Didn't say goodbye to anyone, handed her valet ticket to a young man who called her ma'am, and stood alone on the sidewalk waiting for her car. Her phone buzzed six times in her purse before she turned it face down. She drove home through the lights of Atlanta, and the city was beautiful in the way that expensive things are always beautiful, polished, and bright, and utterly indifferent to the person looking at it. Her apartment was on the 32nd floor, floor to sailing windows. Custom kitchen she almost never cooked in a master bedroom that slept one.
She walked in, dropped her keys on the marble island, stood in the silence. She had a meeting at 7 the next morning. A pitch call from London at noon. A performance review for her VP of operations at 3. Her calendar was a fortress built to keep her busy so she didn't have to think about how quiet the fortress was after 6 p.
M. She sat down on the edge of her bed and stared at the opposite wall. Nobody gets close to Victoria Hail. She thought about her mother, about the way her mother used to take her hands and hold them both hands. Even when Victoria was in her 30s, even when Victoria was trying to talk about quarterly earnings, and her mother was trying to talk about whether Victoria was happy, her mother was the last person who had looked at her, really looked at her without wanting something in return.
Her mother had been gone 3 years. Victoria sat on the edge of that bed for a very long time. Then she stood up, went to her closet, and pulled out a duffel bag. She did not overthink it. That was the other rule she lived by.
When you know you move, she didn't tell anyone where she was going. That alone was extraordinary. Victoria Hail had a chief of staff, two executive assistants, a personal security consultant, and a driver. Her whereabouts on any given day were tracked, scheduled, and logged. There were people whose entire jobs revolved around knowing where she was.
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.