Chapter 1: Spreadsheets and Wine
On Friday at ten past four, Raymond Cole closed the boardroom door behind me and didn’t sit down.
“We voted at lunch,” he said. “Unanimous. We’d like you to run it, Nora.”
I was eight months pregnant. My ankles were the size of grapefruits. I had a granola bar in my jacket pocket because the baby kicks harder when I’m hungry.
I said, “Run what?”
Raymond laughed. “The company. Callowell. All of it.”
I have worked at Callowell Group for nine years. I started in finance at twenty-five, the year Derek and I met, and I never left. For the last three years I’ve been the person who signs off on every dollar that leaves the building.
At work, I’m Nora Whitfield. My maiden name. I kept it for the job long before I married, and I never saw a reason to change it at the office.
My husband, Derek Shaw, calls what I do “spreadsheets.”
He knows I work at Callowell. He thinks I’m “in accounts.” He says it at dinner parties: “Nora does spreadsheets at Callowell.” Then he talks about his buildings for twenty minutes.
In nine years together he has never once asked me what I actually do. I used to think it was funny. Then I stopped thinking about it at all.
In the spring, Callowell bought Derek’s design firm, Shaw & Lyle.
The firm was in trouble. Two big clients had walked, and the bank was making phone calls. Callowell’s offer saved twenty-two jobs, including his.
Derek saw a bigger company that wanted him. “They came to me,” he told his brother.
I had told our board the first day that the firm’s founder was my husband. I stepped out of every meeting about the deal. I never read the file. That was the right thing to do, and it meant Derek never knew how close his firm came to closing.
Now Raymond was standing in front of me, asking me to run the company that owned it.
“There’s one condition,” he said. “Nobody hears it before Saturday. We announce it at the gala. Not your team, not your friends.”
“My husband?”
“Your husband, fine. He’ll find out Saturday anyway. Nobody else.”
I said yes. I planned to tell Derek that night anyway, alone, at our own table.
He didn’t come home.
At 8:40 he texted: “Client dinner. Don’t wait up.”
He came in after one. I heard him in the shower for a long time.
Saturday morning he stood in the kitchen doorway, buttoning his cuffs.
“About tonight,” he said. “Don’t come.”
“To the gala?”
“You’ll be uncomfortable. You can’t drink, you can’t stand for three hours, and it’s my night. They’re announcing big leadership news. Paige is coming to help me network.”
Paige is his assistant. She’s twenty-seven. She has started answering his phone when I call.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
He sighed like I’d asked him to carry something heavy. “Fine. Just stay in the back.”
