CHAPTER 1: THE FLOWERS I CARRIED UPSTAIRS
I bought flowers that morning. I want to tell you that first, because everything else that happened that day started with me being happy. It was a Tuesday in early October, and by nine o’clock that morning I was supposed to be sitting in the executive conference room with the COO and the CFO, shaking hands and signing the paperwork that made me Vice President of Operations at Halloran Meridian.
I had worked eleven years for that chair. I stopped at the market on Vine Street before work and picked up yellow tulips, because my mother used to say tulips meant good luck and I still believed her. I also brought the framed photo from my desk at home, the one of me and Rafferty at the lake four summers ago, because someone in the office had told me they wanted a picture of me for the company newsletter and I thought it would be nice if the picture meant something.
I was in the building at eight forty. The elevators were slow, so I took the stairs to the executive floor and came in through the side door, the one near the big glass room where the board meets when the board is here, and where everything important at Halloran Meridian gets decided.
The door to the conference room was not quite closed. I looked in because I thought someone had left a light on. Rafferty was standing at the end of the table with his hands on Annelise Keane’s waist. She had her fingers up in his collar, and she was laughing at something quiet, and he was kissing her, and I watched them do it for about three seconds before my body caught up with my eyes. The tulips fell first.
I don’t remember letting go of them, but I remember the sound. Rafferty turned around with his mouth still half open, the way a man turns when he has been caught by someone he did not expect, and he did not say my name. Annelise stepped back and put her hands down at her sides like a schoolgirl caught passing notes. She is an HR consultant. She came to Halloran Meridian four months ago through a contract, and I had signed her welcome packet myself, and I had told her on her first day that if she ever needed anything in operations, my door was open. On the table between the three of us was a single sheet of paper. I looked at it because I needed something to look at that was not my husband’s face.
It was a transfer and promotion recommendation for Annelise Keane, moving her out of consulting and into a permanent operations role with a director title and a salary band that I knew by heart because I had set those bands myself. At the bottom of the form, on the line marked Approved By, my name was typed in. Leontine Marchand, Vice President of Operations. Annelise saw me reading it and said, very quietly, ‘You already approved it. You signed off last Tuesday.’ I set my purse down on the table. I said, ‘I have never seen this document in my life.’ She looked at Rafferty. He was still standing there with his tie crooked and his hands in his pockets, and he did not say one word to either of us.
I asked him again. I said, ‘Rafferty. Look at me and tell me you didn’t do this.’ He looked at the floor. Annelise took a step back from him, and I saw her face change, and that was the first moment I understood that whatever she knew, she did not know all of it. Then Rafferty finally spoke. He said, ‘Leontine, don’t do this here. Not in your own building. You’re better than that.’ And Annelise, still staring at the form, said the thing that would follow me for the rest of that year. She said, ‘Then why does it say you signed it last Tuesday?’ Last Tuesday I was in Cincinnati. I was standing in a plant audit in Cincinnati, Ohio, twelve hours from that conference room, and I had the badge logs, the flight confirmation, and forty people who had watched me eat lunch in a cafeteria that did not exist in this state. But I did not say any of that out loud. I picked up the paper. I folded it once, carefully, the way you fold something you plan to use later, and I put it in my bag. Then I looked at my husband and I said, ‘I don’t know what this is yet. But I’m going to find out.’ I walked out into the hallway, and I did not cry, and I did not yell, and I did not let anyone on that floor see anything on my face except a woman who was late for a meeting. Because that was true. I was late for a meeting. I just did not know yet how much of my life that meeting was about to cost me.
