Chapter 6
Eric POV
The conference room on the thirty-second floor faces east. By two in the afternoon the light has shifted, and everything on the table looks slightly more honest than it did at nine — a phenomenon I noticed during my first week in this role and have never mentioned to anyone, but which is precisely why I schedule the difficult meetings in the afternoon. People make fewer optimistic errors when the light is rendering their paperwork at an unflattering angle.
Today's particular honesty reveals a discrepancy in the quarterly projections on page fourteen. The senior analyst apparently did not catch it before binding the report. I flag it with a pen cap and say nothing yet. There are seven more pages, and I prefer a complete inventory before I begin.
The analyst presenting the slide deck is a man named Vickers who has been with Perry Pharmaceuticals for eleven years and who treats pending regulatory approval as a settled matter whenever it suits his numbers. He is citing a market expansion figure for the Hartwell compound now with the smooth confidence of someone who has confused a possibility with a fact.
"Stop there," I say.
He stops.
"The FDA review is not resolved," I say. "Your Q3 projection is built on the assumption that it will be, and fast. What's the basis for that assumption?" He opens his mouth.
"Don't cite the industry average," I continue. "The industry average applies to compounds with a completed Phase III trial. Hartwell has a conditional completion. Those are not the same category. Presenting them as equivalent isn't estimating — it's wishful thinking dressed up as data."
I look at him, and then at the other eleven people arranged around the table. "The figure on page fourteen goes back to finance before this reaches the board. And while we're here — we make compounds that keep people alive. The moment we start rounding corners on that premise because a quarter is looking difficult, we are no longer a pharmaceutical company. We are a liability. Is that clear?"
It is clear. The meeting ends. I take the report with me.
Marcus is standing two feet from the door instead of the usual six when I come out of the conference room, which is how I know the next piece of information will cost me something.
"Mrs. Perry is here," he says. "She arrived about forty minutes ago. She's waiting in your office."
I press two fingers to the bridge of my nose. It accomplishes nothing, but it is the gesture I have for this particular category of news, and I use it anyway.
"Thank you," I say. He nods with the expression of a man who has delivered a message he did not author and does not intend to be held responsible for.
She has found the coffee machine and made herself entirely at home in one of the chairs across from my desk, legs crossed, mug balanced on her knee, looking like a woman who has never in her life been anywhere she was not welcome. It is the first week of July and she is wearing pale linen and she is watching me with the expression she believes is unreadable.
"Mom," I say. "You're here."
"Someone has to be." She tilts her head at me in a way that manages to be both fond and mildly reproachful. "If I waited for you to come home, we'd only see each other at holidays. Your father asks about you every Sunday. It would cost you very little to call him."
"The board has been difficult this quarter," I say. "You know how the older members are — they've been in the industry longer than I've been alive and they don't let me forget it."
"Then listen to them," she says, simply. "They have things worth hearing, even when the delivery is not what you'd prefer." I don't say what I think about that. I say: of course.
She smooths her skirt at the knee. "There's something I wanted to raise with you. A friend of your father's has a daughter — Penn graduate, Wharton, very accomplished by all accounts and very personable. We thought you might consider meeting her."
"I'm in the middle of the Hartwell transition," I say. "The board already has questions about my focus. I'd rather not give them additional reasons to doubt my commitment — for your sake as much as mine."
"Eric." She looks at me with the particular patience that has always managed to make me feel simultaneously understood and thoroughly tired. "You are already more than enough. No one who has watched what you've built in two years is going to question your commitment because you have a life outside this building. You're allowed to want that."
Four days have passed since Blue Tears, and I have not thought about Evan Dalton in any sustained or deliberate way. This is true. I have thought about him briefly on Tuesday morning when Marcus mentions the hotel billing, and again on Wednesday during a call I am not sufficiently present for, and once more on Thursday for reasons that remain unclear to me and which I decline to examine.
I look at the window.
"There might be someone," I say, before I have completely decided to say it.
She goes still. The mug on her knee does not move.
"But they're not interested," I add. "Or not yet. The situation is unresolved."
"Not interested in you?" The mild outrage is immediate and entirely genuine. "That is remarkably poor judgment on their part. Anyone with eyes should be able to see—"
"I don't find it unappealing," I say. "Someone who falls over themselves to impress me is less interesting than someone who doesn't. I've always preferred a challenge. Otherwise what's the point."
She is quiet for a moment, and then something shifts at the corner of her mouth that is not quite a smile. "Well," she says, standing and gathering her bag. "That sounds about right for you." She smooths her jacket. "Don't let it go too long, though. The right woman won't wait around forever."
"I know," I say.
I walk her to the elevator. She touches my cheek when the doors open, the way she has done since I was small, and she looks at me for a moment longer than the conversation requires, with the expression she has always worn when she is trying to see something in me that she cannot quite reach.
"Dinner soon," she says. "Your father misses you."
"I'll call," I say. The doors close.
I stand in the corridor for a moment. The person I just described to my mother is not a woman.
He is twenty-three years old, and he has brown eyes that I have been thinking about with an irritating and involuntary frequency for the past four days, and the last time I saw him he looked at me across a room like I was a problem he had already calculated the solution to and found the solution insufficient. He has not called. I have not been waiting for him to call. These are two separate facts.
I am back at my desk and two-thirds through the corrected projections when my personal cell rings. Not the office line. The one I keep in my jacket pocket, the one whose number I have given to almost no one. Except...
I let the unknown number ring twice. Then I answer.
"Hello." A pause, carefully controlled. "This is Evan Dalton."
Something in my chest rearranges itself without asking permission. The corner of my mouth does something I am glad no one is present to observe.
"Yes?" I say. "This is Eric."
He is quiet for a moment — enough silence that I can hear him on the other side of it, deciding whether to continue, assembling whatever he needs to say a thing he clearly did not find easy to dial.
"What can I do for you?" I say.
"What you said." A brief pause. "The other night. Does that still stand?"
I lean back in my chair and look at the ceiling.
"I'm not sure I remember exactly what you're referring to, Mr. Dalton," I say. "You'll have to remind me."
The silence that follows is a different quality than the first one. I let it sit. Somewhere on the other end of the line, Evan Dalton is working up to saying something out loud that has apparently cost him several days and whatever it cost him to dial an unknown number, and I am enjoying this more thoroughly than is probably warranted, which I note without any intention of changing it.
"Never mind," he says at last, flat and quick. "I'm sorry to bother you. Goodbye."
"Evan."
He stops.
"Pearl Hotel," I say. "Room 1014. Nine o'clock tonight."
A pause. A different kind than the others — shorter, and carrying something in it that the previous ones didn't.
"Okay," he says.
The line goes quiet.
I set the phone down on the desk and return to the projections. The afternoon light has moved another inch across the city. Nine o'clock. I pick up the pen.
