The Underwriting (33 page)

“But clearly there is one.”

He inhaled sharply. He didn't give a shit about Tara.

They finished the workout in silence and Todd went to the locker room to shower. Morgan was waiting when he came back out in his suit and tie.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I got carried away.”

“Don't worry about it,” he said. “You're just wrong.”

“You're right,” she said. “I mean, I don't know you at all. It wasn't fair for me to assume just because . . .” She paused. “I'm sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” he said without smiling. He handed her a check for two hundred dollars and walked out the door. He didn't give a shit about her, either.

TARA

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“I really don't have time for this,” Tara said.

“Your next meeting isn't until six,” Callum reminded her.

He leaned in as he said it, putting a hand on her arm.

“Then I don't have the energy,” she said, moving away from his touch. “I'm exhausted.” She hadn't slept more than three hours in the past four days, hadn't had a full eight since before the deal began. She'd been holding it together just fine until London, but now their night together was dragging her down, like someone had given her a hundred-pound weight to carry on the last mile of a marathon.

“My hotel is right here,” he said, pointing to the Peninsula behind them.

“I don't want to sleep with you,” she said quickly.

“I don't want to sleep with you, either,” he rebuffed. “I want you to take my key and have a nap.”

“Why?”

“Because you said you're exhausted.”

She hesitated, considering.

“Fine,” she said. He was right: a nap would do more for her now than anything else, and a plush bed at the Peninsula was a better option than a cot in a closet at L.Cecil.

But when he followed her into the bedroom of the hotel suite her anxiety returned. “What are you doing?”

“Getting you a T-shirt,” he said, pulling one from the closet and handing it to her. “Calm down.”

“Thanks,” she said, taking it from him.

“What time do you want me to wake you?”

“I'll set my phone alarm.”

“Okay. Sleep well,” he said, shutting the door.

Tara blinked at the closed door, willing her heart to stop beating so quickly. “Chill out,” she whispered to herself. She'd spent the past two days trying to block out what he'd said about her path: he was wrong, of course. She was in control, and was headed exactly where she wanted to be. The life she had now might not be perfect, but at least she was in charge of it.

She undressed and hung her suit in the closet. She felt the pleasure of the sheets, cool and crisp against her skin, before she dropped into a deep sleep.

She was on the plane to Boston, wearing a suit and sleeping with her head against the window. Her youngest sister, Abigail, still eight years old, sat next to her, wearing her favorite yellow pajamas with her teddy bear propped on her lap. Abigail pulled at Tara's sleeve to wake her. She indicated the Barbie coloring book open in her lap, and handed Tara a crayon.

Abigail pointed to a picture of Bride Barbie, whose dress she'd colored a light pink. “That's Lisbeth,” Abigail said, and Tara agreed, remembering her sister's wedding the next day and ignoring the fact she was missing it. She nodded at Abigail and stroked her baby soft hair, running her finger along the barrette she'd affixed on the side.

“That's me,” Abigail said, pointing to Soccer Team Barbie, and Tara nodded, remembering Abby running around the house in the soccer jersey she insisted on wearing every day the summer before she died.

Tara looked at the opposite page in the coloring book and pointed to Business Executive Barbie. “And that's me,” she told Abigail.

But Abigail shook her head and flipped through the pages looking for another picture. Tara patiently took the girl's small hand in her own and directed her back to the picture, but Abigail got angry, shaking her head and turning the pages faster. “Stop,” Tara said softly, but the girl kept flipping the pages, faster and faster so that they started to rip. “Stop it,” Tara said more firmly, feeling herself get angry. But Abigail refused to stop. Tara took hold of her wrists, and held them tight to make her still. But then Tara kept squeezing, squeezing and squeezing until she felt the girl's tiny bones break in her palms.

“Tara?”

She jolted awake, blinking fast. “Wha—” she started, remembering that she was in the Peninsula hotel, taking a nap between meetings, and the man shaking her awake was Callum, whose room this was, whose T-shirt she was wearing.

“It's almost six,” he said. “I thought I should wake you.”

“Oh,” she said, pushing herself up, and registering what had happened. “I forgot to set my alarm.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah”—she could feel her heart pounding—“I just had a bad dream.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She shook her head.

“I'll let you change, then,” he said, turning back to the door.

Her brain was spinning: she didn't want to be alone.

“It's my fault my sister died,” she blurted.

Callum turned back. She didn't know why she said it.

“What?”

“I was a match. For her bone marrow.”

She looked at her manicured hands against the thousand-count sheets on the thousand-dollar bed in the thousand-dollar-a-night suite she'd done nothing to deserve.

“What happened?”

She shook her head, as if it would keep out the flooding images of the hospital and the needles and the doctor announcing that the transplant hadn't worked and her mother starting to cry because Tara, the daughter they had had so much hope in, had let them all down.

She saw Abigail looking over from her bed to Tara's, clinging to her teddy bear and telling her big sister it was okay, and felt all the weakness of knowing that it wasn't.

Callum moved to the bed and she sank into his arms, letting the sobs come in heaving waves. His chest supported her as she cried and cried for the first time in as long as she could remember. He didn't say anything: didn't tell her not to cry, didn't try to convince her it wasn't her fault. He just held her. And when she stopped they just sat there, saying nothing.

She finally broke the silence. “I've got to go.”

He nodded, lifting her face to him and tracing a finger under her eye. “You're going to need to re-do your mascara.”

“Shit,” she forced a laugh at herself. “How bad is it?” She was conscious of how horrible she must look.

“You'd make a very pretty raccoon.” He smiled. “Get changed. I'll order you a car,” he said, and moved to the door.

