Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

  Ames’s reasoning was actually fairly sound. Sloane and Ardie had worked with Ames for over a decade. Why would they, all at once, decide to up and out him, especially when Sloane’s own promotion in the company was on the line?

  He underestimated them.

  “Well,” Grace said. “That’s definitely a pickle.”

  “God. I should have warned you more directly, Katherine,” Sloane said, stopping in her tracks. “I’m sorry. I just thought…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I thought. I should have told you about Ames myself.”

  Katherine lifted her chin. “Did you add Ames’s name to the list?” The room stilled for a beat. A ripple of anger passed over Katherine’s face.

  “Yes,” Sloane said. She didn’t implicate Ardie at all. Ardie had been there. Ardie hadn’t stopped Sloane from adding Ames’s name. More than that, she’d agreed to it.

  “I’ve been there,” Sloane said. Katherine sized Sloane up, or at least that was how Ardie interpreted it. Taking in the age difference and the disparities in aesthetic. One did not look like the other. But, were these things ever about looks? “Oh god, years ago. Eons, really.” Sloane waved her hand. “We were involved once, as a matter of fact.” Sloane Glover’s worst-kept secrets tended to be her own. “But we still have our … misunderstandings.”

  “It wasn’t exactly the same,” Grace pointed out, but the other three ignored her.

  Katherine tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling. “Then, what now?” she asked. “I’m pretty sure my career doesn’t have nine lives. It might not even have two.”

  What must it be like to build yourself from South Boston to Harvard and then find that wasn’t even the hard part?

  “Do you want to file a complaint?” Sloane asked. “Because we’ll support you. No question there.”

  Katherine sat up, startled. “What? No. No. You can’t tell anyone. You have to swear to me. I’ve already lost one job.”

  There was something weighty sitting in the pit of Ardie’s stomach.

  “That was different.” Sloane spoke to Katherine like Ardie had sometimes heard her speak to Abigail.

  Grace watched on. “A complaint sounds like a good option. I think there’s even a hotline.”

  “It’s my word against his. Doesn’t seem that different to me.”

  “Okay…” Ardie watched Sloane’s head, the neatly cut line of blonde hair. “Ardie?” Sloane turned to her for ideas.

  “I don’t know what now. What ever?” Ardie said. “Do you remember when Debra was with the company? Y’all probably weren’t even here yet. Maybe you were, Sloane. Different floor. She filed a harassment complaint with HR about one of her supervisors. There was a random round of downsizing a few months later, which was small. Laughably small. She was out. Flat on her ass. Just like that.”

  There were other examples she was leaving out.

  “That could have been a coincidence,” Grace said. “We shouldn’t jump—”

  “He’s going to be CEO,” Sloane said, cutting her short. “The board met. I heard it’s as good as done. Once it’s announced, there will be even fewer options. Maybe none.”

  “You should have seen his face.” Katherine pushed her hair from her forehead. “I’m so dumb.” She had moved on to the stage in which she scolded herself. Sloane had followed the same trajectory. “This didn’t exactly come out of the blue.”

  No one asked what that meant. If someone were to, it should have been Sloane, but she let it hang. How much information did they really need, anyway? They either believed Katherine or they didn’t. Should Katherine have to detail every interaction just so they could decide for themselves how problematic certain behavior truly was? Or maybe even: whose problem was it?

  Ardie and Sloane looked at each other. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same—where did that come from? A song? Ardie thought the lyrics were wrong. More accurately: the more things didn’t change, the more they stayed the same.

  Sloane cupped her hand to the back of her neck, her fingers kneading there. “Well.” In the pause, Ardie could feel that in a moment they’d have to disperse, to reenter the world where all of this was happening and mattered. It was going on, Ames existed, just on the other side of that locked door. “I don’t think we can keep sitting around and praying he gets hit by a bus,” she said.

