit on Gerri for the first time respectfully, in a well-lit room at a Christmas party at Lester’s house, leaving a number of openings in the conversation through which, had she wished to, Gerri might have politely slipped away. Over the course of the conversation, Baird’s hand found its way to her arm and lingered there but strayed no further. He seemed as good as anyone, Gerri thought.
The whole of the C-suite attended the wedding, some with the wives they were cheating on, others with the mistresses for whom they had recently left their wives. From Gerri’s family only her sister, Margaret, was in attendance. Logan walked her down the aisle, a concession to Gerri’s new mother-in-law, a traditionalist. Baird’s mother suffered from a powerful lack of imagination, the kind endemic to WASPs raised in clean, peaceful homes by two emotionally distant yet loving parents. She liked to ask Gerri questions about her past, interrupting her terse responses with interjections like: “Oh, you poor thing.” It seemed she would accept the marriage as valid only if she could locate some man who was currently in possession of Gerri and willing to give her away.
It started with the first dance, the pressure building in her chest. Gerri was wrapped in layers of silk and lace, her train pinned up behind her, turning slow circles inside Baird’s arms. Baird was taller than her by a head and danced with a well-bred, country-club confidence. Gerri had needed lessons, which she’d begun a few weeks after their engagement, again, at Baird’s mother’s urging. Gerri had needed to learn—she had realized with a smirk—how to dance backward in heels.
As the third song started up, they swapped partners: Baird handing Gerri off to Logan, extending his hand to a very pregnant Caroline, whom he led out to the center of the floor. Gerri’s connection to Baird had brought her into Logan’s orbit; otherwise, so junior a member of the legal team would have had little reason to cross his path. Baird had been part of Logan’s inner circle for years, the two of them seeming to balance each other out: Baird level-headed where Logan was impulsive. There was a neutrality to Baird, a solidity. He had a near-photographic memory and a love of procedure and he did things by the book, steered away from unnecessary risk—most risk, as far as Baird was concerned.
Logan danced a respectable waltz, keeping decent time. In the past, his hands had tended to wander. There had been that time in the kitchen at Baird’s, when they’d gone to freshen their drinks and Logan had said: “You know, you’re too good for him,” resting a hand at her waist. Baird and Caroline yards away in the living room, laughing uproariously at each other’s jokes. Her stomach had flipped and her hand trembled, over-pouring the gin. It had been fear, Gerri told herself later that night, lying sleepless next to Baird, his arm slung over her chest—though at the time she’d mistaken it for something else. She hadn’t liked the full glare of Logan’s attention. There was a too-muchness about it, like staring into the sun.
There had been that time in the kitchen, and sometimes his hand on her arm at parties, lingering a little too long. His foot tracing the line of her calf at dinners, hidden by the fall of the tablecloth. Then when Baird proposed, a switch seemed to flip. Now, as they danced, Logan kept his hands firmly at her waist, maintaining space between their bodies. Gerri wondered if he’d needed lessons, too. The whispers she’d heard suggested that his life had been something like hers. Logan, like her, had come from nothing. But no one hearing the story would ever say: Oh, you poor thing. You pitied anyone who came between him and whatever it was he wanted. It was what Gerri loved about him, if you could call it love.
Across the room, Caroline twirled beneath Baird’s arm. She was wearing an empire-waisted green gown, tented over her pregnant belly. They made a handsome couple, Gerri thought: the same bony elegance, sharp cheekbones. Baird’s WASPy self-possession, Caroline’s aristocratic grace. The light had seemed to go out of her over the past two years, as though she were a candle Logan kept snuffing out. But Caroline was laughing now, twirling beneath Baird’s arm, the green skirt of her gown skimming the floor.
“This will be good for you, Gerri,” Logan said, his right foot advancing as her left drew back. “Settling down.”
It was then that all of it went unrecognizable: the husband and the new name. Gerri saw it at once in a bird’s-eye view where the dancers moved in elliptical orbits, the faces of the guests blurred into unfamiliar masks. She stumbled and Logan steadied her, a hand at her elbow. “Gerri…?” Logan said.
She felt a frisson of shame. She was still awed by him then, had never seen him falter. “It’s nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Empty stomach and too much champagne.” It was true; in the bustle of the day, Gerri had forgotten to eat. She touched the high lace neck of the dress, the rope of pearls at her throat—a family heirloom, a gift from Baird’s mother.
