The Space Between (27 page)

“Ask her. She’ll tell you what she thinks. I think she’d be down for a nickname.” I gave the plans a quick study and glanced to Matt. “You’ve looked at this?” He nodded, and I thought about a permanent office for Andy. An office right next to mine.

So fucking
right
.

“Draft a budget,” I ordered, and Riley allowed himself a subtle fist pump. “Let me see it as soon as you have it.”

“What?” Shannon snapped. “We built existing offices around the original footprint when this was a house, and we didn’t want to fuck with that. And, shouldn’t we determine where Andy fits in after her apprenticeship before building office space?”

What the actual fuck? ‘Where Andy fits in?’ How was that even up for discussion?

Yelling at Shannon in Black Widow mode in the middle of a team meeting was a bad idea, and it always ended with a ball beating but I was ready to take those licks if she didn’t cut the shit. It seemed like she was intentionally goading me into a reaction.

“We need to keep Andy,” Matt said gravely. “Whatever it takes, she’s fucking gifted and GCs eat out of her palm. She can have my entire fucking office if she wants it.”

“Seconded,” Sam added. “The building integrity won’t suffer because we break up a few rooms.”

“No disagreement from me,” Shannon replied, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’ve always advocated for this. I was the one who insisted on hiring her, and I opened the door to keeping her on longer so Optimus could get some sleep at night. It’s obvious he isn’t, so that experiment failed.”

I stifled a laugh. If only she knew what was keeping me up these nights.

“I agree with all of you, but no one brought me in on any of this, so I apologize that I’m out of the loop.”

“I don’t think that’s accurate, Shannon,” Sam said, leaning back in his chair and circling his hand around the table. “I think we’ve discussed it in some fashion every week since January. Perhaps we haven’t articulated ‘Andy needs an office because we want her to be a permanent fixture’ but we’ve discussed her as a transformative member of our squad, and we’ve made it clear that if she can handle Optimus at his worst, she’s earned her stripes.”

Shannon clasped her hands in her lap and pursed her lips. I held my breath, waiting for the explosion. It was either an explosion or she stopped recognizing my existence.

“Okay, moving on. Cornell invited us to a special breakfast next week. Next Friday.” Shannon pulled up an email with the details. “The architecture school’s dean wants to personally thank us for Angus’s donation. I took the last meet and greet for Angus’s charitable giving at Brigham and Women’s. If I had to go to the vagina shop, someone else is doing this.”

“Well I’m out,” Riley said. “Last thing they need is RISD representing up in hill country.”

“I would have to believe they’d rather see Patrick,” Sam said, his attention fixed on straightening his cufflinks. “Fitting for the SMP, wouldn’t you say?”

While Andy was busy running the shit out of every project on deck, I was coming to terms with my new title as senior managing partner. My partners outvoted me on that measure, but I succeeded in elevating Shannon to managing partner and adjusting titles for Matt and Sam to reflect their respective specialties.

For me, the changes lived in legal paperwork and on our website, and though it didn’t imply anything new, it felt different to me. Theresa dropped three boxes of freshly printed business cards on my desk last week with a purposeful cluck. I immediately shoved them in my bottom drawer. Although I spent more than a decade at the helm, making it official required some adjustment. It was a reminder of everything that changed.

Shannon nodded and glanced at me. “I would agree. So Tom will book you at The Statler?”

“Fine,” I ground out, struggling to contain my irritation. We didn’t do this to each other. We figured out shit out before coming to these meetings.

“Awesome,” she chirped. “Now. Matty’s wedding is only a few weeks away, woohoo, and we need a plan for when he’s out of the office.”

“I got you, bro,” Riley said, dousing his pants with coffee as he attempted to slap Matt’s back. It was refreshing to see the spill in action. I was beginning to think he was buying his pants pre-stained. “I’m all over it.”

Matt started to speak but stopped, snatching Riley’s coffee as it teetered toward his keyboard. He met my gaze with a small shake of his head, and we knew there was no way in hell Riley was rubber-stamping anything structural. My irritation flared again. I glanced at Shannon, my eyes asking why she didn’t come to me with these issues first. Shrugging, she looked away and I added ‘deal with Shannon’s shit’ to my list for the day.

