Chapter One

Erin McCallister liked the heavy velvet draperies at Dialogue, the restaurant she went to at least once every week. They were a deep green, swallowed up sound from the tables around her, and were soft to the touch when she couldn’t resist putting her hands on the luxurious fabric. Everything at Dialogue, including the Italian-inspired food, was dialed in for maximum comfort without being ostentatious. No wonder she couldn’t stay away. Well, that and the fact that she couldn’t cook her way out of a paper bag and was still too immature to try to learn how. Why bother when the brined half chicken, herb-roasted potatoes, and sauteed shaved brussels sprouts were so delicious and enough food for two meals?

She went out to eat a lot, but Dialogue was her favorite and in that sweet spot where entrees went for between thirty and fifty dollars. Not that money mattered to her. But at more expensive places, she didn’t feel comfortable sitting alone and reading—a magazine, the latest business bestseller, or the occasional novel. Dining alone didn’t put her off, but unstated rules were often more stringent than ones posted for everyone to see. Besides, the dress code here suited her: dark jeans and a blazer made her blend right into the scenery.

Dialogue changed its menu regularly, and she made a point of tasting everything on offer while she could get it. Tonight it was trout in a mustard cream sauce she wanted to lick off the plate. Between bites and paragraphs in the latest issue of The Harvard Business Review, she glanced around the medium-sized dining room. It was creeping toward nine, and the second seating was proving to be smaller than the first. She liked to play witness to the ebb and flow of the tables around her, the waitstaff weaving their way around obstacles with big trays loaded with divine-looking, earthenware plates in deep jewel tones. She’d been served multiple times by everyone working tonight—everyone except a small, striking woman with dark hair in a braid as thick as Erin’s arm. She must be new, but she looked like she knew what she was doing, making the diners at her tables nod and laugh along with her.

Erin bet she got big tips, though probably not as large as the ones Erin made a habit of leaving. Fifty percent was typical for her, and it went up from there. Why not? Since Nuvio had acquired her company almost three years ago, she felt uncomfortably made of money. Twenty-one million dollars and change the last time she looked at her accounts. The least she could do was spread it around to people working hard for a living.

She ran her fork across the plate to catch some stray sauce and woke from her food daze long enough to see that she wasn’t going to be toting home any leftovers tonight. It was getting to be too late to hit a market on the way home, so she’d have to go scavenging tomorrow. Within a minute of her setting her silverware on her plate to signal that she was finished, her server, Greg, was there to clear it and replace it with a dessert menu. Dessert was a different story from the savory dishes; if she ordered it every time she went out for dinner, she wouldn’t be able to make it through the door of her house. She glanced at the small sheet of thick, cream paper and wistfully pushed it away, replacing it with her magazine.

Despite the hour, she wasn’t ready to go home, and Greg took the hint, staying away except to top off her water glass. She’d sit here undisturbed until she finished this article on bias in blind hiring practices. Then she would settle up and walk the mile back to her place, taking it slow to delay the inevitable. She didn’t mind living alone, but thinking back to the tiny apartment she used to share with Catherine Wu, her best friend and former business partner, her memories were often tinged with the honeyed glow of irresistible, revisionist history. They’d hated that place while they’d lived there. They’d made do with what little they had while bootstrapping a new company just out of university. Boxed mac and cheese was a splurge back then.

While she wouldn’t want to go back to eating ramen several times a week, she missed the closeness she’d had with Catherine then: in it together, dreamily pragmatic. And it had worked. Four years after they’d started out with nothing, TriBar was acquired for a sum remarkably close to the number Catherine had written on a sticky note hanging off her laptop the whole time. The money had been more Catherine’s aspiration than Erin’s, who had taken a detour from law school for the tantalizing prospect of making something of her own. Though her father had done that for himself with his construction business, he’d never understood what Erin had been doing at TriBar. Now here she and Catherine were, rich and validated and strangely separated from each other. After the two years they had contracted to Nuvio as part of the acquisition, Erin had left and Catherine had stayed.

It wasn’t that Erin didn’t want to work. She just hadn’t wanted to work there anymore, where she felt alternatingly useless and stymied by the powers that be. During their partnership, roles had been clearly split, with Catherine taking the technical work and Erin accountable for everything else. Their product was a piece of middleware missing from the legal space, a ligament knitting together bones of data critical to law firms. Erin, with her prelaw degree and multiple internships at local firms, had played the domain expert while Catherine actually built the thing, eventually hiring a small technical team to assist her. Erin’s job was figuring out how to keep the lights on, at least until she’d landed a five-million-dollar investment that had left them breathing easily until their acquisition.