After the dancing there was a cake piped with elaborate rosettes, dry inside despite its astronomical cost. Baird fed her a bite speared on the end of a fork and Gerri wondered, watching herself as though from outside, if this would damage her professional reputation. Were these rituals meant to humiliate? Lester, drunk by the end of the night on wine that Gerri and Baird had paid for, clapped Baird on the shoulder and said: “Well, the best man won. Congratulations.” Gerri’s eyes darted between them and Baird put a hand on the small of her back, steered her away to a room in an unfamiliar and beautiful hotel, where she bent her head forward as he fumbled with the buttons on the neck of her dress, catching her hair in his fingers.
Lester’s remark had referenced a bet among the men on the executive floor. Baird brushed her off the first two times she asked, admitted at last that when she’d been hired—the first woman in the legal division—they’d taken bets on who’d be the first to get her into bed. “It was boys’ club shit,” Baird said, “obviously, and I told them as much. But you know how it is.” “Actually, I’m not sure I do,” she’d snapped. It made her re-see those early days, the legal team and a handful of executives crowding into a booth at Bemelmans, out of work late on a Friday night. Baird always managed to take the seat next to hers, and their thighs would press together under the table like a secret they shared, until Lester looked over at Baird and smirked and something shifted in the atmosphere, like all of them were in on a joke except her.
Frank claimed the bet had been between only Lester and Karl, though his hedging years later when she broached the topic again suggested to Gerri that it had included Baird. Baird, for his part, pointed the finger at Karl, Lester, and Ray. “Maybe Frank,” he added, spreading the shit around. Logan cracked a joke about it twenty years later (by which point Baird was dead), the first indication she’d had that Logan knew. But when Gerri pressed him for details, Logan demurred, saying only: “Oh, you know how it was.”
When she thought of Logan, then, Gerri thought of Baird, of the twenty years of her marriage to Baird. She thought, too, of her mother’s death, when Gerri was thirty-one. Lester—or, more realistically, Lester’s secretary or wife—sent flowers, lilies, which Gerri wedged between stacks of acquisitions paperwork on her desk. Frank took her out to lunch, where he spoke to her earnestly about the stages of grief. And Logan appeared late one night, the night before the funeral, brandishing a bottle of scotch through the office’s glass wall.
“I can’t,” she said as she waved him in, shaking her head apologetically.
“What?” he said, placing the bottle down on the table between them. “Afraid the boss will catch you drunk on the job? Whatever you need to do, it’ll get done. It always does.”
“It isn’t that,” she said, looking down at the gray institutional carpet.
Gerri had taken the test a week ago: three tests, to be precise, sure there must be some mistake, dread twisting in her gut as she watched the pink lines form in parallel over and over again. Steph was only one, still barely slept through the night, and Gerri and Baird were locked in an endless, circular argument over whether Gerri should quit her job until she was old enough to start school. Baird insisted he could cover their mortgage easily with just his salary, still put plenty away for Steph’s college, both of their retirements.
“We could make it on my salary, too,” Gerri snapped at last, fishing a quarter from the pocket of her coat. “Maybe we should settle this. Heads, I quit my job and stay home. Tails and you do.”
He’d backed off then, waited a week then continued to press the issue, and Gerri didn’t know how to tell him it wasn’t about the money, not really. It was about the pressure building steadily in her chest ever since the day of the wedding, when she had stood wrapped in layers of silk and eyelet lace and watched the faces of the wedding guests distort, becoming strange. It built whenever she heard Baird’s car pulling into the driveway, the house in the quiet suburb where nothing ever happened, where whatever happened happened in silence, behind closed doors. Steph’s sticky hands tugging at her blouse, the secret bank account Gerri had kept ever since the wedding, squirreling money away—a little from each paycheck, a big chunk from last year’s bonus—anticipating the day she would need to run. She felt sometimes she was standing in a river, waist-deep, the current growing stronger and her body growing weaker, until it swept her away.
“Mm-hm,” Logan said.
“Please, just don’t… say anything,” she said. “I haven’t told him. I think he knows, I just… it’s still so early. You know how it is.”
“Uh-huh,” Logan said, folding his arms across his chest.
