Page 8 of The Difference Between

I drop my bag and phone on my desk, strolling toward the view. Every east-facing surface is bleached by the morning sun, so bright it’s white. The windows of nearby buildings—some taller, some smaller—burst with light. Thousands of daytime fireworks at the crest of their explosion reflected as far as the eye can see. A sparkly sea of success with me in the middle of it.

Cities are known as concrete jungles, but there’s so much glass it looks fragile. Like I could crack the scene with the tap of a hammer. It can’t be that fragile though, because the more money I make, the more glass I’m surrounded by. Protected by. My office alone has two full walls of it: one facing the world, one facing the guts of the firm. And it’s not just the amount of glass, it’s how much higher in the air it is. My success is measured by a raw material made of sand and heat that magnifies the difference between me and everyone else.

Swallowing a yawn, I rest my Givenchy-wrapped hip against the window. After my first uninterrupted sip of coffee, I let out a long exhale.

I was in the office until two this morning prepping for today’s meeting and watching surgical-feed videos of craniotomies, then woke up at four when Rue called on the way to the hospital. Most nights I don’t sleep for more than five hours, but two hours is painful. I need the caffeine to hit. Immediately.

Beneath me, cars stop and go, and people scatter like ants in every direction, oblivious to my watching. I could probably strip naked and press myself against the window like a starfish and not one of them would care.

Well, except the man who’s now in front of me washing the window. Unless he’s blind, he’d be forced to notice. He’d probably be delighted by my nipples spilling across his workplace. They’re good nipples.

But also, it’s Chicago. He’s likely seen wilder things on a Tuesday morning through a high-rise window. Maybe women across the Windy City regularly press their naked bodies to dirty glass, and what’s beneath my silk shirt would only result in him squeegeeing right over my smooshed flesh. I tap on the window; he doesn’t react. Why does that irk me?

Only an inch between us—two quarter-inch panels of glass with a half-inch air gap—it might as well be a chasm. We’re both on the thirty-second floor at one of the most prestigious buildings on Canal Street, and if he looked over his shoulder, we’d have the same clear view of Lake Michigan and the buildings and parks that lead to its shore.

But there’s a difference between us.

It’s not just our clothes—he’s in discount jeans and a faded T-shirt under his neon orange harness while I’m in a skirt, shirt, and pair of pumps that cost more than his monthly salary—nor is it the fact he could fall to his death if one thing goes wrong. It’s that I’m looking out and he’s looking in.

I see the world; he cleans the dirt so I can.

And we might be on the same floor, but I got here by eighty-hour weeks spent climbing the ladder, and he was lowered from the roof in a scaffold.

I press a palm on the window, cool to the touch despite the August heat wave we’re in the throes of, at the same time he drags a squeegee down the other side. A path is cleared—sparkly and spotless—while small streams of water race down either side. Based on the shape of his lips, he’s whistling. He likes his work. Interesting.

He’s older than me—probably in his early fifties—and I wouldn’t call him attractive, but he has a sturdy quality. A steel beam in human form. He probably has a good Midwestern name like Jake and lives in Bridgeport; it’s probably the same neighborhood he grew up in. He has a wife who makes casseroles and wears comfortable shoes while his two kids—both boys—wrestle in the yard. Their report cards consist of Cs. He clocks out of work at the same time every afternoon then spends every weekend bitching about the Bears, the Sox, and how the Union doesn’t give a rat’s ass about him. In the designated beer refrigerator in his garage: two thirty-packs of PBR. He grabs one right before settling around a card table to play euchre on Friday nights.

With the next drag of his squeegee, he pauses, and our eyes meet. With his free hand, he presses a thumb to his temple and wiggles his beefy fingers while sticking his tongue out. I don’t know what to make of it and drop my hand from the glass. He shrugs, chuckles, then gets back to work.

My phone dings with a text that pulls me from the window. It’s Rue. Mom’s in surgery. Nurse said they’d keep us updated hourly. Remy started crying (of course) then I started crying. Send a statistic to make us both feel better, will ya?

I glance back at Jake in his neon vest and squeegee. A strong gust of wind could kill him and he probably has next to nothing in his bank account, but for some reason—for a split second—I’m envious. If his mom were having her head cracked open, he’d be there. He’d take the day off because the bird shit and bugs he’s scraping off these windows—my windows—will wait; the deal I’m chasing won’t. Hard decisions are easy when there’s nothing to lose.

To my sister: Grade 1 meningioma craniotomies have a two-percent mortality rate. Her surgeon—whom I picked—has never lost a single patient from a surgery with these parameters or post-op complications. Stop crying in public, you’ll ruin the family name—I smile to myself, then add, again. We found out Rue was the love child of a man not our dad a few months ago, and it’s borderline impossible for me not to bring it into every conversation. Also, this isn’t an emergency. EMERGENCIES ONLY UNTIL MY MEETING IS OVER.

She responds instantly. All the time I spent trying to convince you to be here for the surgery and your bitch shines just as brightly from seven-hundred miles away as it would if you were sitting right next to me. Define emergency.

I send her a picture of my well-manicured middle finger then exchange my phone for the file containing every data point for today’s meeting.

I’ve been part of dozens of investment committee meetings—many I’ve led—but it doesn’t change the fact that I need a unanimous vote today. I’ll pitch the acquisition of Fizz Co, and then it’s up to the committee members—all twelve senior partners, a few people from finance and legal, and, due to the size of this account, the three managing partner siblings. Not only will I prove that this deal would be a huge asset for the Rutledge Group, but it would also solidify us as a global player in this vertical, something I’ve been working toward since I made partner five years ago. If I can convince the committee, it will be the largest consumer goods company acquired in the firm’s history. The payday would be huge—millions for me alone—but the notoriety for the firm would be unmatched.

And I would be the one to do it. Me. Reese Conway. A girl from a small town in North Carolina who grew up to do something worth billions. It gives me goose bumps.

I open my laptop and start clicking through the presentation; it looks the same as it did at two am when I last reviewed it. As do the papers in the file. That doesn’t stop me from scrutinizing every line like I’ve never seen it or reading points at an enthusiastic whisper to myself.

File in hand, I discard my now-cold coffee and make an espresso at the machine in my office, moving through the steps on autopilot. This is the first of many cups I’ll have to get me through end of business and beyond. I’ll be here past midnight if I get approval to move forward.

The machine hisses and I flip the page, reabsorbing every number.

Up to this point, my biggest hurdle in securing an account of this magnitude has been the firm. The Rutledge Group is a family-owned company—all three managing partners have Rutledge in their blood—who value building a portfolio of other family-owned companies. They make decisions based on numbers and a noble code of ethics, something not often synonymous with PE firms.

Turns out, ethics complicate things. Anything with an even remotely negative connotation is nixed. Nicotine products. Food with too many questionable ingredients. Any product that has adverse impacts on the environment. CEOs caught sticking their dicks where they don’t belong. It might not sound difficult, but when the curtains come down, most execs have a secret or two and every company cuts corners to save a buck.

As challenging as these expectations are, it’s part of what drew me to the Rutledge Group—The Family, as I like to call them—when I was just starting out. I knew they’d be great to work for, and when the time came for me to start a family of my own, they’d be supportive. The time hasn’t been right for the family piece—I barely have enough hours in the day to eat a single meal—but because almost everyone else in the firm has one, I take advantage of it. While they use the extensive days off for whatever they do, I use them to work. Hard.

Hard enough at age thirty-five, I was the youngest woman to make partner.

Hard enough for the last four out of five years, I’ve held the title of sponsoring the largest acquisition.