They had not. He told Natalie he thought they should stop seeing each other. He said it standing in her office, which he had come to in the early evening after the building had mostly emptied. And he said it plainly without building up to it or softening the edges. It's not working, he said.
Not because of us, because of what it does to the people around us. Lily shouldn't be explaining my life to her friends at school. My guys shouldn't be losing hours because clients think they're getting charity work. Natalie looked at him steadily across her desk. So, you're going to let Grant Holloway decide this for you?
She said, "That's not what that is exactly what that is." She said, "A man who has been trying to get leverage over this company for 2 years finally found a pressure point, and your response is to hand it to him. My response is to protect my daughter and my employees by disappearing, which tells every person watching that they were right about you." He stood very still. Ethan. She came around the desk and stood in front of him. If you walk away from this because other people don't understand it, you're not protecting anything.
You're just letting them win without a fight. And if I stay, he said, what exactly are we fighting for? Because you have a company to protect and I have a business I'm barely holding together. And the math on this doesn't get easier. No, she said it doesn't.
She did not reach for a solution. She did not tell him it would be all right. It was one of the things he had come to recognize about her. She did not decorate difficult things with easier language. But I'd like to find out, she said, if you're willing.
He left without answering. 3 Days later, Natalie's director of acquisitions flagged a listing. The industrial block in SoMa, where Ethan rented his workshop, had been placed on the market by its owner, who had taken an offer from a development group. The current tenants had 30 days before the new ownership took possession and would make their own decisions about lease continuations. She read the listing twice.
Then, she called the head of Orleans real estate subsidiary and told her to make an offer on the building, to keep the acquisition entity off Orleans's primary ledger, to make it clean. She told herself she was not interfering in his business. She was simply ensuring that a piece of commercial real estate he happened to occupy did not change hands to someone who might not honor existing leases. She would keep the rent at the current rate. He would never know the building had new ownership unless he asked and he had no particular reason to ask.
She signed the paperwork on a Thursday afternoon and moved on to the next item in her calendar. He found out on a Friday. She never fully understood how her best guess was a property record search his accountant had run as part of the lease paperwork. But by the time she arrived at the workshop that evening, he was standing in the middle of the floor with his keys in his hand, and the look on his face was one she had not seen before and did not want to see again. He set the keys on the workbench.