Without thinking, Simone reached out and found the inside of Alexandra’s wrist, stroking the soft skin there and feeling her pulse fluttering. Alexandra’s gaze softened, but she didn’t say anything. Simone became hyperaware that she didn’t have to consciously fight her usual instincts to run after sex, and she wasn’t sure when that instinct had disappeared. As Alexandra’s eyes drifted close, Simone thought, with a wry internal twist, that maybe the real competition had been them pretending that this wasn’t inevitable all along.
19
Chapter 19: Alexandra
Ruth’s message had come in the night before, a short email to Alexandra’s personal inbox.Can you give me thirty minutes tomorrow at ten? My office.Nothing else, not even a subject line. In the time she’d spent as her general counsel, Ruth had asked for private meetings only a handful of times, and they were always worth the interruption. Alexandra had cleared the slot before turning off the light for bed.
By seven the next morning, she had already been at her desk for an hour. By eight, she had answered the morning’s correspondence on the coastal road, and by nine, the Roosevelt Elementary paperwork had been signed and returned to Helen for processing. The upcoming meeting with Ruth sat in the back of her mind all morning.
Paula Hollander called her a quarter past nine about her March renewal. She was a careful woman who ran a distribution warehouse in the south valley, and she spent the first two minutes of the call telling her that she wasn’t worried, though her tone suggested she was. Alexandra reassured her that thetakeover wouldn’t affect her contract terms. There was a beat of silence on the other end of the line, and Alexandra held her breath, waiting for a potential fallout. But Paula said, “All right, Alexandra,” thanked her, then said goodbye.
Alexandra sat with the phone in her hand after the line went dead. Paula had believed her. She had given her word in good faith, but Alexandra couldn’t help but worry about what she would learn in Ruth’s office in forty-five minutes and whether or not the new information would change those terms. She set down the phone.
She turned her attention to the computer and wrote three paragraphs of a memo to herself, annotating thoughts on the sustainability division’s positioning. She devoted more concentration to the individual sentences than she normally did, especially for a memo only she would see—typing and retyping words and rearranging clauses, occupying her mind with the small problem of making a dull paragraph less dull.
At nine-fifty, she saved the file and closed it. She sat for a moment with her hands flat on the desk, letting herself finally look at the ten o’clock slot she had kept at the edge of her attention since the night before. Then she stood and reached for her suit jacket.
The walk to Ruth’s office was forty-two steps. She had counted it once, years ago. The number resurfaced in her memory as she walked down the hallway.One, two, three, four.Counting was a discipline that steadied her mind, and she had been relying on it for decades.
When she reached the end of the hallway, Ruth’s door was closed. Through the side glass pane, Alexandra saw Ruth sitting at the desk reading the monitor with a small frown. She knocked once and let herself in.
“Alexandra, good. Close the door.” Ruth set a manila folder on the desk.
She crossed the office and sat, her gaze flicking to the folder.
“It’s internal,” Ruth began without preamble. “The irregularities I flagged in November, I’ve been following and tracking them. I have what I need to piece it together, and I want to walk you through it before I tell you what it adds up to.”
“All right.”So someoneissabotaging me from within.Alexandra kept her face and posture still, not wanting to betray her thoughts.
Ruth opened the folder and turned it on the desk so it faced Alexandra, then sat back in her chair. Alexandra appreciated the space to absorb the information.
The first page was a communications map; Alexandra recognized the format from the annual compliance. It had the usual distribution: heavy around her own office, dense around Meg’s and Ruth’s, and thick around the divisional heads. It looked normal.
Ruth pointed to a thin line of activity in the lower quadrant. “This is the working-group channel.”
Alexandra looked at it. She hadn’t thought about the channel in years. IT built it over a decade ago, and its purpose was to let strategic ideas circulate before they were committed to paper. She had approved the idea on Meg’s recommendation, back when she still trusted Meg’s instincts over her own.
“Look at the timestamps.”
Alexandra pulled the map closer. The activity clustered in the four months before each quarterly board meeting. Three or four bursts a year, six weeks at a time. The most recent had ended eight days before the board meeting on Tuesday.
Tension coiled in her stomach as Ruth turned the page. There were two sets of numbers laid side by side, both projecting the sustainable energy division’s costs and returns over the next five years. They drew from the same underlying data, but they weren’t the same projection.
One emphasized growth and momentum, which was the case Alexandra had been making to the board for a year. The other emphasized risk and cost, which made the case for slowing down. The raw numbers, though, were identical, but someone had used them to tell two different stories.
Alexandra had only seen the first projection. She had presented from it at the September board meeting. She had never seen the second.
“This one came to my desk,” she said and pointed at the first projection. “But what about the other one?”
“It was sent to five board members, routed through the working-group channel as preparatory reading and marked as supplementary. It wasn’t formally distributed, so it was never logged in the minutes.”
Alexandra withdrew her hand back to the edge of the desk and pressed it flat. “Who sent it?”
Ruth turned the page. The third sheet showed who had been using the channel and how often. There were a handful of names, and one of them was sending more than three times what the others were.Vivian.
“How long has she been doing this?” Alexandra asked, keeping her voice level.
“The earliest set of doctored projections I could place with certainty is from May. I’m still reconstructing the spring, and the pattern stabilizes in July.”