“Please, though, don’t let me stop you.” Gerri stood, retrieved a clean mug from the top of her filing cabinet. “You have one and I’ll just… sniff it. Drink vicariously through you.”
Logan accepted the mug, placing it beside the bottle on the table. “I’m sorry, Gerri,” he said. “Rotten fucking luck.”
It took her a moment to register the change of topic. “Oh,” she said, “you know. It wasn’t… unexpected, precisely.”
Her mother had been in poor health for years, which Gerri knew from wiring Margaret money to cover the hospital bills.
“Still,” Logan said. “It’s a nasty shock, no matter how much you see it coming.” He uncorked the bottle, poured some into the mug. Swirled it around, didn’t drink. “Would’ve thought you’d be off to the airport by now,” he said.
“Not until tomorrow morning.”
“And the funeral…?”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
He nodded pensively at that, staring down into the mug. “Go home, Gerri,” he said. “If it’s busywork, push it down the chain. Something big, push it up to Baird.” He sipped at the scotch, savoring it. “I notice he’s staying behind.”
“Too much shit to shovel on the Mendelson deal,” Gerri said. “He couldn’t get away.”
Logan shrugged. “Let Frank handle it.”
“I think he really feels he should do it himself.”
Logan snorted. “You want me to clear his schedule? I’ll fire him if that’ll do it. Just say the word.”
Gerri laughed humorlessly. “No. I don’t think that’s going to be necessary. Thank you, though. I appreciate the offer.”
Logan was staring at her with an intensity. Not the leering look of the pre-engagement era. Instead, a kind of careful concentration, like when he was working to land a deal, puzzling through some stratagem. She turned away, her face flushing.
“What, then?” he said.
“It’s stupid,” she said, closing her eyes, resting her head in her hands. She thought of the two-bedroom house, its little postage-stamp yard. Paint peeling from the shutters. She’d paid off the mortgage with her first year’s bonus, posting the check then getting on the train to Connecticut to spend the holiday with her in-laws. “I don’t want him to see it.”
She’d never spoken to Logan about her past. In fact, she was careful to never bring it up unless she was asked directly, and felt that reticence might attract further scrutiny. Still, she wondered sometimes if she was playing the part too well. A month ago they’d been in her office, Gerri and Logan and Frank, fighting over something that turned out in the end not to matter. “Well, I learned my shit at the school of hard fucking knocks,” Logan had said, waving a hand at the two diplomas hung on Gerri’s wall, “so maybe you pointy-headed fucks know something I don’t.” (He’d dropped out of high school, Gerri would later learn, to work at his uncle’s print shop. Studied nights for his GED.)
Gerri opened her eyes. Logan was staring, the look on his face—not hostile. He seemed to be waiting for her to speak.
“Because he hasn’t… seen it,” she said, “and I think it’s better if—” She drew a shallow breath, pressed her lips together. “It was difficult to leave. Not emotionally, but… logistically. And I think it’s… neater, if I’m the one who goes.”
The inside of the house had smelled like cigarette smoke and old carpet. Gerri had been happy there, sometimes, with the three of them. Other times there was shouting, men slamming doors. Gerri had noticed when she was young that she was smarter than the people around her, a penetrating kind of intelligence, able to cut through extraneous detail, straight to the core of the thing. It got her out and away.
“You know,” Gerri said, “I’ve been trying to remember the last time I went back and it was… law school, I think. The winter of my first year. It was ugly, she was having one of her episodes, and then after that it occurred to me that I could just… not go. And then after that, I… didn’t go.”
Her mother was—fine, most of the time. But there was a demon in her, a demon that asserted itself at strange moments. None of them could exorcise it: not Gerri or Margaret or any of the stepdads or the snake-oil men who would rest their hands on her forehead as she writhed and spoke in tongues. All they could do was stay out of her way, wait for the worst of it to pass. Sooner or later her rage would burn itself out, the venom would neutralize, and Gerri would come home to find her sprawled out across the living room sofa, cigarette ash ground into the carpet, her mouth open slightly like the thing had gone out of her, taking with it her life, her vitality.
“None of that is real,” said Logan.
Gerri shook her head, pressing her lips together. “If only.”
“None of that is real,” Logan said again. “This is real. The life you’ve built. There was nothing, now there’s something. That’s real.”
