Chittik didn’t need to be asked twice and scurried away like a frightened bunny. Once they were alone, Keener asked Haley, “Who else have you told?”
“No one.”
“If you’re lying to me, I’m going to fire you and make sure that no one ever hires you. Understand?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did wrong. The analysis is right. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t fucking care. What I do fucking care about is the $100 million fee Maeve Grant gets at closing. Every penny of that vanishes if this deal craters. Do you have any idea what that would mean to our bonus pool?”
The deal closed on time, without the client ever becoming the wiser of the land mine that awaited them with the regulators. At the closing dinner, the client’s CEO toasted Maeve Grant’s dedication to the cause and thanked them profusely for their hard work. Champagne flowed. Caviar was consumed. In February, bonuses were paid. Instead of a bonus, Haley was fired. “Restructuring,” they told her. But if she signed a release promising never to sue, they’d pay her a bonus.
After her sacking, Haley dutifully did all the things the recently unemployed are supposed to do. She reached out to her contacts, asking for leads. When that ran dry, she sent out résumés. First to the blue-chip firms, then broadening her circle, until there was hardly a financial institution she hadn’t contacted. She made it to the final interview stage twice, but in each instance, after contacting Haley’s references, the head of HR called back to say that they couldn’t extend an offer. When Haley asked why, she was told both times that they were not at liberty to say. Haley knew that was corporate-speak meaning that Maeve Grant was blackballing her.
Within twelve months, she’d lost her husband and her career. That’s when she started seeing Dr. Rubenstein. She’d been having self-harm fantasies, she admitted to the shrink straightaway, and worse.
“I think about how happy I’d be if someone flew a plane into the Maeve Grant tower and killed them all,” she told him once. “Or I construct these elaborate scenarios to kill James or Jessica. Sometimes I even fantasize about killing Jessica’s ex-husband, which makes absolutely no sense because he’s a victim like me in all this.”
Rubenstein said that type of misplaced rage was perfectly normal, although he was quick to point out that it was important for her not to act on the feelings but instead to rechannel them.
“They’re telling you something important, Haley,” he said.
“And what’s that?” Haley asked.
“The anger you feel to the people who wronged you—your bosses, James, even Jessica—that’s straightforward enough and understandable at face value. You want to hurt them the way that they hurt you. It’s your rage toward Jessica’s ex-husband, however, that, as you acknowledge, doesn’t fit that pattern. What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I come here,” Haley said.
Of course, she did know. On some level, at least, she knew. Still, she waited for Dr. Rubenstein to say it aloud.
“It suggests that you think that Jessica’s ex-husband also bears some blame in all of this. That if he had been a better husband, perhaps Jessica wouldn’t have started an affair with your husband. So what it’s really telling you is that you think you bear some blame for James being unfaithful to you too.”
She wondered if that was true. How much of her anger at James was fueled by her own self-loathing? Then again, she hadn’t broken her marriage vows. James had. It wasn’t her fault. Neither was what had happened at Maeve Grant. She had done everything right—in both instances—only to be the one devastated by people with zero concern for honesty or integrity.
And yet, she was still the one seeing a shrink once a week. She was certain that neither James nor Jessica, nor even Lawrence Chittik or Sean Keener for that matter, had lost a moment’s sleep about what they’d done. Still, she couldn’t deny that she was in a downward spiral, with self-destruction seemingly at the top of her daily routine.
“How has your week been?” Dr. Rubenstein asked, once Haley had assumed her position on the sofa.
“Well, let’s see now,” she said. “Pretty uneventful. No job leads. Stayed inside. Drank a lot.” She paused. “And, oh yeah, I offered some guy sex in exchange for him accompanying me to James and Jessica’s anniversary party, and once I was there, I screamed profanity at them during the toasts in front of all their friends and family.” Another pause. “So, pretty much just a regular week in the life of Haley Sommers.”
Owen knew almost immediately something was wrong. During the subway ride home from the doctor’s office, his mother looked like she might faint at any moment, white as a ghost and holding on to the pole for dear life.
All of which made Owen sick to his stomach too. There are a limited number of options for what constitutes bad news when you’re visiting a pediatric oncologist, after all.
A few minutes after they returned home, his mother knocked on his door. He heard the knock through his headphones but didn’t turn around.
When his mother found him in this position, she sometimes shouted his name or touched him on the shoulder to get his attention. But other times, when the point wasn’t to engage him but to ascertain whether he was occupied, she’d quietly retreat from his bedroom, as if she wanted her entry to go unnoticed.
Which was why Owen’s most prized possession was not his computer, despite what his mother thought. It was his Beats noise-canceling headphones. He liked the way they enhanced the audio when he was playing Call of Duty, but what made them so dear to his heart was that whenever he wore them, his mother assumed that he was hearing impaired.
Which made them almost akin to an invisibility cloak. When he wore them with the sound off, they weren’t canceling outside speech but amplifying it.
This was apparently
