One bed between enemies

Declan Ashford

The problem with the Hargrove Group’s proposal was not that it was bad.

It was that it was almost good, which was significantly worse.

Declan Ashford had read it twice on the car ride over, flagged eleven pages, and arrived in the forty-second-floor conference room three minutes before the meeting was scheduled to begin. He did not pour coffee. He did not make small talk with the three Hargrove representatives already seated on the other side of the table, who had the wide-eyed, slightly rigid quality of people who had prepared very thoroughly for an encounter they were now realizing they had not prepared for at all.

He sat down. He placed his copy of the proposal on the table. He looked at the man across from him; David Hargrove Jr., forty-four, the kind of handsome that had probably gotten him further than his actual competence for most of his life and said: “Page twelve. The liability clause.”

David Jr. reached for his own copy. “Of course, we’d be happy to walk you through...”

“You’ve drafted a clause that protects your firm in the event of a market-driven devaluation but provides no corresponding protection for Ashford Group in the same scenario. Page seventeen compounds this by tying our exit terms to a performance benchmark that your team sets unilaterally.” He turned two pages. “Page twenty-three, the indemnification language is lifted almost verbatim from a 2019 agreement that was litigated in the Southern District and found partially unenforceable. I’d recommend your counsel look that up before we continue.”

The room was very quiet.

From the corner, Renata Voss watched with the expression of someone watching a very familiar film. She’d been Declan’s COO for thirteen years. She had been in this room, in different rooms, in rooms on four continents, watching him do this. She was not bored. You didn’t get bored watching precision. You just got used to it.

The Hargrove team spent the next forty minutes revising their own proposal in real time, which was not typically how these meetings went. Declan was not unkind. He was simply exact, and exactness had a way of making people feel very aware of every corner they’d cut.

By the time they left, they had agreed to renegotiate three of the eleven flagged points before resubmitting. David Jr. shook Declan’s hand with the expression of a man who had just survived something and wasn’t entirely sure how.

The room emptied. Renata stayed.

She poured herself the coffee she hadn’t poured during the meeting and sat in the chair across from him. “Liam’s anniversary is Saturday,” she said.

She did not say: are you all right. She had learned, a long time ago, that asking Declan Ashford if he was all right was a question that produced very accurate and entirely useless answers. He was always ‘fine.’ He was frequently not fine. The two things coexisted in him without apparent contradiction.

“I know,” he said.

A beat. She drank her coffee. He looked at the proposal on the table without reading it.

“There’s a gala Saturday evening,” she said. “The Whitfield Foundation. You were invited.”

“No.”

“Declan.”

“I said no, Renata.” He straightened the pages of the proposal into a neat stack. “I won’t be going to the gala.”

She looked at him over her coffee cup. “Then where?”

A pause. “The Westgate.”

She knew better than to follow that thread. She always knew better. It was one of the reasons she’d stayed thirteen years. “Your new EA starts Monday,” she said instead, a gentle redirect. “Colleen leaves Friday.”

“I know.”

“Have you reviewed the file?”

He hadn’t. He’d signed off on the agency arrangement three weeks ago and hadn’t thought about it since. The agency was vetted; the contract was standard; he had other things to manage. “The agency cleared her,” he said.

Renata set down her coffee. She had a particular look, not disapproving, not quite, that she deployed when she felt a situation warranted more attention than it was receiving. She deployed it now. “Mm,” she said.

He looked up. “What?”

“Nothing.” She stood, picked up her coffee. “I’ll see you Monday.”

He watched her go and had the specific experience, not for the first time, of feeling that Renata Voss operated on information he didn’t have access to. It was an unsettling quality in a COO. It was one of the things that made her exceptional.

His apartment occupied the top floor of a building on Central Park West that had been designed by an architect whose other notable work included three museums and a bridge. The views were extraordinary. The rooms were large, precisely organized, and almost completely silent.

He’d bought it six years ago, six weeks after Liam died, when it had become clear that his previous apartment was full of his brother in ways he hadn’t anticipated, Liam’s coffee cup still in the cabinet, a jacket on the hook by the door, a scrawled note on the counter about a restaurant they’d been meaning to try. He’d bought the new place and had it professionally staged and then mostly left it that way. Functional. Impersonal. His.

He changed out of the meeting suit and into something marginally less architectural. He stood at the window for a while and looked at the park going dark in the October evening and thought about the proposal, and then stopped thinking about the proposal because that was easy, that was the kind of thinking he was very good at. He was less good at the other kind.

He thought about Liam instead, which he tried not to do with any regularity because it had a way of settling on him like weather and making everything slightly harder to navigate. Liam, who had been four years younger and somehow more alive in every room he entered, who had talked Declan into the sailing trip he would never forget by saying: ‘Come on. When’s the last time you did something just because it might be good?’

He hadn’t had a good answer. He still didn’t.

The Westgate was twelve blocks south. Liam had discovered it in his late twenties — the bar on the ground floor, low-lit and unhurried, the kind of place that didn’t rush you. He’d dragged Declan there at least a dozen times over three years. On the third anniversary of the accident, Declan had gone alone, sat at the end of the bar, and ordered the scotch Liam always ordered for him. Balvenie 21. Liam had called it the kind of drink that deserved a better occasion. Declan had thought: this is the occasion. This is what I have.

He went back every year.

He put on his jacket. Took the elevator down. Walked south through the October dark with his hands in his pockets and the city moving around him with its usual complete indifference to anything as small as one person’s grief. He had always found this either comforting or appropriate. Tonight he couldn’t decide which.

The Westgate’s doorman held the door. The lobby was warm, amber-lit, the particular hush of a hotel that had decided its clientele deserved quiet. He walked through to the bar.

He sat at the far end. Cesar was on tonight, which meant the drink appeared without conversation, which was exactly what he wanted.

“Mr. Ashford,” Cesar said, placing the glass.

Declan nodded. He wrapped his hand around the glass and looked at the room and thought about nothing, which was the only thing that didn’t hurt, and the night settled around him like something he had learned to wear.

★ ★ ★