She felt tears pricking at her eyes, blinked them away. “She stayed,” Gerri said. “Margaret, my sister.”
“And, what? You’d trade with her? Bullshit. You’ve worked too fucking hard for this.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I have. And I wouldn’t.”
She’d stopped even answering the calls toward the end, had Baird play the voicemails back and delete them. Baird, who still had dinner at his mother’s every Sunday. Baird, who winced and looked away as he summarized the contents of the messages to Gerri. Sometimes she imagined she could see him editing the tapes in his head, stripping out whatever struck him as cruel or nonsensical, translating the words into an argot he could understand, leaving only the shell of a thought: I’ve missed you, why don’t you call.
It wasn’t as though Baird was uninvolved. He’d go to Kentucky if she asked, he’d stay away if she asked. He cared for her, in his way, even when he didn’t understand.
“They don’t know,” Logan said, “these silver-spoon Connecticut fucks. Nothing to toughen ‘em up.” He shrugged. “Their fucking loss.”
He was looking at her again. She held his gaze, cold and blue.
“Well,” he said at last, “I should be going. Caroline’s waiting up, God fucking knows why.” He stood, reached for the door. Turned back. “You aren’t going to quit on me, are you?”
“No,” she said. “Not unless… no.”
Logan nodded, smiling. “Knock ‘em dead, killer,” he said, pulling open the door and passing through. He’d left the bottle of scotch on the table, still full.
Gerri went home soon after that, returned in the morning to sort out the paperwork, took a car from the office to the plane. Her work clothes doubled as funeral clothes: a simple black dress and the strand of pearls, the one from Baird’s mother, handed down from her mother before her. Gerri and Margaret stood side by side at the grave. Margaret the dutiful daughter, Gerri the one who left. (“Good of you to show,” Margaret had said when Gerri stepped into the church, then folded Gerri into her arms. She still wore the same perfume she had when they were young, a whiff of jasmine, of rose.) Margaret’s daughters, clinging to her skirts, had her same face, their mother’s face. All of them had the same face. Still, the other funeral-goers snuck glances at Gerri like they weren’t sure who she was. The full cast of characters had shown: the boyfriend, the two ex-boyfriends, the three ex-husbands, one of whom Gerri’s mother had married twice. The snake-oil preacher and his wife.
She had had people in her life, Gerri thought, stepping forward to toss her handful of dirt into the mouth of the grave. Gerri’s absence couldn’t have pained her too much.
The cemetery was muddy, the morning after rain, and the earth sucked at her heels as she retreated back to the line of mourners. Looking up, she saw that the moon was full, hanging low in a dull blue sky. As she watched, a plane passed by, scrawling a jet trail across its face. Gerri touched her neck—the rope of pearls—then her hand drifted down to her abdomen, where the baby was growing. The baby, she chided herself. So sentimental. It was a clump of cells, a tadpole. Not even a baby at all.
She’d forgotten the dirt on her hands, she realized. Smeared the red across the necklace of pearls, across her black dress.
It was real, she thought. It was undeniably real. The red dirt smeared across her clothes and the wet-earth smell of the place. It was, in fact, New York that didn’t seem real. But she would go home and the state of affairs would flip, her life would be real again and all of this would recede back into the haze, and maybe that was what Logan had meant after all. It was only real if you stayed, if you let it be real.
Standing graveside with dirt on her hands, she thought of Logan Roy. Logan could persevere through anything. Whatever happened, he would keep moving forward. Nothing could stop him. Gerri, too, had tried to break free of all this. Washed the red dirt of Kentucky from the soles of her feet, from under her nails. Changed her accent, her name, made herself untraceable. Life had seemed for a time a high-wire act, a thrilling performance, in which she fooled everyone with her clever disguise. Wormed her way into the place where money and influence flowed through the beating heart of things.
Yes, Logan could persevere through anything. And there was a tacit agreement between them: Gerri was like him, or she could become like him. It meant that if nothing could stop him, then nothing could stop her, too.
Gerri had to knock twice before Logan came to the door. “It’s late,” he said, ushering her in. And when she showed no sign of turning around: “Well, sit down, then. Have something to drink.”
