More like a provisional acknowledgement that he existed and was apparently speaking to her. Everyone left. She said. It was not a complaint. It was a statement of fact delivered with the flat affect of someone who has processed this information and reached a conclusion about what it means. I’m still here, Ethan said.
Are you all right to drive? She looked at the keys. She looked at her car, which was parked approximately 30 feet away. She performed what appeared to be an honest internal assessment of her current capabilities.
And then she looked back at him with something that might, in other circumstances, have resembled honesty. No, she said, probably not. He offered to call her a car. She shook her head slowly and said she didn’t want anyone else involved.
He thought about this for a moment and then made the decision that, in retrospect, was the one that changed everything. He said he would drive her home. She looked at him for a long moment, long enough that he thought she was going to refuse, which would have been the simpler outcome, and then she picked up her keys and held them out to him without saying anything. The drive to Victoria’s house took 22 minutes.
For the first 10, she sat in the passenger seat with her head resting against the glass, eyes open but not really looking at anything, and the silence between them was the particular silence of two people who are not comfortable with each other and have not yet determined what the appropriate form of discomfort is. Ethan kept his eyes on the road and said nothing because there was nothing obvious to say. He did not know her. She did not know him.
He was a maintenance worker driving his CEO home from a company party, a situation that had no established protocol and several obvious ways to go wrong. Then she spoke, not to him, exactly more in the way that people speak when the alcohol has lowered the barrier between their internal monologue and the outside world, and the words simply find their own way out. I failed, she said. $230 million. Four years of work.
And I failed. Ethan said nothing. The board thinks I’m losing my edge. She laughed, and it was a sound without much humor in it.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’ve been pretending so long I can’t tell anymore. Pretending what? he said, because the question presented itself before he could decide whether to ask it.