Ten months later
Divorce has taught me a lot of lessons.
One is that the cushions, towels, and cutlery adorned with the couple monogram is a spectacularly bad idea. It hadn’t been mine, of course, but my former mother-in-law’s, but that doesn’t change the fact I now have a set of beautiful towels I don’t want to use. A couple monogram is only useful as long as the couple exists.
And Percy’s and mine no longer does.
But the lesson that hurts the most has little to do with cutlery or the artful intertwining of our initials. No, it’s all about our mutual friends.
I’ve now learned the hard way that there’s no such thing. In the trenches of divorce warfare, everyone takes a side.
It had started as soon as I filed, the slow decline in texts, phone calls, invitations, brunch invites and hellos from the people we’d surrounded ourselves with during our seven years as a couple, four of those married.
Our mutual friends chose a side, and it was very rarely mine. Oh, our female friends were very understanding when I met them, of course. I was so sorry to hear about it all, Maud had told me at a dinner, two months post filing for divorce. Was there no way to… repair it? To look past his little indiscretion? Here, let me give you the name of the couple’s therapist Mark and I used when we were going through something similar. Just think about it, Sophia. You two have so much together.
Yes, I’d thought. We have a shit ton of monogrammed junk.
So maybe they weren’t so very understanding, after all.
Most of the people Percy and I knew were more his friends than they were ever mine. His old camaraderie of buddies from school, be it the semester he did at boarding school or from his Ivy League college. His squash friends and his golf buddies, and his parents’ friends and their children, and the entire vast, ivy-covered network we’d built together in New York—except it wasn’t our network, and I didn’t build it. He and his parents did, and I had naively thought I’d become a part of it.
That I’d made it my own and that I had a life here.
But one divorce later and I’m as much of an outsider as I’d been when I arrived in New York a decade earlier. Percy’s part of them. I’m not, and what was once a hairline fracture is now a yawning gulf between us.
I’m Sophia Bishop from Marhill, an outsider, no longer invited to bottomless brunches and couples’ golf sessions.
So, I’ve done the one thing I can… and that’s work.
Distraction, my therapist likes to say in a lecturing tone, isn’t the healthiest way to deal with your problems, Sophia.
Maybe not, but it sure is the most comfortable, not to mention profitable. My nonstop work hours began immediately after the divorce, when the Exciteur office became a homier place than the three-bedroom apartment I was emptying with Percy.
And they bore fruit. I’m now a senior project manager in the Strategy department, a step up from project assistant, and all it took was my personal life imploding.
The promotion came just in time for me to switch from avoiding the apartment I lived in with Percy, to avoiding the new apartment I’d found for myself. It’s a one bedroom in Midtown, modest by New York standards, and still expensive as hell for a single-payer household.
It’s also painfully empty.
The one begrudging silver lining is the kitten my sister had foisted on me. One of the cats that patrol her husband’s barns had a litter, and when I holed up in Marhill after I’d seen Percy in flagrante, the little ones had kept me company with energetic pounces and naps. Rose insisted I take one home.
So now I have a cat I never wanted, a too expensive apartment, and a job that requires an ungodly number of hours per week.
And that’s the third lesson I learned from my divorce. You don’t just lose your husband, or your marriage. You lose the entire life you’d built for yourself.
Sophia Browne no longer exists. And I’m not sure who Sophia Bishop is anymore.
She desperately wanted to become a New Yorker, that I know. I’d once had a poster of the skyline in my childhood bedroom and used to watch Sex and the City like it was an instruction manual. Moving here had been a dream. Percy had helped me fit in, showed me the ropes… I’d married a New York man and into a New York family. This was my home.
But now I’m not sure who I am anymore.
The first task on my to-do-list is to work. I’ve always loved it. Percy often complained, in his characteristic voice that turned just a little petulant when he didn’t get his way, that I worked more than I should. That he’d offered to take care of me, time and time again, if I chose to stay at home.
I’d remind him that he’d always said he liked my ambition. He would then relent and nod and say that, of course, he did.
But I wonder how much of that had been true.
I take my usual walking route to work. Exciteur has its offices in a tall skyscraper a comfortable distance from my new apartment. I stop at my usual bench in the little greenery nearby, where most junior Exciteur employees eat their lunch during the warmer months, and switch from my ergonomic sneakers to a pair of low-heeled slingbacks. Then I undo the protective braid I keep my hair in during my walks. Nothing ruins blow-dried hair like the wind, and that’s a lesson I learned long before my divorce.
I’ve got my morning routine down to a science.
I grab a coffee from the cart outside of work and head up to my floor.
Exciteur is a huge consulting firm.
Actually, huge might be too mild of a word. Colossal. Global. I have more coworkers across the globe than the small town I grew up in has inhabitants.
Let’s just say the reply all button in emails has been permanently disabled.
Jenna is already at her desk. Her sleek, black hair is pulled back in a severe ponytail. It’s her killer look, one she often wears to meetings with important clients.
“You made it in before me,” I say.
She shoots me a look over her shoulder, eyes sparkling. “There’s an almond croissant on your desk.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did,” she says.
“I’ll get in here before you next week. Do you want your muffin with blueberry or chocolate?”
“Sure you will,” she says. Jenna lives across the city but has, for some reason, decided to start biking to work. She arrives earlier than anyone so she can use the Exciteur gym showers. “But just in case you actually do… chocolate all the way.”
I head into my office to grab the croissant waiting for me. It’s a big day for my team. She knows it, ponytail and all, and so do I.
