I got to the office at seven-thirty on Monday. My name was already on the door. Someone had worked all Sunday.
At eight, I called our head of HR, Denise, and our general counsel into my new office and closed the door.
“Before anything else,” I said, “Derek Shaw is my husband. I’m not making a single decision about him. Not his job, not his bonus, not his parking spot. Whatever needs deciding, the board decides.”
Denise nodded slowly. “We’d already heard about Saturday.”
“Then you also know I’m a witness, not his boss. Treat it that way.”
The general counsel wrote something down. “There’s a second problem,” she said. “If he’s in a relationship with his assistant, that’s a direct report. Our policy says he had to disclose it.”
“I don’t know what he disclosed.”
“Then we’ll find out.”
At nine o’clock, Derek knocked on my door.
He’d shaved. He was wearing his good gray suit, the one from our wedding. For a second he looked like the man I’d married, nervous and trying.
Denise was already sitting at the small table by the window.
He stopped in the doorway. “What is this?”
“You asked to see me,” I said. “Monday, nine a.m. Denise is here because I’m not allowed to be the only one in the room with you about work. Neither of us is.”
“Nora, come on. I’m your husband.”
“That’s exactly why she’s here.”
He sat. He tried for twenty minutes. He said he’d been drunk. He said Paige was a mistake. He said the merger had been hard on him, that he’d felt small, that nobody at Callowell respected designers. He said, “You know I’d never hurt the baby.”
“I know,” I said. “You’d only hurt me.”
Denise slid a single sheet of paper across the table. It was the company’s relationship disclosure form. Blank.
“Mr. Shaw, did you ever submit one of these about Ms. Paige Lowry?”
He looked at it like it was written in another language.
At the door he turned around.
“Were you ever going to tell me?” he asked. “If Saturday hadn’t happened. Would you have told me?”
“Friday night,” I said. “I made your favorite pasta. It went cold on the stove.”
He stood there a second longer. Then he left, and Denise let out a breath she’d been holding for twenty minutes.
I didn’t fire him. I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. Firing him myself would have made the story about me.
The board’s committee did the rest, quietly, over two weeks.
It turned out the “client dinners” had receipts. Paige processed Derek’s expense reports. She signed off on a hotel bar in March, a hotel restaurant in May, and a weekend rate at a lake resort in July, all billed to Shaw & Lyle as “client development.”
The client was her.
When the committee interviewed Paige, she didn’t fight. She brought her own copies.
“He told me his wife didn’t care what he did,” she said, according to Denise. “He told me she just did spreadsheets.”
I thought I’d feel something when I heard that. Triumph, maybe. Mostly I felt tired, and a little sorry for her. She had believed him too.
Derek resigned on a Thursday, before the committee could finish. He sent the letter to Raymond, not to me.
Paige asked for a transfer to our Denver office. The board approved it. I wasn’t in the room.
