Chapter 5
He stepped toward my desk like proximity might undo what he'd already seen. "Adrienne, we can talk about the number. It doesn't have to be permanent, I was testing—"
"Testing what," I said. "How much I'd swallow before I stopped showing up? You already got your answer."
"You can't just walk into Victoria Hayes's building. She'll chew through you in six months, she does that to everyone she poaches—"
"She offered me equity, Gregory. You offered me a fifty percent cut and called it an adjustment." I stood, closed my laptop, and slid it into my bag. "Forty-three of the fifty major client threads this week had my name on them, not yours. Crestline calls me. North River calls me. You haven't personally closed a deal in fourteen months, you've just been standing next to me while I closed them and putting your name on the recap email."
His jaw worked, no sound coming out.
"I'll finish today," I said. "I'm not interested in a two-week transition where you get to pretend this was mutual."
"If you leave like this, I'll make sure every firm in this city knows you walked out mid-review."
"Good," I said, walking past him into the hallway, loud enough now that the whole floor could hear it if they wanted to. "Tell them I walked out the same afternoon you cut my pay in half and smiled while you did it. See which story the industry believes."
I didn't slam the glass door. I let it click shut, soft and final, the same way a lock sounds when it decides which side of it you're going to be standing on for the rest of your life.
Three days later I sat across from Victoria Hayes in her corner office with a view twice the height of Gregory's, signing a partnership agreement that put my name on the letterhead for the first time in my career. Within a month, Crestline Robotics followed me. North River followed two weeks after that. By spring, Dalton and Pierce had lost eleven of its top fourteen accounts, and Gregory Dalton was fielding calls from a board that finally wanted to know exactly whose name had been on those forty-three email threads all along.
May you like
I heard he sold his stake in the firm that summer for a fraction of what it had been worth the year before. I didn't call to gloat. I didn't need to. I had a corner office of my own now, a team who came to my door instead of hiding behind someone else's, and a partnership agreement with my actual name spelled correctly on every page.
Some men only understand a person's value the moment she stops being available to prove it to them.
