But at the same time, she knew she could never just stop caring about her kids, no matter what. She was determined to focus on what was in front of her, even if it was a struggle. Focus, she told herself. On your family. On what matters.
She could hear him talking. She waited a moment, couldn’t make out what he was saying, then knocked. She waited, then knocked again, harder. She heard him say, “Oh, shit.” Finally he opened the door.
“Yeah?”
He stood there, headphones around his neck, a look on his face somewhere between ashamed and defiant.
“What happened to SAT class?”
“It’s bullshit.”
“Excellent sheep, I got it.” She paused. “You don’t think the class is helping?” she said, as reasonably as she could. “It’s supposed to be the best prep class you can take.”
“I’m talking about the SAT. It’s a scam. It doesn’t predict how well you’ll do in college. It just measures how good you are at taking the SAT!” He appeared to be primed for an argument, but she didn’t want to give it to him.
Juliana sighed. “Okay,” she said. “Do your homework. Your dad and I have to talk.”
She closed the door and headed downstairs. She wanted to tell Duncan about what had happened earlier, the intruder at the courthouse, but of course she couldn’t. That would involve telling him about Chicago, and that was out of the question.
He was downstairs watching Game of Thrones. Everyone in the world had seen it, it seemed, except her. She had no interest. He was sparing her.
When he saw her, he paused the show — someone was being decapitated — and looked up. “You talk to him yet?”
“Just did, a little. Honey, what are we going to do?”
“Like I said, we can’t force him to take the course.”
“So we just let him blow off the SATs?”
“If that’s what he wants to do...” He shrugged.
She came over to the couch and sat next to him. “Did you see that e-mail from Mr. Wertheim?”
He nodded. Mr. Wertheim was Jake’s despised math teacher. “He flunked the big test.”
“It’s the damned marijuana.”
“He’s just rebelling.”
“Against us?”
“Against Mr. Wertheim, against high school, college, the whole thing. It’s a goddamned pressure cooker.”
She shook her head, heaved a sigh. “Excellent sheep.”
“Exactly.”
“It feels like he’s just throwing away his chance to go to a good school.”
“He’ll get in somewhere. Some place that’s right for him, where he belongs. With other kids who don’t believe that perfect SAT scores are the holy grail. Maybe he’s enjoying life. It’s like Baba Ram Dass said — ‘Be here now.’”
She gave a tight smile. “He can be here now as soon as he gets into college.”
Be here now. That had a double meaning, didn’t it? That was what it meant to keep living. You might know there was an asteroid hurtling toward your neighborhood. That didn’t mean you didn’t have to floss. Maybe the asteroid would veer off course. Maybe it wouldn’t. Life was about handling different threats on different scales. She remembered how scared her mother had been after receiving her breast-cancer diagnosis. But an hour later, Rosalind was on the phone with the carpet-and-tile shop, pestering them about a delivery date.
“He’s almost an adult,” Duncan said. “In some societies, he is an adult. We can’t control him. Maybe you can control what happens in your courtroom, what happens in your life, but we can’t control him.”
Control? she thought. Her life had spun out of control and all because of that night in Chicago. And that second drink. One slip, she thought. One mistake. Nobody got points for walking a tightrope with a little detour into thin air.
Maybe he was right; maybe she was trying to control Jake because she couldn’t control what was happening to her and she didn’t know what to do about it.
“You okay, Jules?” Duncan said. “You seem really distracted. Anything wrong?”
“Me? No, I’m fine. Just... worried about Jakie.” She stood up. “Okay, I have some reading to do. Enjoy the decapitation.”
23
While Duncan was downstairs watching TV, Juliana went to the bedroom to read more of the Wheelz chats. She’d closed the door so she couldn’t hear the TV. She needed to be in her own head.
She had a pile of the documents on her lap, and at first she just skimmed through the chats, dipping in here and there in no particular order. But soon she found herself in the zone, focused, and she started reading them in chronological order. She was following Rachel Meyers’s short career at Wheelz.
She was surprised to see that barely two weeks or so after starting at Wheelz, Rachel was already in conversation with the CEO. Their first exchange began with an invitation by Allerdyce.
ALLERDYCE: rachel it’s devin a.
MEYERS: oh hi!
ALLERDYCE: settling in OK?
MEYERS: Yes, thanks!
ALLERDYCE: we’re different from most companies — don’t worry if it takes you a while to get up to speed
MEYERS: OK, good to know.
ALLERDYCE: i’m here to help, whatever you need. why don’t you come by my office sometime and we can talk about the carras lawsuit
MEYERS: sure
ALLERDYCE: come by at 5 today
MEYERS: great, see you at 5!
No surprise that the CEO wanted to talk with his new general counsel. But a couple of hours later Allerdyce contacted her again to change the plan.
ALLERDYCE: OK if we meet at madrigal at 7 instead?
MEYERS: OK, cool.
Madrigal was famous, the most expensive restaurant in Boston. Juliana had been there once and remembered their copper menus and the superpricey wine list. Madrigal was a major change in venue — from a meeting in his office to a meeting over dinner at an over-the-top restaurant. That altered the dynamic of the meeting quite a bit, and Rachel must have known it.
An hour later he messaged her to change the time.
ALLERDYCE: moved our rez to 8pm — busy till then
MEYERS: Fine, see you then.
The next exchange between Allerdyce and Rachel came the next morning. Clearly something had happened between the two of them, something awkward.
ALLERDYCE: hey sorry if we got our signals crossed
MEYERS: No problem.
ALLERDYCE: ok cool
Whatever had transpired between the two of them, it was never mentioned again, as far as she could see in the chats. “No problem,” she’d told him, after whatever had happened the night before. Words that would no doubt come back to haunt her if they went to trial. Though she probably had said “no problem” because she was talking to the CEO of the company, no matter how she really felt.
Then she found a chat between Rachel Meyers and someone in the company named Karen Heraty, who was probably a friend.
MEYERS: Devin hit on me again
HERATY: Another dinner at Madrigal?
MEYERS: No, we were at the 4 Seasons in Palo Alto last night — road trip to meet with Silver Lake and Elevation. he asked me to come to his room for a meeting and when i got there he was in his bathrobe!
HERATY:!!!!! what did you do???
MEYERS: told him I wasn’t comfortable meeting with him in that situation and left.
HERATY: this the 2d time he hit on you?