I tapped my coffee cup against the table, and said, “I need someone on engineering. Someone who understands physics.”

Looking up, I met Riley’s irritated grimace.

“Could be good for Andy,” Sam mused.

I inhaled sharply, immediately wondering whether we’d be able to keep up our daily rituals if she shifted gears for a few weeks. Spending a couple of nights in Ithaca was bad enough; the prospect of loaning Andy out to Matt’s office for three weeks was heinous.

Riley stopped blotting the coffee and scowled. “And where the fuck does that leave me? You don’t think it would be better for me to take over Matt’s projects since I know what they are and work on them every day?”

I needed to have a serious talk with Riley. In all fairness, that talk should have happened ten months ago when it became clear that his skills required extra levels of supervision. He was making progress, but I occasionally doubted he’d be able to manage anything independently.

“With me,” I replied. “I have a lot of design projects coming up, and I need your eye on those.”

Riley rolled his eyes, and with a lifted shoulder, the topic was dismissed.

“Look at us, on schedule and everything,” Shannon said with a glimpse at the clock on her screen. “I want everyone to know that Lauren’s shower is Saturday evening, and there are no boys allowed so I expect you all to keep Matt occupied.”

“Can I renew my objection to this?” Matt asked. “Lauren wants me there.”

Shannon crossed her arms over her chest and gazed at Matt. “That’s horseshit, and what part of ‘no boys allowed’ are you struggling with? Go drinking with these idiots, and have a big, bloody steak, and leave us girls alone for once!” She shook her head and slammed her notebook and phone on her closed laptop. “Christ on a crutch, Matthew. I’m leaving. Figure out your Saturday.”

Sam and Riley launched into a point-by-point comparison of the city’s best whiskey bars and steakhouses, and Matt rolled his chair away from the table to type a message on his phone. He smiled at the screen, replacing it with a tolerant grin when he returned to the table and offered his opinions on Grill 23, Abe & Louie’s, and Boston Chops.

I knew exactly what that look meant. He was going along with this obstacle course, and he’d probably have a stellar time with us on Saturday, but he would spend the evening counting the minutes until he could get home to Lauren. She would always be his first choice.

I knew all about that.

I told the boys to make the decision without me and moved ‘deal with Shannon’s shit’ to the top of my list for the day. I was prepared to breathe some fire. My legs ate up the two flights of stairs between the attic and Shannon’s office, and she waited a full ten seconds to look up from her documents after the door slammed behind me.

“What the fuck was that about, Shannon?”

She carefully peeled a sticky note from its decorative dispenser and marked a few notations before lowering the lid of her laptop and meeting my eyes. “I’m not sure what you’re referring to, Patrick.”

So that’s how we were going to play? Fantastic. Fucking fantastic.

“All right, Shan. I’ll break it down.” I deposited my laptop on her round conference table and approached her desk. “Your little list? We never bring up topics that we haven’t run through in advance, especially not big things like coverage for Matt. You need Riley losing his shit about as much as I do, and it was not the time to figure that out.”

“I’d be happy to do that, Patrick,” she replied with enough sweetness to rot teeth. “But that only works when we check in before meetings and you don’t bother to do that anymore. You don’t even talk to me unless I corner you in the stairwell.”

I winced, thinking about the stolen moments with Andy in the shower this morning and the assumption Shannon would have chased me down if there were something important to review before the meeting.

“And Andy? How is it not obvious that we need to keep her? Do you need a fucking billboard?”

“You know that I like her. Hell, Patrick, I go out for pedicures and drinks with her a couple times a month, and she’s one of Lauren’s best friends, and I think she’s awesome, but you don’t communicate with me anymore.” Shannon rolled her Starbucks cup between her palms and lifted a shoulder. “You’re in your own head, and you’re not talking to me, and I don’t know what else you want me to do.”

“So you decided to throw down in a team meeting? Is that the smartest thing you could come up with?”