She settled herself at the table in the middle of the room. Crossed her legs, fiddled with the heavy rings on her hand. She’d packed to look like she was on vacation and relaxed, was still wearing the green floral dress with the floaty sleeves. But now, it made her feel exposed—soft and feminine and too much skin—and she missed her armor, the thick wool shawls and the necklines, the boxy cut of her suits.
“I’m here as a friend,” she said, “to tell you I think you should reconsider.”
“Uh-huh,” Logan said, pressing a glass of scotch into her hands, a generous pour. They clinked their glasses together and she drank, just enough to taste it. She’d had a glass of wine with dinner, just enough to calm the nerves without dulling the wits. And she sensed that tonight, she would need all her wits.
Logan stared, raising his eyebrows, waiting for her to speak.
“Who did you talk to, by the way?” Gerri said. “On strategy? Clearly not me. Not anyone here, I assume. If they’re all on the chopping block, you can’t trust anyone to give you an honest read.”
Logan did that thing he did where he shrugged, mumbled something, made a sound—not words. The thing he did to signal that he wasn’t angry yet, but that this would be a good time to stop asking questions.
“Rhea?” Gerri said. “Marcia? How is Marcia, by the way?”
“Fine. Thank you, Gerri.”
“There’s always someone, isn’t there?” she said. “But I do actually wonder what you’re going to do when there’s no one left.”
“I appreciate your concern,” he growled, “but I’ll manage.” There was that edge of anger in his voice now, the growl that warned her to back down. She could feel a tension in the room, thick, hanging like humidity in the air.
“I suppose you’ll always have Frank,” she said. “Frank will always come back.”
“Gerri.” Logan looked down at the table, raised the glass to his lips. A small sip, the volume of the liquid remaining unchanged. “I meant what I said. I like you. You’ve been a loyal soldier.”
“You know,” she said, “I would have taken—I don’t know—a fruit basket or a thank-you card. Or, I don’t know, a novelty paperweight or something.”
He gave a humorless little laugh. “I meant what I said. I’ll take care of you. Whatever you lose, I’ll make it up to you.”
“Logan, you know me. I’m very willing to slap a dollar amount on… many things. I find it can be a helpful way to simplify certain social relations. But this…”
He was staring at her now, and she forced herself to hold his gaze.
“Do you trust me?” he said.
Gerri paused, weighing her answer carefully. “No, Logan,” she said at last, “I don’t. And that’s something I’ve learned from you. You’re going to pursue your interests, just like I’m going to pursue mine.” She shifted in the chair, uncrossing and re-crossing her legs. “And I think, actually, if you trust me, it’s because you know that I know that.”
The shrug, the half-smile. “Maybe so,” Logan said. “But you know how it is. Either it’s you, or it’s all of us. You’ve been across the coverup. It plays.”
When she looked at him now, she saw a kind of optical illusion, like the duck-rabbit or the woman whose hair became a bird. She saw him as he had been when he was young, when it seemed he could not be defeated. And layered over that was the aging king, slowly losing his grip on the kingdom. When he’d lowered himself into his chair, he’d done it slowly, as though his aging body pained him.
“Of course,” Gerri said. “I do understand—you’re in a bind here, and maybe I look like the best of a set of bad options. I just wonder whether you’ve exhausted all the options.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You want to know what I’d do?” she said.
When Gerri told the story she gave it six months between Baird’s death and the thing with Logan, though in reality it was more like two or three. It lasted—two months, maybe two and a half, though Gerri would tell herself later that it was one. Ten, twenty years earlier, Gerri might have felt that they were righting some past mistake. But she had seen the thing with Sally-Anne and the other thing with the girl in PR and Baird’s careful pages of notes. And there were Logan’s two wives to consider: Sylvie in the madhouse and Caroline banished by now, back to the castle on the heath. Gerri hadn’t been naive, exactly, back in the early days, but she knew things now that she hadn’t back then.
They were in a hotel room in the middle of the day, both too busy to get all the way uptown but not too busy to carve out an hour in their respective schedules for a “lunch meet,” and as she fixed her makeup in the mirror, Gerri wondered how it had come to this. Baird had died unexpectedly, of a heart attack, here one morning then gone the next. Widowhood came as a shock, but had she had time to imagine it, she would have imagined something other than this.