  But, God, thought Ardie, wouldn’t that be a nice coincidence?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  3-APR

  “You want to sue your boss.” Derek ignored the two fingers of Scotch Sloane had poured for him prior to starting this conversation. They sat on their California King bed. For some reason, all of their important conversations took place on this bed. It was multipurpose. As advertised.

  “And Truviv,” she reiterated. She was toeing the line between properly explaining, because Derek had no legal background, and needing to remain this side of condescension.

  He tipped his head back onto a Euro sham. “Oh, that makes it so much better.”

  “Sarcasm isn’t a good look on you.” Sloane hugged a pillow. She balanced on her hip, legs curled to one side. Derek wore his undershirt and boxers. An hour earlier, she had requested a “family meeting,” even though Abigail had already gone to sleep, because Derek liked that term. He’d heard it in a parenting audiobook, which was a thing she would have listened to in order to seem like a better parent, but that he would listen to in order to actually be one.

  He lifted his head. He had great hair for a man over forty. She could only imagine what the middle-school girls said about him. “Look at this house, Sloane.” He held out his arms. Truthfully, this house she was supposed to be looking at wasn’t particularly massive, but “location, location, location,” as they said. “How much money do you think I make?”

  Sloane smelled a trap. She had married a man who didn’t mind if his wife made more than triple what he did, so long as no one mentioned it.

  “I’m serious, Sloane. What do you think happens, exactly, if this goes south? If you, I don’t know, lose your job over Ames? In case you haven’t noticed, money isn’t growing on trees around here.” He pinched the back of his neck and rubbed.

  “Only because we spend it like it does,” she said. “We don’t need to have the bathroom remodeled with Ann Sacks tiles.” She would never have guessed that her husband’s most expensive habit would be his closeted love for interior design, but here they were.

  “And we don’t need to have five pairs of Louboutins.” Which wasn’t exactly fair, in her opinion, because she made the money to pay for those Louboutins and she didn’t care if their bathroom was tiled from Home Depot. She wouldn’t say this, because she knew that if it were a working man who told his wife that, she would have thought it was a hideous indecency, and so she held herself to the same standard. The money was theirs. And Derek was right, if she lost her job, there’d be a domino effect—a car first, then maybe a vacation, then eventually, the house. Unless she found a way to staunch the bleeding.

  Still, a job was supposed to pay an employee, not cost her. The reality of her situation was that, if she wanted to do something about Ames, it was now or never.

  She hugged the pillow more tightly. “What kind of example are we setting for Abigail?”

  He tossed the nearest two-hundred-dollar, hand-painted throw pillow off the bed thoughtlessly. “None. Because she doesn’t know this is going on. You’re the one thrusting it into the limelight.” She stared at him. “Settle it out of court,” he said.

  “I might. But the only way for that to happen is if I file the lawsuit first. No suit, no settlement.” It felt good being the calm, reasonable one. She should try it more often. His head hung limply on his shoulders. “If I file a lawsuit for sexual harassment, they actually can’t fire me.” Fire her, no. Reduce her responsibilities? Fail to promote her? Saddle her with poor reviews? Make her life miserable? Drive her to want to quit? Yes, but it didn’t seem prudent to get into detail. “That’s
why it’s better than simply complaining. Did I ever tell you about the time Ames told opposing counsel that I was too emotional to be a good negotiator? ‘Move over, we can handle closing the deal.’” Sloane performed some old-fashioned Mid-Atlantic accent, the sort of thing that usually got a smile from her husband. “My deal, Derek,” she said, more earnestly.

  “You … have mentioned it, as a matter of fact.”

