The Birthday He Gave Away

The restaurant was called Corvina, a small Italian place on the water in Bellhaven that took reservations six weeks out and never answered its phone before noon. I had been there exactly once, three years ago, when Daniel closed his first big client and wanted to celebrate. He had ordered the branzino and talked through the whole meal about the pitch deck. I remembered because I had paid. That night I wore the navy dress with the slit, the one that cost more than my first car had been worth. I had bought it two weeks earlier with a specific image in mind: Daniel on one knee, the ring he had been hiding in his sock drawer since March, the whole dining room clapping. I had rehearsed my face. I wanted to look surprised in a gracious way, not a greedy way. He had said, "Wear something nice. I have a surprise." I got there at seven. The hostess led me to a table by the window, the best one in the room, with a view of the harbor and the ferry lights coming on across the water. Two glasses of champagne were already poured. One chair was empty. Then I saw her. Margot was sitting in my chair. She had her back to the window and her hands folded on the table like a woman who had been waiting a long time and did not mind. She was wearing cream, the color I had told Daniel I hated on anyone but myself, and her hair was shorter than it had been when I last saw her, four years ago, at a funeral neither of us had wanted to attend. She looked up and smiled the way she used to, before. "Cass," she said. "Happy birthday." I did not move. I was still holding the strap of my bag, still standing in the middle of the room with the hostess hovering behind me, and I could feel the eyes of the bar crowd sliding over me, the woman in the expensive dress who had clearly come to the wrong table. "You're in my seat," I said. "I know." She tilted her head. "Sit down, though. You're making a scene." Daniel came back from the bar with a bottle of wine. He saw me and his face did something small and complicated, a flinch he covered with a smile, and then he set the bottle on the table and pulled out the chair beside Margot. Not mine. Hers. "You're early," he said. "Two minutes." "Right." He sat down. He did not pull out my chair. He did not look at the dress. "So. Surprise." I looked at Margot. She had a bouquet on the table in front of her, white roses and something green, wrapped in paper. It was the bouquet I had described to him in April, at a wedding we went to, when I said if he ever did it, I wanted white roses and the small ones that smell like licorice, and he had nodded and asked me to pass the salt. "That's my bouquet," I said. Margot picked it up. She held it out to Daniel. He took it from her without looking at me and set it on the windowsill, out of my reach, and then he reached for the plate the waiter had just set down and slid it across the table to her. Shrimp. Peeled. A whole plate of them, arranged in a spiral, tails off, the way I did not eat them because I hated the smell on my fingers. The way she had always eaten them, when we were twenty-three and broke and she would peel a pound at a time and feed them to me one by one while we watched bad TV. "I remembered," Daniel said to her. "You said you never get them peeled." "You're sweet," she said. I stood there. I want to say I said something cutting. I want to say I turned and walked out and left them to their wine and their shrimp and their bouquet, and that would have been clean. Instead I sat down in the chair across from them, the third chair, the one for the person who is not part of the couple, and I stayed for an hour. I do not know why. Maybe I wanted to see how far it went. Maybe I wanted to make them say it out loud. Maybe I thought if I sat there long enough, one of them would have the decency to feel bad, and I would get to watch. Nobody felt bad. Margot talked about her new apartment in the old Rogers building downtown. She talked about her job at Morrow & Kessler, the architecture firm that had beaten us on the harbor front project last fall. She talked about the trip she and Daniel had taken to the coast in June, the weekend I had spent in the office finishing the Delaney merger, the weekend he had told me he was visiting his mother. "We didn't want to hurt you," she said, near the end, when the plates were cleared and the candles had burned low. "That's why we waited." "Waited for what?" "For you to be in a good place," Daniel said. "You've been so stressed. We didn't want to pile on." I looked at him. Four years. I had moved into his apartment when his rent went up and mine was cheap. I had paid for his mother's knee surgery when the insurance balked. I had built the company, Kestrel Group, from a folding table in a rented room to forty employees and a lease on the top floor of the Hollis Building, and I had given him a job when he got laid off, and a title, and a salary, and I had never once made him feel small about it. I had bent over backwards to make him feel like a partner. "Pile on," I said. "You brought my best friend to my birthday dinner and gave her my flowers." "Former," Margot said. "What?" "Former best friend." She smiled. "You ended it, remember. You said you never wanted to see me again." I had said that. Four years ago, at her father's wake, after she told me she had slept with the man I was engaged to. I had said it in the parking lot of a funeral home with my shoes in my hand, and I had meant it, and I had not spoken to her since. Now she was across a table from me, eating shrimp my boyfriend had peeled, and I understood that she had never really left. She had just been waiting. "Why?" I asked. I was not asking why they did it. I was asking why