The dim light didn't make it easy to read on the fine, high-quality paper that Bournham Industries was known for in its letterhead, but eventually Krysta’s eyes widened. Lydia could tell the second that Krysta read the salary.
“Holy fucking shit!” she screamed. “You’re going to make that much money?”
“Yup.”
“Do you guys need clerical support? Because I want to put in for a transfer if they pay that kind of money.” She looked at Lydia with a giant grin on her face. “And besides, it looks like I know the director of communications for European operations, don’t I?”
Krysta’s squee! would have given away their location to anyone who was searching for them, and they jumped up and down, embracing, as Lydia’s eyes filled with tears. This was real. Now that she’d talked to someone else about it, now that she’d shared the letter with Krysta—this was real.
“You’re going, right?” Krysta asked, pulling back suddenly as if realizing there was an option.
“Well…I…uh…” She said the words that would make it not just real, but true. “Yes. Yes.” Before she could equivocate she spat out the words. “Yes. I’m going. Absolutely. I don’t have anything holding me back.”
Matt, she told herself. Matt. What about Matt?
And then Krysta said the words aloud. “Yeah, it’s not like Matt’s, you know, anything serious or worth altering your career over.”
“No. No,” Lydia said, covering a swirl of emotions that she couldn’t even imagine trying to name right now. “He’s definitely not someone who has that kind of impact on my life. He certainly shouldn’t affect whether to take a mega-promotion like this.”
Krysta’s face softened, her hand on Lydia’s elbow. “It’s okay, Lydia. It’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling.” And then her eyes hardened and she leaned in, two inches from her face, their noses practically touching. “But no matter what you feel for him, you’re going.”
Mike knew that by now, Lydia had read the letter that went in the package from Human Resources. Joanie and HR had made swift work of his middle-of-the-night decision. He just hoped Lydia had a valid passport. If not, he could get her in to the Boston office tomorrow before the end of business with the Passport Agency for an expedited one. The sooner the better. Tripling her salary would make her the highest-paid employee in the European operations office. But, then again, that wouldn’t be too hard. There were only five employees there as of now.
By the time she got on a plane, upended her life, and settled in there she’d figure out, quickly, that there was some sort of sham element to all of this. He knew she was smart and sharp—and to add insult to injury, once that tape went live, if she chose to go he would know that she went out of anger and that she went knowing it was a consolation prize, not something that she earned.
He wished that he could be there right now to watch her face, her excitement, as she received the offer packet. In the end, while helping her to escape the scrutiny of the video really was the most compassionate move, in the long run, that stripping away of that moment of glory where Lydia triumphed on her own merits—or thought she did—could be the single biggest mistake of his life. He knew it, but did it anyway.
Jonah had given him a handful of hours but he knew that even Jonah couldn’t control this. At a minimum, the video guys knew, someone in a controller room knew, there were interns and admins and all sorts people in the chain who, with whispers and texts and emails and Facebook pages and tweets, would make this go live sooner rather than later. It was like the nervous finger on the trigger of the weakest soldier, with guns pointed at a crowd, from tragedies like Kent State to fiction like Les Miserables. It wasn’t that intent would lead to the unleashing of agony; it would be that simple collision of too many voices, too many eyes, too many torn allegiances and of one tiny fissure in the universe that would simply open.
Even Michael Bournham couldn’t control that. Jonah damn well couldn’t. So, as Mike made a series of phone calls that involved everything from canceling meetings to getting his hair dyed back to its regular color to cashing out certain investments, to finally having a lovely conversation with his mother, he knew that he was racing against the clock, his preternatural calm driving him toward a fate he didn’t know, but one that felt freer, less inhibited.
With a near complete abandon that he imagined Jeremy felt on a regular basis creeping into him, he imagined that video was about to do to Lydia the exact opposite of what it had already done to Mike before it had even been released. Pregnant in possibility and dilating by the second, its birth would give him a new life—because the same force that gave him decency, that made him do the right thing with Lydia, that made him protect her now to the extent that he could, and that stripped him of the killer instinct when he most needed it, that decency had finally reached a tipping point in him. Growing larger and larger, crowding out the adaptive sociopathy that he’d cultivated over the past decade, and now he was just back to being Mike.
“Bespoke or be naked.” It was time to get naked.
Chapter Three
“Mike, Mike. Hey, I swear to God, man, it wasn’t me. It was some teenage intern.” Miraculously, Mike had been given an entire day—or most of one. The video had been unleashed in the middle of the night, during one of the three hours his exhausted self had managed to sleep. The clock next to his bed said 7:52 a.m. The story must be breaking across all the morning news shows now. Matt Lauer would dissect his sex tape. Worse—Kathy Lee Gifford.