It was a quarter past eight, and after a long day Taryn had folded onto the couch with a glass of wine — the custom cream sofa, deep seats, wide arms — and pulled the brief she’d worked on all day back into her lap.
She began to reread what by now she nearly knew by heart, and her whole body tensed before she noticed it happening.
The brief was done. It had only confirmed what she’d been circling all day: the scope had grown, and she was going to have to go back to the client about the budget.
She opened her laptop. “Jim, Clarisse — can we do dinner tomorrow evening? 7 at The Grill, I’ll have my assistant make the arrangements.”
She pushed the laptop aside, irritated that she had to reopen a conversation about something she’d seen months ago and said nothing about.
Now she had to ask for another five hundred thousand dollars — because six months ago she said yes when she meant no.
Six months earlier. Winter, Manhattan, the deal closing.
They were settling the final details when something flagged her, something she knew would surface later. But Jim worked the deal in front of him and never the cost downstream; he was three moves ahead on the board, and he'd have called that being good at his job, not rushing. Closing fast wasn't a tactic to him — it was simply how you won. An open question, any open question, was a kind of exposure he couldn't sit in.
“There’s one thing that came up in my research,” Taryn said.
“Another thing? I thought you wrapped up your research weeks ago. We need to move on this.” Jim didn’t look up. “What could it possibly be now?”
“It’s fine, nothing,” coughed Taryn. She swallowed the resistance with the last sip of wine.
And now, the dead of summer, it was something after all. Like that winter, she swallowed the frustration.
Tonight it went down with a fresh-delivered cookie and a bottle of Cab.
When I sit with that swallowed “it’s fine, nothing,” I recognize the exact shape of it — maybe you do too.