“I’m sorry that meeting didn’t go the way you wanted but…I’ve tried to talk to you about these things for weeks, and you either ignore my texts, or tell me to schedule a meeting but there’s never time on your calendar, and you don’t want to meet for dinner anymore. What am I supposed to do? I know you’re having a hard time with this SMP thing—”

“It’s not the reorganization,” I murmured, and my control over the riot in my head faltered. I wanted to sprint upstairs to my office and convince Andy to bring our relationship into the light of day.

She’d probably beat the shit out of me with her Perspex ruler.

“Okay, I guess that’s good to know, but…what is going on? I thought we were doing well, Patrick. We finally have cash reserves to cover a few
years
of investment projects, and we haven’t worried about making payroll in ages. And do you know how it’s been since I’ve had to clean up a single Angus disaster? Five months, two weeks, and six days.”

My head was swimming with too many competing thoughts to keep still, and the idea of Andy wagging a ruler at me was more than a little arousing.

“Things are finally good, really good, but Patrick, how the fuck am I supposed to know that we’re creating a post-apprenticeship role for Andy if you don’t tell me? And yes, I know we’ve talked about how amazing she is, but you’re also a fucking ogre when it comes to her. If you hate working with her so much, maybe this isn’t the right firm for her. I was expecting you to come in here one of these days and tell me you needed her gone.”

That sucked the air right out of my chest. I gripped the ornate mantel to catch my breath. “This is the right firm for her.”

“Patrick. Talk to me. You look like you’re giving yourself a hernia. Please, whatever it is, just talk to me.”

I paced between the bank of windows facing a roof garden in bloom, and the windowed wall separating Shannon’s office from the bullpen where Tom and her support staff were staring at us. “Do something productive,” I yelled at them, and they snapped into action.

I was thankful Shannon had the sense to stop speaking while I wore the rug thin. I paced for at least ten minutes, repeatedly building and disassembling evasions as I walked, and constantly finding myself at impossible junctions. There was only one solution that prevented me from going to war with my business partner, best friend, and sister. That same solution would probably have Andy abandoning me in a bathroom somewhere, too.

But Shannon didn’t betray confidence. She never trafficked in rumors, she took trust seriously, and that unyielding bond made us good together. I pivoted to face Shannon. It was the only solution. It meant we could go back to being open and talking to each other, and we could get the house in order.

“If I tell you something, can you swear on your life that you’ll keep it between us?”

“Does this need to be an attorney-client privilege conversation? Is there a warrant out for your arrest? Who did you kill?”

“Don’t joke,” I warned. “This is serious, and yeah, consider yourself my attorney right now.”

“The fact you even have to ask if I’ll keep something between us, and then invoke privilege, makes me realize that something went down and it wasn’t good, and I need you to be honest so we can figure out a path forward. I won’t run a business with you if you can’t be upfront with me.”

I searched for my perfectly crafted speeches, but they were lodged in a sticky part of my mind and wouldn’t form on my tongue. I met Shannon’s concerned gaze, and as adrenaline borne from months of secrecy jolted my blood, the words tumbled out. “I’m in love with Andy.”

The rush of admitting my relationship with Andy throbbed in my veins, and it felt real. With that clandestine weight lifted from my shoulders, I allowed realness to wash over me until an infatuated grin replaced my fire-breathing snarl. It was then that my confession echoed in my head, and ‘in love’ started playing on an infinite loop. I loved her, and it was finally real.

“What?” Shannon screamed, her palms slapping against the desk when she surged to her feet. A flick of my wrist sent the audience back to their computers and phone calls. The glass was thick enough that they heard only raised voices. This kind of attention would draw my siblings in a few minutes, but nothing was wiping that smile off my face. “What! What? You’re
what
?”

“I’m. In love. With Andy,” I replied haltingly, the words feeling foreign as I repeated them. “Be quiet. Your minions are trying to listen.”

“Wow, that wasn’t even on the short list of what I was expecting,” Shannon panted, dropping into her desk chair. “I am experiencing this at a rate of several hundred what-the-fucks per minute.”

“Shannon,” I warned, realizing her disapproval could rock me to the core.

“Where do I even start? Did you not care that she’s your apprentice? I thought you didn’t like her. No offense, but is she in your league? Do you even talk or is it a lot of silent scowling at each other? And isn’t she a lot younger than you?”