Her feet knew the path anyway. She predicted the roots at the first turn, the stretch where the gravel thinned, and the grade change past the spruce with the split trunk. Four and a half months of mornings had stenciled the trail onto her body, and she didn't need to see it to know where she needed to go.
She ran hard, the way she hadn't since her twenties, when running had been less about discipline and more about burning off whatever she couldn't contain. The cold air hit her lungs, and her legs took the downhill section fast enough that a stumble would have meant going over the cliff edge and hitting the rocks below. Somewhere deep in the back of her mind, she knew this but kept the pace anyway. The alternative was standing still in that penthouse, in the sealed quiet of a life she’d designed to keep people out. The trail was a different kind of solitude, open and wet and completely indifferent to whether she was there or not.
She slowed at the halfway point and stopped, breathing hard. The drizzle had intensified into a downpour, and the wind was pushing it sideways off the ocean. She stood in it and let it hit her, the droplets sharply cold and slanting, as she tried to find the part of herself that knew what to do next. That part had never failed her before. In every city, at every inflection point, she'd known to close the deal, pack the bag, book the flight, and move. The sequence was automatic. It had carried her from Montreal to New York to London to a dozen cities after that, and the speed of it, the clean efficiency of a life that never accumulated enough weight to slow her down, that had always felt like competence and control to her.
She had won a significant milestone today, and the only thing she'd wanted was to tell Alexandra. Simone suspected shewas the only person alive who would understand the emptiness inside the win.
Her mind kept circling back to Alexandra's face at Elements, when the conversation had drifted past acquisition strategy and something unguarded had surfaced between them—a recognition, mutual and startling, like two people discovering they'd been holding the same wound in different hands. Simone had wanted to stay in that moment and have it stretch around her. She had wanted to stop performing and let Alexandra see whatever was underneath. The desire had terrified her, because underneath the performance was a woman Simone had spent three decades making sure no one got close enough to meet.
She thought about Margaux, standing in the kitchen of their Upper West Side apartment with her arms crossed, saying the sentence that had ended nineteen months in five words:You are incapable of intimacy.Simone hadn't argued back with her. She'd moved out in three days, flown to London, and found another apartment, telling herself that Margaux had wanted something conventional and Simone simply wasn't conventional.
She thought about Diane, who had lasted longer and seen more of her but still arrived at the same place. Simone had heard the grief in her words and had done nothing besides leave. It was the only thing she was good at in these situations, and she knew that what Diane was asking for—staying in one place long enough to be truly known and risking that it wouldn’t be enough—was the one thing she couldn't give.
The rain dripped in her eyes, and she swiped it away. It came back immediately and she let it stay. She stood on a cliff in the dark on a Thursday night, and the realization that the two women who'd loved her had all seen the same thing—Simone was terrified of intimacy. She was terrified of standing still, terrified of being seen completely and finding out that whatsomeone saw, without the accomplishments, wasn't enough to make them stay. So she left first every time. Before they could get a good look and the verdict came in, she was already packed and gone, preferring to call it strength and self-sufficiency.
And now here was Alexandra, and Simone found herself not wanting to leave, and it was doing something to her that she didn't have language for. Because, she now understood, that what she wanted from Alexandra couldn't be taken or forced. She could force a proxy vote and acquire a company. She could walk into any room in the world and control the outcome, but she could not make Alexandra Vaughn respect her. She couldn’t construct a scenario where Alexandra chose her, actually chose her, freely and with clear eyes and the full option to say no. Choice wasn't something you could eliminate the risk from. You had to stand there and let someone look at you. You had to trust that what they found would be enough, and Simone had never trusted that, not once, not with anyone, and the distrust had kept her safe and free and so alone that winning the biggest deal of her career felt like nothing.
And underneath all of it, underneath the respect and the attention and the terror of being seen, there was something else. Something she'd been keeping in her peripheral vision for weeks because looking at it directly would make it real.
She wanted Alexandra's composure to break. More than that, she wanted to be the one who broke it.
Not just professionally; she'd been doing that for months. That was the game. What Simone wanted now had nothing to do with that. She wanted to see Alexandra come undone. She wanted her steady hands to shake. She wanted the voice that never faltered to falter, and she wanted to be the reason—not the takeover, not the business, but Simone herself, her hands, her mouth, her presence in a room with the door closed. She wanted Alexandra to surrender something she'd never surrendered toanyone. The desire that had been building since the boardroom wasn’t tender and it sat in Simone's body like heat, and it had nowhere to go.
She doubled back on the trail toward the city and ran, soaked through and shivering. Her unspoken desire carried her forward; the first thing in years that made the direction matter more than the speed.
11
Chapter 11: Alexandra
The energy division lease renewal passed unanimously, and Alexandra moved to the second item.
Ruth's governance amendment drew a question from Antonia Hargrove about the disclosure timeline, which Ruth concisely answered in two sentences. The vote carried eleven to one, the lone dissent coming from Daria Calloway, who objected to all governance changes as a matter of principle and whom no one had taken personally in eight years.
Two items down, both clean. This was the part of the job that never made thepapers and that Alexandra had always found quietly satisfying, the procedural maintenance that kept a company of this scale running true. It was the boardroom equivalent of checking the pressure in a water main: invisible when it worked, catastrophic when it didn't. She'd overseen hundreds of these votes. The room had a rhythm to it: twelve directors she'd worked alongside through two recessions and a pandemic, their tendencies as familiar to her as her own. Antonia asked the insightful questions. Daria voiced her dissent.Julianna listened with the investment committee's rigor and voted with the data. Celeste followed the consensus. It was comfortingly predictable.
She opened the third line item herself.
The coastal road reallocation was straightforward: the project had overrun its original budget—both the nesting season delay and the material cost increases that had hit every coastal infrastructure project this year—and the request would shift capital from the general reserves to cover the gap. The project would continue either way on its existing budget, but the reallocation accelerated the timeline and brought them back to within eighteen months of completion.
She laid out the numbers and the rationale without lingering on either. This was Dorothy's road, but she didn't say that because the surest way to weaken an argument in a room full of directors was to tell them why it mattered to you personally.
Julianna spoke first.
“The reallocation draws from the general reserves during a period of significant shareholder uncertainty.” Her voice was measured, and her hands were steepled on the table. Seven years on the investment committee, and she had never voted against Alexandra on anything. “With the proxy fight creating volatility in our institutional base, committing additional capital to a project that's already exceeded its original budget sends a signal I'm not comfortable with. I'd recommend we revisit this once the corporate situation stabilizes.”
The room shifted, and Alexandra felt the redistribution of weight as people’s attention realigned around a new center of gravity.
Celeste seconded but didn't elaborate, though it was obvious that Celeste had been waiting for someone to push back since the day Simone Rousseau's boardroom presentation had left her clutching her agenda packet.
Alexandra could see the vote moving. Two of the longer-serving directors glanced at Julianna and then at each other, recalculating. Julianna's reasoning was financially sound. The general reserve existed for stability. Depleting it during an active hostile takeover, for a project already over budget, was a risk a responsible board could reasonably decline.
That was the part she had no answer for. You could fight a poor analysis and bad faith. But you could not stand in front of twelve directors and tell them that prudence was wrong.
She didn't argue further and called the vote.
Seven to five, against. The reallocation had failed.
Alexandra recorded the result with the same tone she used for every other agenda item. She thanked the board for their diligence, confirmed that the project would continue on its existing budget, and noted that the reallocation could be resubmitted in thirty days. She closed the meeting on schedule.