—

T
ARA
SLIPPED
OUT
of the dinner meeting before the meals were served so she could get back to the office and reply to all the requests that had come in that afternoon. She'd bummed an Adderall off of Neha to help her push Abigail out of her mind and focus on the cocktail presentation, and thanks to the dim lighting in Del Frisco's, no one had noticed her bloodshot eyes. Todd was pissed at her, but she didn't care: he could think whatever he wanted.

Her phone buzzed with a text.

Tara felt her heart catch. The message had a photo attached, of her sister, Lisbeth, and her husband-to-be, smiling at the rehearsal dinner Tara was currently missing, offering a piece of cake to the camera, with a sign that said
FOR TARA
.

She paused on the street and swallowed hard. What must Lisbeth think of her? And Callum, now that he'd seen her at her worst? Tara suddenly saw herself from the outside, and missing her sister's wedding for the deal didn't make Tara seem incredibly important, it just made her seem . . . pathetic.

She put the phone back in her pocket and shook her head to refocus.
Work
, she told herself. If she was going to make these sacrifices for her ambitious career path, she was sure as hell going to do it well.

“How's it going?”

Tara looked up at the voice. Lillian Dumas, the gorgeous senior colleague who she'd been avoiding since she'd accused Tara of stealing the Hook deal, was standing over her desk, her thin lips smiling.

“Hi, Lillian,” Tara said, turning her attention back to her computer, hoping she would take the hint to go away.

“It's not that easy, is it?” the woman's voice pressed. “Being under the pressure to deliver a big deal?”

“It's fine,” Tara said.

“Especially with Todd leaving you with all the work.” Lillian clicked her tongue. “Guess we know now who was using who.”

“What are you still doing here?” Tara tried to keep her voice steady.

“I'm waiting for Lucas to finish at the office. He had a call with Asia. We're going to Le Bernardin. It's our anniversary.”

“Congratulations,” Tara said without looking up from her screen.

“You should really get a boyfriend, Tara,” Lillian said.

“Maybe after the deal.”

“I mean, at your age, you really don't want to be that girl working late on Friday nights.”

Tara's brain snapped, shooting the words to her mouth before she could keep them from coming out: “Because I'd rather be the one killing time at the office while my fiancé finishes a call with Asia?” she heard herself say. “Which is probably code for screwing his secretary.” She watched Lillian's cheeks redden but didn't stop. “All so that I can brag to a junior colleague who doesn't give a shit that I'm going to a Michelin restaurant, where I order a salad with dressing on the side, which I throw up afterward so I can maintain my double-zero dress size that he doesn't even enjoy fucking?”

Lillian's jaw dropped, her face pale. “What?” she squealed. “Would you like to apologize before I—”

“You know, Lillian, I really don't want to apologize? And now that I think about it, I don't really want to spend my Friday night here at all.”

She grabbed the suitcase that she hadn't had a chance to take home since landing that morning. She left, neither fully conscious nor unaware of what she was doing or the ramifications it might have, just trying to preserve the feeling of freedom she felt pulsing through her veins as she exited the building and hailed a cab.

“I need to get to Kennebunkport,” she told the agent at the airport ticket counter, “by noon tomorrow.”

“My last direct flight to Portland was at 9:50, but I could get you on the 11:05 tomorrow morning.”

“That's too late,” she said. “What about Boston? I'll rent a car.”

“There's a flight leaving in thirty minutes.” The agent looked up at Tara. “Do you have anything to check?”

“No.” Tara indicated her carry-on, handing the agent her credit card. “I'll take it.”

JUAN

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Beau hadn't apologized after their fight in London. Nick hadn't remembered anything from the night, and Todd had only acknowledged it by playfully teasing Beau about his failed conquest of Fiona. Juan couldn't believe it.

He didn't know why he'd shown Neha the database in London, or why he'd expected her to think they ought to tell. She was just like the men in the other room: all she cared about was the deal going well so she could collect her promotion and her paycheck. Her line about him being some kind of hero was just that, a line, like all the other lines the bankers used to make people believe what they wanted them to believe so they'd do what they wanted them to do.

Juan came out of the restaurant's restroom and found Neha waiting for him.

“Did you erase it?” she whispered.

“No, Neha,” he said, annoyed, “I didn't.”

“But you heard the man in the lunch meeting,” she said, skipping to catch up with him. “What if—”

“He's not going to find out, okay?”

“No,” she said, “what if he's right? What if Nick sells the data?”

Juan stopped and turned to face her. Her eyelids were puffy behind her glasses, and the bags underneath weighed them down. Her skin had cleared, though, and she'd gotten a new suit for the road show that looked less like something she'd borrowed from her grandmother.

“He won't,” he said. “He thinks it's gone. And you heard Tara: every app has this kind of information. It's not a big deal.”

“Can you at least find out who the other user was? The one who was with Kelly?”

“Why do you suddenly care? What about supporting the rich men so you can keep your job and climb up the ladder?”

“I didn't get the promotion,” she said.

“What?”

“They sent the e-mail announcement today. I didn't get it.”

“That's bullshit. There's no way anyone works as hard as you.”

“It doesn't matter. You have to find out who the other user was.”

“The path is corrupted,” he said. “It's a moot point.”

“You're the best programmer for the best tech company in Silicon Valley. You're telling me you can't figure that out?”

“I don't want to know, Neha, and I don't want to tell,” he said. “I just want this to be done so I can get my money and not have to deal with any of these people anymore.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Why not?”

“Because if you meant that you would have deleted the database.”

“We need to get back in there,” he said, moving past her to the dining room, ignoring her point.