Then I head back out to her desk. “Are you going over our notes?”
“Sure am.” For all our teasing, Jenna has the sharpest mind. She’s my right hand and the third-in-command in my business development team at Exciteur Consulting.
And she’s doing all of it while studying part-time for her MBA. For someone who started just six months ago, she’s doing incredibly well.
I take a sip of my coffee. “This project hit us fast.”
“It did,” she says. “Do you know if we’re going up against another consulting firm for it?”
I shake my head. “Not that I’ve heard. Apparently there’s a family connection, or some sort of friendship, with Victor St. Clair.”
“Ah,” Jenna says. Our CEO at Exciteur prefers to be heard and not seen, hands-off but omnipresent. But he sure is well-connected, and he expects the best. Always, and with no exceptions. His response has been… severe, in the past, when teams failed to deliver.
“Yes,” I say. “That means we need to nail this meeting.”
She nods, face settling deep into thought. Jenna is second-generation Vietnamese, positive to a fault, and loves dressing in lemon-yellow blouses. I’ve never worked better with anyone than I have with her. “Toby is coming with us today?” she asks.
I nod. “I want you two to be my support on this project. We’ll see what the client says today, but… this could be major.”
“Major,” she repeats, and turns back to her computer. With a few quick clicks she’s pulled up the hotel’s website.
Our potential new client.
The Winter Corporation.
It’s the single biggest client I’ve ever been assigned to run point for on a project, and yet I can’t quite look at the name without remembering.
The Winter Hotel, my own private salvation and my own private hell, all in one. The place I learned the truth after months of suspecting, of questioning Percy’s unusually late nights and wandering eyes.
“Is the attendee list up to date?” she asks, and pulls up our internal briefing for this meeting.
We have names and pictures of everyone attending from Winter. Background research is expected from consultants like us.
I need to make sure we walk into that meeting today and kill it… And I need it for so many different reasons.
“Yes,” I say, and narrow my eyes at the list of names… including the one at the very top. “They’ll all be there.”
A few hours later Toby, Jenna and I file into the taxi ready to take us to the imposing stone structure that is the Winter Hotel. It’s an institution in the city, one of the first great hotels, filled with history that dates back to the Gilded Age.
As old and storied as the family itself. Although Percy’s parents consider themselves firmly enmeshed in the world of the Upper East Side, the Brownes’ place is nothing compared to the Winters. They’re woven into the fabric of society itself. Hell, they probably wove it themselves.
I knot my hands tightly together and look out the taxi window, away from Jenna and Toby’s pre-game warm up. Nerves rise up like hummingbirds inside my chest.
It had taken me a while to figure out who, exactly, had helped me that fateful evening at the Winter Hotel.
He wasn’t a receptionist or a cleaner or a security guard. Not that he’d looked like any of those. He’d had eyes too sharp, a bearing too straight, and a suit far too expensive. There’d been something faintly familiar about him, too, with a face I could have sworn I’d seen before in a crowd.
But I’d just had my world destroyed, and the details had faded, mixed with the emotional whirlpool of that night and all the screaming conversations that followed with Percy.
So I’d almost forgotten about the man who lent me a tissue until the Winter project landed in my newly promoted lap at Exciteur two weeks ago.
The client is a special friend of the CEO. Give it everything you have, and make it fast.
So I’d done that, and it had involved a fair amount of research about the Winters, both the institution and the family that still owns and manages the century-old hotel chain.
It’s one of the few companies that has gotten stronger, and not weaker, under the stewardship of the third and fourth generations.
It took me three minutes into my research to find the name and picture of the current owner and manager of the Winter Corporation. His face had stared back at me from a professional photograph, taken at the foot of the stairs in the Winter Hotel lobby, his dark hair brushed back and eyes looking into the camera like he’s telling the photographer to hurry up.
It was the man from the lobby who I’d so embarrassingly overshared to, who had gotten me a cab and given me a tissue.
I’d been a hairsbreadth away from passing on the project. But I’d just been promoted, and my apartment still felt too big and too lonely to return to in the evenings. So I’d taken the Winter job and decided I’ll just swallow my pride when the time came.
Only that time is now, and my pride doesn’t taste so good going down.
The taxi pulls into a smooth stop outside the Winter Hotel. The main operations remain in the building itself, on a floor dedicated to office space. It speaks to the type of business this is. Old, family-oriented, and a little in love with its own legacy.
Stone columns flank the gilded entrance. Doormen wear a uniform, familiar to me after visits to this hotel with Percy and his parents. They loved to dine at one of its restaurants… and their son loved to meet his mistress here. It was a one-stop-shop for all Browne appetites.
“We got this,” Jenna murmurs between me and Toby. “Break a leg, Soph.”
“Lunch is on me after this.”
“Thai?” Toby says.
“Yes please,” Jenna chimes in.
We walk toward the main staircase, past the spot where I’d accidentally blabbed my heart out to Isaac Winter, CEO and one of the most influential people in New York.
“Sure,” I say. “Let’s have a glass of wine with it, too.”
I don’t look at the spot where I’d made a fool of myself. I don’t look toward the emergency staircase either.
You’re in control, Sophia.
“Just through here,” an associate in a formal uniform says, and uses her keycard to access the staff door. We’re escorted down a hallway. Into a conference room. And there, waiting for us, are the five people who make up the Winter Corporation’s executive team. I know all of them by name and position.
And at its helm sits the man himself. Isaac Winter.
Staring right at me.
