Page 19 of When Ice Queens Collide
“What flipped them?”
“The Q3 earnings report.” Tess pulled up a second screen. “Vaughn's infrastructure division came in under projections for the second consecutive quarter. Linden's portfolio managers have been patient, but patience has a price point and Vaughn just hit it. They want growth. Vaughn's offering maintenance and stagnation.”
So Linden hadn't been swayed by the restructuring proposal or the pitch Simone had spent two weeks refining. They'd defected over a margin percentage. A fund manager in a Westford office looked at two columns and picked the bigger one. It wasn’t loyalty, but it still benefitted her.
“Run the revised proxy timeline,” Simone said. “I want filing options by the end of the day. And get the legal team on the support agreement. Linden will want governance protections written in.”
Tess was already typing. “I'll have three scenarios for you by four: conservative, moderate, and aggressive.”
“Aggressive first.”
They worked through the next steps, with Tess feeding her data and Simone making decisions about the remaining uncommitted institutions: prioritize Graves Fiduciary and NorthPoint, skip Cascade (too conservative, they'd wait for the proxy statement). The proxy slate required three board seats minimum, and she wanted names by Friday who'd pass shareholder scrutiny without looking like plants. The communications strategy needed two tracks: one for institution investors and one for theTribune. Claire Whitfield would have the filing on her desk within hours of it going public, and the narrative had to be set before she started calling sources.
Tess was leaning forward, typing fast, and asking questions that showed she was already three moves ahead; she was thirty-three and still lit up by a deal tipping. Simone could remember that, the adrenaline hit of a win, the way it used to carry herthrough a week or two, the high of one deal powering the engine until the next one came along. She'd left Montreal at twenty-two with a suitcase and a job offer, and she'd built Rousseau Global on that fuel—the adrenaline hit of a win and the certainty that she would never again sit at a folding table watching her mother count bills to see which ones could be paid that month.
She waited for the feeling now—the satisfaction, the heat of it, the thing that had arrived every single time a deal crossed from possible to probable.
But there was nothing. Just a flat, quiet absence where the rush should have been and the growing suspicion that the absence wasn't new, that it had been there for a while, maybe years, and she'd been papering over it with the next deal and the next one and the next, the way you keep turning up the volume on music so you don't have to hear what the silence underneath sounds like.
She knew what the silence sounded and felt like. She'd felt it in New York, in the apartment on the Upper West Side she'd shared with Margaux for nineteen months before Margaux told her, very calmly over dinner, that Simone was incapable of intimacy. Simone hadn’t argued with her or got defensive because Margaux was a journalist and simply stating facts. She'd felt it in London after Diane had left, when the penthouse there had felt less like freedom and more like a set she kept rebuilding in different locations. She'd felt it and she'd done what she always did—she worked harder, moved faster, and found the next target, the next city, the next deal that required her full attention so there was no space left over for the question she refused to ask.
The question she refused to ask wasn’tam I lonely. She knew she was lonely. She'd known since her thirties, and she'd looked at that feeling the way she looked at everything, then decided it was an acceptable cost. Loneliness was the price of mobility, andmobility was the price of safety. And safety—the kind that meant she would never be the woman at the kitchen table mulling over bills, who would never depend on anything she couldn't leave—was worth what it cost. That had remained true for twenty years.
But all of that had come into question three weeks ago in that private dining room when Alexandra Vaughn had called herSimone,the word landing somewhere no one had reached in so long that the sensation was visceral, a door opening revealing a room she'd forgotten was there. And what had flooded her wasn't attraction. Or rather, it was not only attraction, but the particular recognition of being across a table from someone who understood what it took to hold everything up alone. She was doing the same thing on her side, and it didn't come with pity or curiosity or even the eagerness to fix it. It just sat there between them, steady and mutual and devastating in its quietness.
She had spent three weeks trying to recategorize that moment as intellectual chemistry and the natural intensity of two minds operating at the same level, which happened sometimes. She had felt it before, but it always faded when the deal closed and the city changed. And it always changed.
Except this time, she didn't want to leave. She'd never not wanted to leave. Leaving was the thing she did best—better than dealmaking, better than strategy, better than the twenty-nine years of acquisition and optimization that had made her rich and mobile and free and completely, utterly alone. Every woman she'd ever been with could testify that Simone Rousseau knew when to walk away. She did it so cleanly and practiced that most of them probably thought it didn't cost her anything, which was the performance of a lifetime, because it cost her everything every time. She paid it, though, because the alternative—staying, depending, needing—was the thing that had terrified her since she was twelve years old watching her mother's hands shake over a stack of bills.
And now there was Alexandra, and the thought of leaving Phoenix Ridge evoked something in her she couldn’t quite understand, like a physical weight, something she'd have to set down, walk away from, and know she'd left behind. In all her years of moving, she had never left anything behind; she'd made sure of that. Even packing took twenty minutes because twenty minutes was all you needed when nothing belonged to you.
“You okay?” Tess looked up from her laptop. “You're quiet.”
“I'm thinking.”
“You're usually talking while thinking.”
“Run the scenarios.”
Simone took her coffee to the small office she used when she needed to be alone and stood at the window. Below her, someone had strung white lights along the café awning two blocks over. November wasn't even finished, and Phoenix Ridge was already reaching for warmth, the way small cities did, as though decorating for a season they'd all get through together.
Her coffee was cold. She drank it anyway.
She called her mother at six, which was unusual on two counts: it was Thursday, not Sunday, and Simone had initiated it.
The penthouse was warm. She kept every space she occupied at seventy-four, a reflex so old she no longer connected it to the Villeray apartment where the heating had been unreliable and the winters had not. She'd changed out of her work clothes into a cashmere sweater and loose pants, poured a glass of the Sancerre she'd bought last week, and stood at the kitchen counter with her phone in her hand for a full minute before dialing.
She didn't think too deeply about why she needed to hear her mother's voice tonight. Analyzing it would require admitting that the day had hollowed something out of her, and Simone was not yet ready to look at that.
Nadine picked up on the third ring. “Are you sick?”
“Hello to you too.”
“You call on Sundays. If you're calling on a Thursday, something must be wrong. Are you unwell?”
“I'm fine,Maman. I just wanted to check in.”
Her mother’s pause carried twenty years of her opinions about her daughter's emotional transparency, which was to say, the absence of it. “The garden is done for the year. I put the last of the kale in yesterday. Madame Beaulieu's daughter is getting married in January, the younger one, Marie-Claire, you remember her.”
