She left a single voicemail for her chief of staff. Marcus not that Marcus her Marcus would come later telling him she would be unreachable for the weekend that all non-emergency decisions could wait that if something was truly on fire to call the COO. Then she went down to the parking garage, bypassed her Gwagon and her Tesla, and found what she was looking for near the back of the level, a 2009 Honda Accord. She it kept for reasons she couldn't entirely explain. An old car, unassuming silver, the kind of car that appears on a highway.
She threw the duffel in the back. She pulled out of the garage at 11:40p. M. She drove south. The idea had come to her in pieces over the previous month.
Assembling itself slowly the way that desperate ideas do. When the mind keeps circling back to a question, it can't answer through logic or strategy. The question was simple. Does anyone see me? Not Victoria Hail, the CEO.
Me. She couldn't answer that within her own life. Her life was too built, too fortified. Every person in it had context for who she was before they knew her as a person. Her friends, and she used that word generously, were industry colleagues, former classmates from Wharton, board members, spouses.
Every single relationship she had was threaded through with professional history and power dynamics. She needed to start from zero. She needed to be nobody. She'd been through central Georgia a few times for work plant visits, a manufacturing partnership she'd brokered 3 years ago. She remembered it being the kind of place where people still waved at strangers from their front porches, where the speed limit was 40 and people actually kept to it, where the world moved at a pace that felt almost foreign to her.
She'd reserved a room at a small bed and breakfast under a false name Sarah Wells and paid in cash she'd gotten from an ATM 2 days before to avoid any digital trail. That part she was almost proud of. That part felt like the beginning of something. What she had not told herself clearly because she hadn't been ready to say it out loud was the other part of the plan. The car the old Honda ran fine.
Victoria knew that. She'd had it serviced 2 months ago. But at some point, maybe 20 m outside of the town of Mil Haven, Georgia, she was going to pull that car to the side of the road. She was going to pop the hood and she was going to wait. She told herself it wasn't pathetic.
She told herself she'd read enough behavioral research to know that vulnerability was the fastest route to authentic human connection. She'd underlined that in a book once. She believed in data. She told herself a lot of things. She stopped for gas at a station just past midnight somewhere in middle Georgia.
Fluorescent lights humming, bugs circling the bulbs. A teenage boy working the register who looked up from his phone long enough to nod at her. She paid cash, got a bottle of water and a pack of peanut butter crackers that she ate in the parking lot leaning against her car because she'd left the gala before the dinner service and hadn't eaten since noon. She stood there in the thick Georgia night in the dress she'd had on at the Saint Regis 4 hours ago, her heels traded for the old sniss she'd grabbed from the bottom of her closet. Eating crackers under a gas station light, she thought, "This is what's become of you. " And then she thought, "No, this is what you're trying to become.
There was a difference. " She was holding on to that. She got back in the car and kept driving. The sun was beginning to suggest itself at the edge of the sky, not rising yet, just hinting when Victoria turned onto a county road about 6 milesi outside Mil Haven. Two lanes, trees on both sides growing close enough that the branches formed a canopy overhead. The kind of road where the asphalt was old and patched, and you drove it slow because you never quite knew what was around the next curve.
She pulled off onto the gravel shoulder. She cut the engine. She sat there for a moment. And the silence was the kind of silence she had forgotten existed. The kind kind that wasn't just an absence of noise, but a presence of something else.
Crickets, a distant bird, the ticking of the cooling engine. She got out of the car. She lifted the hood. She propped it up with the rod. She stood back and looked at the perfectly functioning engine of her perfectly functional car and felt the full weight of what she was doing.
"Okay," she said out loud to no one. "Okay," she didn't have to wait long. 20 minutes, maybe. She'd sat on the front bumper and watched the sky shift from gray to pale gold. And she'd thought about absolutely nothing, which was something she almost never allowed herself to do.
And it had been both peaceful and terrifying. She heard the truck before she saw it. A low rumble diesel engine, something older. It came around the curve behind her. And before she'd even looked up, whoever was driving had seen the raised hood and started breaking automatically.
The way you do when you've been raised to stop for people who need help. The truck pulled up behind her. Dark blue. Maybe once faded now. Work truck.
The kind with toolboxes in the bed and mud on the side panels. The driver's side door opened. He was tall. That was the first thing she registered. Then the rest of him, broad shoulders, work boots, a gray t-shirt with a faded logo across the chest.