Page 49 of When Ice Queens Collide
For twelve years, she had woken up alone by choice, yet Simone had stayed for most of the night. She turned over and looked at the ceiling. She knew she should feel unsettled by this new development, and she waited for a flinch that never came.
Instead, she got up and padded barefoot downstairs. These were the hours Alexandra loved the most, when the morning staff hadn’t come yet and the house was all her own. The kitchen was chilly, and she busied herself by filling the kettle with tap water, setting the French press on the counter, and grinding the beans.
After the coffee routine was finished, she carried the steaming mug down the hall to her mother’s study. As she opened the door, she realized, with mild curiosity, that it was the first time being in the room in almost a week. She had been working at the kitchen table, telling herself it was practical and that the lighting was better there. She sat at the desk and blew on the coffee before she sipped.
Alexandra looked around. The room was the same as she had left it. The painting still hung in the same place, the books on the shelf were in the same order, the stacks of paper on the desk were in the same order. None of it had changed just because Vivian had called her a “brilliant steward but a limited visionary” in a private memo. Despite her inner world collapsing in on itself as it shifted, it seemed like the outer world had stayed constant, except with maybe a fine layer of dust that had settled on top of everything. It felt wrong that so much could change while other things stayed the same.
On Wednesday, Alexandra hadn’t been able to come in here. Today, she was able to walk in here almost on autopilot. She would do well to remember when she next caught herself believing that betrayal was something that a person didn’t survive.
Alexandra thought about the wordwinningand what it meant to her. Every meeting with Simone, every memo from her board, every late-night phone call with her executive team—all of it was ranked, internally, on whether she had come out of it with more or less leverage than she had gone in with. She didn’t have to question where she learned that. Dorothy always told her, “You either win the room or you leave it.” And Alexandra had won a great many rooms in the last twelve years.
On Wednesday, she lost when Vivian betrayed her, but yesterday, in her kitchen, she had, on paper, won when Simone told her she wasn’t filing the hostile takeover paperwork. Exceptwhat she felt didn’t feel like winning, not really. A win required someone on the other side trying to beat her, and Simone had stopped trying.
Alexandra took another slow sip of her coffee. When Simone told her she was going to stand down, she hadn’t felt victorious, but she didn’t feel relief either. What shehadfelt, though, was something unformed and nameless, and that was most disconcerting of all because Alexandra had been able to reliably name what she felt since she was nine.
She set the mug down. The part she couldn’t stop thinking about wasn’t what Simone had said but the look on her face when Alexandra had held her hand. Simone had looked at her like she had been waiting a long time to be truly seen. Alexandra inhaled suddenly. That was what she had felt: recognition. It was like they were holding a mirror up for each other, and Alexandra refused to let herself see it until yesterday because it was something she hadn’t let herself even want and from someone who was on the opposite side of everything she had worked her entire life for.
The question formed in her mind without her having to reach for it:Is this about winning, or is it about me?Her eyes flicked to her phone a half-second before she picked it up. She wouldn’t get an answer to her question by sitting in this chair and ruminating, so she unlocked her phone and typed,Coastal trailhead at 4. I’ll come to you. She read it once then sent it off.
She finished her coffee, now lukewarm, and knew what she had to do to process this morning. She went upstairs and changed into running clothes.
After several hours, the run cleared her mental noise. By nine-fifteen, Alexandra was back home, showered and dressed in jeans and a moss-colored cashmere sweater. She sat at the kitchen table with her laptop open and a fresh cup of coffee at her side. The fallout with Vivian hadn’t paused just becauseit was the weekend. There were three drafts of a press release in her inbox from Meg, two memos from the board chair that needed her sign-off, a six-page document from Ruth outlining the legalities of Vivian’s termination, and a forwarded note from the head of HR about how the sustainability division would be communicated about internally on Monday. She read each carefully, then started addressing them.
She had done this work for over a decade, and she had managed to do it under all different types of taxing circumstances—with fewer than three hours of sleep, on a plane, in a taxi. What was different this morning was that while fielding requests, she wasn’t asking herself whether the person on the other end was an ally or threat. The takeover was no longer looming over her head like a guillotine, and for the first time in the last five months, Alexandra was doing her job without simultaneously preparing for war.
By the time she had cleared over half the queue, her phone buzzed on the table. Meg. She picked it up. “I was about to email you back.”
“I figured. I’m two minutes out. I have the final draft of the Monday rollout printed and a few things from the board chair that needed signatures. Is that all right?”
“Of course.”
“Want me to pick up some coffee?”
“No, I already made some.” Alexandra glanced at the half-empty French press.
After they hung up, Alexandra dumped out the old dregs, boiled more water, and made new coffee. Minutes later, Meg arrived with a dark brown leather portfolio under her arm. There were exactly two people in the world who had seen Alexandra in every state, vulnerable and otherwise, over the last decade. Meg was one of them; Ruth was the other.
Alexandra gestured toward the kitchen table, and Meg took a seat opposite from Alexandra’s laptop. She set the portfolio down and accepted the stoneware mug full of hot coffee with cream in it. She took a sip and visibly relaxed before she looked at Alexandra over the rim of the mug.
She set down the coffee on the table. “You look like you’ve slept.” She said it like a fact, but her left eyebrow raised a fraction of an inch. “I can tell. You haven’t looked that well rested in months.”
“I slept,” Alexandra said plainly, offering nothing else.
“Good,” Meg said, then opened her portfolio. She slid a stapled document across the table. “Here’s the final rollout sequence for Monday. Legal cleared everything overnight. The press release goes out at 6 a.m. and an internal email at seven, and the all-hands meeting is at nine. The chairman is calling the top ten institutional investors personally before noon, and I’ve already put a copy of the talking points in here for him.” She tapped the portfolio. “I’d like for you to read the press release once more before I send it to print.”
Alexandra didn’t move to pick up the document.
“What?”
Alexandra wrapped her hands around her mug to have something to do with her hands, even though she couldn’t feel warmth anymore. “Simone Rousseau came here on Friday afternoon. She’s standing down, and she’s notifying her team this weekend.” She paused, not sure if she could believe the truth in her words. “The deal is off.”
Meg sat in silence for a minute, but Alexandra had worked with her long enough to read her face and parse its meaning in real time. There was a flash of surprise that was quickly masked as she recalibrated the next forty-eight hours of work. “How firm is this?”
Alexandra knew the question was coming, but even she wasn’t entirely sure she could trust Simone at her word. “It’s firm,” she said with more confidence than she felt.
“Did you hear about this from her or through her lawyers?”
“From her, in my kitchen on Friday afternoon. It was a house call.”