  “We might actually make money off of this.” She didn’t know at what point the idea had transformed from being an idea to being an idea that she actually wanted to materialize. Probably during the course of convincing Derek. She was that persuasive, honestly. “I was going along with Ames becoming CEO because I thought—okay—Ames becomes CEO, I become General Counsel, I suck it up, I get a big raise, hopefully everything is fine. But … but … what if it isn’t? This way, Ames doesn’t become CEO. There is still a vacancy for me to negotiate. There are anti–employment retaliation laws. But mainly I stop watching that man have the same power over other women that he has tried to have over me. We can control this situation if we take control over it. Right now, he has the control. All of it. You understand that, right? That will increase tenfold if he becomes CEO, which he will unless I—unless we—do something about it before it’s announced.” She scooted across the mattress, closer to her husband. “You think that I’m a good lawyer, right, that I deserve this?”

  “You’re in my top five, for sure.”

  Her shoulders relaxed by half an inch. “You have a top five?”

  He scoffed. “Of course I have a top five. Are you kidding me? Let’s see.” He counted off. “Johnnie Cochran. John Adams. Robert Kardashian. Sloane Glover. Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

  She cracked a smile. “Huh. So I come before RBG but after Robert Kardashian.” Things could still be funny. Her husband was one of them. She needed that. Needed him, really.

  “Hey, it’s my list.” Derek was picking feathers out of the down comforter, extracting them by the stem. It was never a fair fight. Sloane got her way in nearly every relationship she was a part of. It wasn’t that Derek didn’t have opinions; it was just that Derek loved her. He was the better person and she was fine conceding that ground to him as long as it was only that ground.

  He dimpled the corners of his mouth into deep parentheses. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. If this is what we need to do to move forward, then this is what we need to do to move forward. You’re the boss.”

  And she tried very hard not to take that as a dig.

  “Thank you, Derek.” Sloane slid from the bed. It was late and she was still wearing her work clothes, rumpled and partially unzipped. She felt mostly relieved. If a part of her worried that she was following a pattern of impulsivity, she reasoned that a case against Ames was years and years in the making. She knew that she was in the right and Sloane loved being in the right almost more than anything else. It was one of the reasons she’d decided to become a lawyer.

  She pulled open her drawer and selected a pair of Thai silk pajamas. Derek read on his phone as she undressed.

  She took a deep breath. “There is just this one thing that I feel like I need to tell you, in case it comes out,” she said as she put a blue line of toothpaste onto her brush. Five years ago, she wouldn’t have even considered telling him because it would have been too soon. But now, with double digits, it felt like a lifetime ago. She’d found herself wondering things like, when did Derek propose, March, or was it November?

  “Hm?” He didn’t look up from his phone.

  This was her moment to turn back. But she watched her husband, his familiar bare feet, his long, crooked toes. They’d so often watched crime dramas in which a child had been abducted and one of the parents was busy hiding their affair and they’d said to each other, For fuck’s sake, if you’re having an affair, when something more important is going on, just say so!

  Sloane was a modern woman with a modern husband. She negotiated at car dealerships. She made money and decisions. She pushed off half her household duties. She didn’t cook. She’d had sex. Her affair wasn’t a reason to let other women be taken advantage of, to be assaulted for, was it?

  “Ames and I were involved once.” He jerked to attention. She held up her hand. “Before we were married.”

  He eased by a degree. “When before we were married?” It was almost as if he’d been married to a lawyer.

  She stuck the toothbrush in her mouth. “A few months before.”

  “So we were dating.” He set down his phone so that she had his full attention. She could have lived without it. Just this once.

  “Engaged. Technically. I think,” she said.

  “Engaged,” he repeated. She spat into the sink, rinsed her mouth out with water. “And he was married?”

  “He was definitely married.

  “It was right after you proposed. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I was going through a crisis of conscience.” She thought it was good to put a label on it. It was like a diagnosis. Everyone had to support you once you got one of those or else risk being a ghastly, selfish person with a bias against mental health issues. And Derek definitely wasn’t that.

  “Well, that’s comforting to hear.” Derek finally lifted the Scotch from the nightstand, sniffed it, and took a swig. It was very good Scotch. She thought that should matter.

  “I’m sorry, what exactly do you want me to say?” And there was a definite snarl to his tone.