now. Daniel looked at Margot. She looked at him. It was a whole conversation, silent, and I was not in it. "Because Kestrel is about to close the Brennan deal," Margot said. "And we thought you should know before the board does." "How do you know about the Brennan deal?" "I've been advising them." She said it lightly, like it was nothing. "For six months. Since the term sheet." The room tilted a little. The Brennan deal was the thing I had been living for since January, the reason I had missed my sister's birthday, the reason I had canceled the trip to Portugal, the reason I had fallen asleep at my desk more nights than I could count. It was going to take Kestrel from a company that mattered in Bellhaven to a company that mattered on the coast. It was mine. I had built it line by line, from a cold pitch to a signed letter of intent, and I had told Daniel everything about it, every night, every detail, because I thought we were building a life. "You went to my company," I said. "I went to the board," she said. "There's a difference." "Who brought you in?" She did not answer. Daniel did. "I did," he said. "Margot knows this space. She's good. You said so yourself, back in the day." I stared at him. Back in the day. Before the funeral. Before the man and the parking lot. He had known all of it. He had held me while I cried about it. And now he was sitting at a table on my birthday, feeding her shrimp, explaining to me that he had hired the woman who had ruined my life because I had once said she was good at her job. "I want the paperwork," I said. "What paperwork?" "Whatever you two have been building for six months. The advisory agreement. The board communications. I want it on my desk by Monday." Margot laughed. It was a real laugh, not a cruel one, which was worse. "Cass, you're not on the board." "I own sixty percent of the company." "You own sixty percent of the equity," she said. "The board is separate. And the board voted last week." "On what?" "On a restructuring," Daniel said. "It's nothing personal." I stood up. My hands were shaking and I did not want them to see, so I picked up my bag and held the strap with both hands and stood very still. "You had a board vote," I said. "On a restructuring. Last week." "Yes." "Without telling me." "You were in Delaney," he said. "We didn't want to interrupt." I walked out. The hostess said something to me on the way, a question about my coat, and I did not answer. I went out into the parking lot and stood by my car for a long time with the harbor wind coming off the water, cold for October, and I did not cry, because I had promised myself after the funeral that I was done crying in parking lots. I drove home. His apartment. Our apartment, technically, since I had moved in, though he had never put me on the lease. I sat in the car in the garage for twenty minutes with the engine off, going over it, and by the time I went upstairs I had made a list in my head. First, I needed to know what the restructuring was. Second, I needed to know who on the board had voted for it. Third, I needed to know why. I did not sleep that night. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and pulled every document I could access from home and made a second list, and by dawn I had the shape of it, though not the details. Daniel had taken a meeting with three of the five board members in September. Margot had been at two of them. The restructuring was a management change, which meant me, and a new advisory agreement, which meant her, and a new CFO seat, which meant Daniel. He was getting my company as a birthday present. I put on the coffee and watched the sun come up over the parking lot and decided what I was going to do. I was not going to cry. I was not going to scream. I was not going to post anything or call anyone or throw the vase he had bought me at the wall. I was going to take it back. Not the dinner. Not the man. The company. And I was going to do it the way I had built it in the first place, quietly, and in order, and with the receipts. The first call I made was to a lawyer. Her name was Priya Raman, and I had used her once before, years ago, when I fired my first employee and needed someone to make sure I did it right. She answered on the second ring, at six forty in the morning, and she did not sound surprised to hear from me. "Cass," she said. "I was wondering when you'd call." "Why were you wondering?" "Because I got a copy of the board minutes on Thursday," she said, "and I have been sitting here ever since trying to decide if I was allowed to call you first." I leaned against the counter and looked out at the gray morning and felt something in my chest go quiet, the way it does before a race, when the g*n has not gone off yet but you know it is coming. "Tell me everything," I said. "Not on the phone," she said. "Come to the office. Bring the coffee." "I'll be there in thirty minutes." "Make it twenty," she said. "There's more than one thing I need to tell you, and I don't think you're going to like any of it." I hung up and put on a jacket and did not look at the bedroom door, where Daniel was still asleep, and I did not take the stairs I usually took, the ones that creaked, because I did not want him to wake up and ask me where I was going, and I did not want to have to lie. Outside the air was cold and clean and the harbor was full of light. I got in the car and started the engine and sat for a second with my hands on the wheel. Thirty-two years old, on the morning after my birthday, with a company I had built and a man I had loved and a friend I had buried, and a list in my head that was getting longer by the minute. I put the car in gear. I had a meeting at seven, and I was not going to be late.