“Stay,” Logan said as she dabbed blush onto her cheek. She had her back to him but he was visible in the bathroom mirror, sprawled out across the bed, naked save for his undershirt, which he never removed. Gerri didn’t touch his back where the scars were, even over his shirt, and Logan didn’t talk about Baird, and Gerri didn’t talk about Caroline. Through these strictures, they maintained an equilibrium.
Did seeing people’s damage make them easier to love? Gerri wondered sometimes. Margaret always swore it was true. For Gerri, love seemed more an effect of time and proximity. Enough of both and you felt it, until you didn’t anymore.
“I have the Anderson meeting,” she said, turning her face to the side.
“Fuck ‘em,” Logan said.
“Fuck ‘em,” she repeated. There was a mark on her neck; she dabbed at it with concealer. “Logan,” she said, “I’m flattered that you’re willing to risk a forty million dollar investment for another hour of my time, but I think in the long run it’s best if I go.”
“It’s not until 1:30.”
“I need to prep.”
“Do it here,” he said. “You’ve got the papers.”
The lighting in the bathroom was marginally more flattering than the average hotel, with a warm yellow cast. Still, it threw into relief the dark circles under her eyes, lines on her forehead and around her mouth. Her purse was sitting on the quartz countertop; she pulled out a comb. “There are plenty of women in New York who don’t have 1:30 meetings,” she said, fixing her hair. “Why don’t you call one of them?”
Logan shifted on the bed, tilting his head, staring at her appraisingly. “Why are you dicking me around?”
“I’m not dicking you around,” she said, “I’m doing my job. You know, my job? The one you pay me six figures to do?”
“It’s a little late to play hard-to-get,” he said. And Gerri heard that edge in his voice, the one that signaled danger.
She turned, exiting the bathroom, folding her arms across her chest. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Logan shrugged, making that face again, the one like the devil. He was sitting up in bed, a blanket thrown over his legs, smirking at her.
Gerri and Logan had been working late together when Gerri got the call about Baird. They’d taken a car from the office. Baird was already gone by the time they arrived. Logan hadn’t said anything, just pulled her in as she crumpled into herself, crying into his shoulder. He had traced slow circles on her back and later, in the waiting room, stood beside her as she made the calls to the girls. Two weeks after that, he had called her at home to offer her Baird’s old job. Gerri had jumped at it, grabbed it with both hands: anything to escape the five empty rooms in the Scarsdale house, the empty days at the ends of which she drank herself to sleep in the sterile living room, wondering how soon was too soon to show back up to work.
Logan, like the job, kept her away from the house, broke the free-fall of grief, the dissolution of what had seemed the solid foundation of her life. But now she felt it building again, the pressure inside her chest. She saw it then, the thing she hadn’t let herself see. Sooner or later something would shift in the balance of power, Logan would want something Gerri didn’t want to give.
“You know, Logan,” she said, “maybe it’s best if we put the brakes on this for now.”
Silently, he glowered at her from the bed.
“People are starting to talk,” she said.
“Then let them.”
“Easy for you to say.”
He stood, reaching for the clothes he’d discarded. “Gerri, what’s this about?”
For months since going through Baird’s papers—stacks of NDAs, binders full of research on jurisdictional issues related to crimes committed in international waters—Gerri had dreamed of the sea. She couldn’t see it but she could hear it, waves crashing somewhere off to the edge of the landscape of her dreams. Half an hour ago when Logan put his hands on her she had thought she felt water closing in over her head. It was like that sometimes. It was irrational, she thought; there was no real relation, none of it had anything to do with her. One of the girls had gone overboard—fallen overboard, that was the story the paperwork told—and no one had looked for her.
“It’s been… a lot of change in a very short span of time,” she said. “I’m trying to buy an apartment, I’m selling the house, I’m working twelve-hour days to catch up on everything Baird couldn’t hand over, I haven’t been sleeping, and if I’m being honest”—she drew a breath—“you haven’t been discreet, about this. I saw how you were looking at me in the Erickson meeting last week.”
“Uh-huh,” Logan said.
“No, you know. You have to know you’re doing it. And Karl and Ray were there and—”
“Fuck ‘em,” Logan said, waving his hand. “What do you care what they think?”