  Okay, then, she thought, let him. She deserved that.

  Sloane holstered her toothbrush. She started to answer and then creased her brow, only of course her brow didn’t crease at all. “I’m thinking,” she said. “You just can’t tell because I’ve chosen to poison my face due to unfair societal beauty standards.” She fingered her forehead gingerly. “This is what it must feel like to be paralyzed.”

  Sloane was talking too much. It was her primary stalling tactic and Derek knew this. It turned out that, in her mind, she hadn’t exactly articulated what she thought Derek would say to her confession. She had vaguely imagined her husband expressing the disappointment of a strict parent having heard that his forty-year-old daughter used to sneak out and drink beer back when she was in high school. Derek’s face told a different story, hurt and anger locked in a neck-and-neck battle for dominance.

  “Does it really count before we were married? Think about it. That’s the entire point of saying ‘I do.’” She was afraid to say so now but she’d always felt that anything before marriage was sort of, she didn’t know, fair game? Practice? Or maybe she had only been telling herself that because that was how she’d treated her relationships pre-Derek. “Nothing ever happened after I said those vows.”

  “How fucking honorable, Sloane.”

  They both cursed. Never at each other, though. And it took a feat of self-restraint not to allow herself to assume the role of the offended. She was so much better at that.

  “Derek.” She returned from their shared bathroom, a dollop of night cream poised on her fingertip. “It was twelve years ago. I get it. I was young and horrible and stupid. But.” The mattress springs squeaked. Derek gathered up his two pillows and tore one of the throw blankets off the bed. He had to twist it around his forearm to carry it all. “Derek? Derek, where are you going?” She followed him into the living room as he headed up the stairs in the direction of the guest room. “I thought you agreed we were going to be on the same team here.” She smeared the night cream on her leg. An ounce of it cost forty-three dollars and she couldn’t believe she’d just wasted it. Her feet pounded too loudly on the steps. She’d wake Abigail if she weren’t careful.

  Derek looked down at her from the top of the stairs. “Yeah, I think that is actually the point of saying ‘I do.’” And he disappeared into the guest room, where she heard the lock snap into place.

  Sloane’s footsteps were softer on the way down. She curled onto Derek’s side of the bed and picked up his mostly full glass of Scotch. It was going to be fine, she told herself. I
n their early thirties, a similar fight would have elicited slamming doors, long text messages sent rapid-fire, one of them driving off—probably her—then returning to ignore the other person before yelling again.

  Now the house buzzed with silence. She tipped the remainder of the Scotch into her mouth. The earthy flavor of peat filled her nose. You have certainly made your bed, she thought.

  She and Derek were supposed to watch the series finale of Orphan Black tonight. Instead, she went to the kitchen to refill her glass.

  Deposition Transcript

  27-APR

  Ms. Sharpe:

  How much do you make at Truviv per year?

  Respondent 1:

  Why is that relevant?

  Ms. Sharpe:

  If an objection stands, your attorney can argue it before the court. How much do you make at Truviv per year?

  Respondent 1:

  My base salary is $310,000 annually, plus a discretionary bonus.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  Are you aware that this salary is within the top one percent of salaries in the country?

  Respondent 1:

  Again, I don’t see how that’s relevant. It is by no means an exorbitant amount for a person at my level of experience to make.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  Were you able to live comfortably on this income, Ms. Glover?

  Respondent 1:

  I’m sure that’s relative. For instance, compared to you, Cosette? Probably not. But, more broadly speaking, yes, we do just fine.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  So, the sole consideration when filing suit against Truviv and Mr. Garrett was to take up the cause against sexual harassment. Is that right? This was in no way a money-making scheme?

  Respondent 1:

  Of course not. By which I mean, of course it was not intended as a means to make money except insofar as forcing a corporation to pay money is one of the most surefire ways to encourage a corporation, and people, for that matter, to change behavior.