At one point she laughed at something Laya said and then looked briefly startled by the sound the way you do when you hear your own voice on a recording. What she saw in my house mattered more than anything either of us said. She had come in expecting, I think, some evidence of struggle because that is the story people tell themselves about men who leave money behind. A cramped place, something patched. Instead, she found a small, warm, entirely adequate house paid off in 11 years with good knives in the drawer and a bad couch nobody intended to replace and a 9-year-old who did not want for a single thing that mattered.
I was not poor. I was not scraping. I was simply finished wanting more than this. And she had never in her life met somebody who was finished wanting. I walked her out around 9:00 and neither of us said anything for a while on the front steps.
It was cold enough to see our breath. She said that she had spent the last 4 months trying to figure out what I wanted from her and that the answer appeared to be nothing and that she found nothing much harder to negotiate with than a number. I told her that was not quite true, that there was something, but that it was not on any term sheet. She asked what it was. I said, "Good night." She smiled and got into the car she had called back and I stood there like a man who had just made a mistake he could not name.
Across the street in a gray sedan that had been parked for 3 hours with nobody in the driver's seat, visible from my window, a man with a long lens took 11 photographs. Vivien Sterling on the steps of a subcontractor's house at 9 in the evening. Vivien Sterling laughing. Vivien Sterling with her hand briefly on his forearm. Conrad Whitmore received the file the following afternoon and according to the timeline that came out later looked at it for less than a minute before forwarding it to a media consultancy on retainer.
He did not need the photographs to be scandalous. He needed them to be ambiguous. Viven found out about the photographs before they ran. She had her own sources and one of them was a reporter she had sed since her first initial public offering who called her out of professional courtesy and asked whether she had anything to say about images that would move in about 72 hours. She called me at 6:00 in the morning and asked me to come to the city.
And by 9, I was in her office watching her do the single most Viviian Sterling thing she ever did in my presence. She solved the problem. She solved it the way she solved every problem, which is to say she bought it. She had it prepared already. A letter of intent to acquire Avery Logistics outright at a valuation, somewhere near three times what any rational buyer would pay, which would have made me personally a wealthy man.