“What do I care?” She sounded angry now; she hadn’t been aware that she was angry. “I have to be twice as good as them for them to take me half as seriously, half their business they’re doing in the waiting-room at the brothel, they gave me the secretary Karl fucked because his wife complained and she’s bad at her job and I can’t get rid of her because I pity her and she’s going to sue, Ray won’t let me get a fucking sentence out even now that I’m technically his boss, I was the only one for a decade in the tank with the fucking sharks, my husband was their boss and that still didn’t fucking stop them and now he’s dead and I’m the boss and it turns out that won’t fucking do it either, because now that I’m too old for them to stare at my ass they just can’t fucking see me anymore.” She paused, inhaled sharply. “So look at the ceiling. Look at Karl. I don’t care what you look at. Just stop making eyes at me at work, because when you get bored and move on to wife number three I’m still going to be here with the closet full of your dirty laundry, cleaning up your mess.” Her face was hot; she paused, drew breath. “And these people might be stupid, but they’re not that fucking stupid.”
Logan stared at her, blinking slowly. It was the most consecutive words she’d spoken to him since they’d met, with the possible exception of her third-round job interview, when she’d felt anxious and rambled on a little.
“I don’t know what you’re so fucking bent out of shape about,” he said. “It’s not like I forced you.”
“Did you listen to anything I just said?”
Logan’s brow furrowed; he seemed to be weighing his words. “Well,” he said, his mouth twisting up, “if it’s such a fucking ordeal, maybe you’d be happier somewhere else.”
“Excuse me?”
He stared at her from across the room. He’d stopped dressing himself halfway through, faced her now with his trousers undone, the belt hanging loose from his waist. He was barefoot still, and with Gerri in her heels, they were almost of a height.
“Just to be clear…?” she said.
Logan shrugged. “It’s nothing personal, Gerri. The transition’s been wonky. Frank might be a better fit. Or that new girl, what was her name?”
She clasped her hands around her forearms to stop them from shaking. She wanted to scream. She wanted to bury her face in a pillow and scream. But it would mess up her makeup again and Logan would win, he would see that he’d shaken her.
“Logan,” she said, “I know you’re familiar with the concept of a wrongful termination suit because I’ve personally handled several on your behalf.”
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“If you go through with this, I’ll win mine and you’ll wish you’d listened to me today.”
“You’d take the money and go.”
“No. I’d sue, and I’d win.”
“Bullshit.”
Gerri crossed the room to the door, slinging her purse over her shoulder as she went. “I’m a widow,” she said, turning in the doorframe to face him. “It’s sympathetic. I’ll see you at the office, Logan.” And before he could respond, she pulled the door shut behind her.
By the time Logan appeared, Gerri’s meeting had already started. Her eyes met his through the glass wall of her office. They had gutted the interior of the building and replaced the solid walls with glass after the incident in 1986.
Logan snarled at her. There was no other word for it; he bared his teeth. Gerri waited, for the rest of that day and the next, for security to come, to usher her out, the Yale mug and the two diplomas boxed up in cardboard, the remnants of her life. They never came. She had outmaneuvered him. That was what she told herself, sometimes: that she had won.
In the bedroom on the yacht, Gerri leaned back in her chair, draping her arm along its back. She had learned this trick from Logan, through years of careful observation: the effortful performance of easy confidence. Maybe, for Logan, it wasn’t a performance. But it didn’t matter as long as the counterfeit remained indistinguishable from the actual thing.
“Kill Karl,” Gerri said. “I mean, have you seen the news for the past three years? They’re hanging guys like that out to dry like laundry day in Yokohama.”
“Uh-huh,” Logan said.
“I’ll do it myself if you want. Give me a week, I’ll find you ten women to testify. Plant some anonymous tips. Karolina would help, I’m sure.” She took a sip of the scotch: a small one, just enough to sting the back of her throat. “That plays.”
Logan waved a dismissive hand. “He’s never been close enough to it. It doesn’t add up.”
“He’s a liability. If I were you, I would have fired him back in 2017.”
Logan shook his head, looking almost wistful. “CFO? It’s numbers on a spreadsheet. He’s too far off from the meat of things.”
“Tom, then,” she said, shifting her weight in the chair. “He fudged those records. He fucked it in DC.”
“If it was just Tom, then maybe.” He pressed his lips together, shook his head, that wistful look on his face again. “But Pinkie. She’d never forgive me.”
“I’m not one of your children,” Gerri said. “You can’t just snap your fingers and get me to heel.”
“They’re soft. You’re tough. You can take it.”
Gerri realized, suddenly, that she was angry. Felt it creeping up her neck, a flush along her chest. There is no one more loyal than Gerri, Logan had said, reaching out and touching her arm, a possessiveness in the gesture that made her skin crawl.
She straightened in her seat, forcing herself to hold his gaze. “In that case, Logan, I have to say, I’m not sure you’ve thought this through. I’ve been in your confidence for thirty years, I’m very observant, and I have a highly accurate memory.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s also—I don’t know if you know this. When Baird died—you remember Baird? My husband, your best friend?”
“Uh-huh,” he said again, looking at her through narrowed eyes.
“He was always writing in his journal toward the end, right before bed. I don’t know if you knew that about him. I think it was Frank’s influence, actually. A kind of literary turn.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s one of the last things I have from him,” she said, “those notebooks. I’ve been thinking someone should go through them. Maybe digitize a few.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I read through some of them, back in the early 2000s,” she said. “It was very interesting, at the time, to learn a little more about what you all got up to back in the day.”
She felt the tension in the air, thick enough to cut with a knife. “Gerri,” Logan growled, “I’m getting fucked from every side right now. I’m trying to do right by my people. You’re making this fucking difficult. Much more fucking difficult than it needs to be.”
“Logan,” she said, “I think you think that this is some kind of way out for you, but I want to be very clear. If you go through with this, you will be creating far more problems for yourself than you can solve.”
“All right,” he said, nodding, “you’ve shown me your hand. I’ll take it under advisement.”
“Try Tom,” she said. “He’ll roll over.”
“I’ll take it under consideration.”
Logan was stubborn tonight, an immovable object, but Gerri hadn’t shown her full hand, not yet. She still had one more card up her sleeve, something she’d pieced together from Baird’s notebooks—more minimal than she had let on, but not nothing—and the stacks of NDAs, and the papers from the locked drawer in Baird’s desk in the Scarsdale house, and snatches of gossip over the years. A secret, one that Logan had managed to keep under lock and key for years. She repeated it back to him now, with a degree of certainty she didn’t quite feel. “So I just wonder what the board and the shareholders might think,” she said, “if that were to somehow make it to press. At such a delicate juncture, too.”
Reaching across the table, Logan grabbed her wrist. “Don’t go mucking about in what you can’t understand,” he growled.
Gerri tried to tug her arm from his grasp and Logan tightened his grip, yanking her towards him, rattling the glasses on the table. He was breathing heavily now, his face red.
“I’ll scream,” she said, even though it wasn’t true. Her voice sounded distant, dispassionate. It echoed faintly in her ears, as though she were listening to herself from down a hallway.
Logan looked as angry as she’d ever seen him. In the past, she’d dealt with this by blending into the furniture, staying out of his way.
“Logan,” Gerri said, trying another tack. “If I’m not back in half an hour, Roman will come looking.”
No change in his expression. His grip was surprisingly strong; she felt the pulse hammering in her wrist. Time had dilated, slowing to a crawl. She tried to remember who else had their rooms on this hallway. Karl, Frank. Maybe Ken. It wouldn’t do. They would see her rattled, and Logan would win.
“You don’t have the fucking guts,” she spat.
He seemed to return to himself then, letting go of her arm. “Romulus?” he said, blinking at her in confusion.
She yanked her hand back into her lap, massaging her wrist under the table, where Logan couldn’t see. It would bruise by tomorrow, she thought. She hadn’t brought any clothes that would cover it up.
“Romulus,” she said.
They stared at each other across the table. It seemed there was nothing left to say. Gerri stood abruptly, moving toward the door, half expecting Logan to bar her path. He remained seated, watching her go.
Gerri reached for the handle, turned back. “You remember the vote of no confidence?”
“Uh-huh.”
“We planned that,” she said. “Me and Frank. Your idiot children whiffed it.”
The side of Logan’s mouth quirked up. An expression passed across his face, one Gerri struggled to read. He said: “Maybe it should have been you.”
She was already rounding the corner toward Roman’s door when her brain—buzzing with adrenaline, still somewhere outside of herself—cracked the code. It was pride on his face, she thought. He had been proud of her.