Nuvio didn’t need funds, Erin’s team had come over with their hard-earned successful culture, and the product was already defined. All of which left her feeling like tits on a bull, as her father would say, even though he’d never been near a bull in his life. So she’d left.

Running a company at such a tender age had been nauseatingly thrilling, full of bruising lessons and occasional wild victories. After that, where was there to go but down? In comparison to those early years, she was tiptoeing toward being a useless relic before she was even thirty. She told herself she had time to turn things around before she officially hit middle age. The problem was she didn’t know where to apply herself.

Erin finished her article, closed the magazine, and glanced at Greg, who came over and delivered her bill before she could even blink. Knowing he wouldn’t grow impatient if she sat around even longer gave her a warm—but fleeting—feeling. Being a regular had its benefits beyond them always finding a table for her, no matter how busy it might be.

When Greg came back with her change from her cash payment, she said, “The trout was unbelievable tonight. Give Suzanne my compliments if you can.”

“It was the sauce, wasn’t it?”

Erin smiled. “If you sold it in quart bottles, I’d buy it.”

“I’ll let Chef know about the idea.”

“Tell her I’m sure she could be very successful with it.” She picked up her magazine and stood. “Thanks for taking care of me tonight.”

He gave a slight bow. “My pleasure. Have a good rest of your evening.”

She nodded and made her way out of the restaurant to the sidewalk, where she stood for a minute, soaking in Boston’s early-summer night. The soft air caressed her skin while she rolled up her magazine and pointed herself home. Dialogue was in the South End, which made for a twenty-minute walk to her place in Beacon Hill. The path she took went past blocks of brownstones and a couple of hotels and design stores before dumping her out on the road that separated Boston Commons from the Public Gardens, both of which were quietly lit this late in the evening.

Erin dipped into the Gardens to prolong the walk and to give her regards to her favorite tree, a sprawling weeping beech with branches that turned abruptly downward after reaching their peak, leaving exposed knobs of tree above the cascading, dark-green oval leaves. Under the skirt of branches and leaves was a clearing down to the dirt, no grass able to grow within the permanent shadow the tree cast.

Some people thought the tree was sad looking or vaguely menacing, but it was majestic to Erin. It left everything on the table and was true to its nature. Stepping under its canopy, one was treated to leaves that turned a lighter green when kissed by the sun, and the rest of the world faded away to insignificance. It was where she went when she was chewing on a problem too big to solve or when she didn’t know quite what she felt about something. She would look at the old carved graffiti on the smooth-barked trunk and think and not think at the same time.

Tonight, she gave it a little nod before caving to her desires and pulling out her phone to call her best friend.

Catherine answered with, “Are you walking home from dinner?”

“I didn’t want to wait until I got home because you might be asleep.”

She laughed but said, “You’re probably right. Nathan and I were meandering in that general direction.”

Catherine had been with Nathan since the second year of their startup, and they shared not only a very nice house about five miles away in Brookline but also a devotion to “Early to bed, early to rise.” Not like her. She and Catherine used to joke that they pretty much operated the company twenty-four seven, with Erin going to sleep about the time Catherine was waking up.

“Fish tonight, in case you were wondering. At Dialogue. It would have been heart healthy if not for the luxurious sauce it was served with.”

“I wasn’t wondering, but I’m all for a luxurious sauce. What’s up?”

“Nothing.” Literally. “Just wanted to say hi. Even though it’s been months, it’s still weird not to talk to you every day.”

“I doubt you miss me nagging you to find a girlfriend.”

Erin sighed. She for sure hadn’t missed that. She stood at the light to cross Beacon Street and waited for the walk signal. Charles Street shone bright with streetlights and a healthy number of people leaving restaurants or popping into ice cream shops for dessert.

“You don’t get it. You met Nathan well before the acquisition so you started on an equal footing. Now I’ve got this money, and you know very well how that changes things.”

“I get it, I do. But you can’t stay alone just because of what Hayley did. Not everyone’s like her.”

“Anyway, how’s work?” She got the light and crossed. From here she could see the side street she’d turn on to walk uphill to her place near the top.

Catherine’s pause was as rich as that sauce had been at dinner. “Can we not do this?”

“I’m asking how things are going for you, not whatever you think is happening.”

“Things are okay. No fires, at least no big ones, and that’s all I’m going to say.”

“Fine,” Erin said, frustrated. “Will you at least tell me when you’re available to get together? I know this great restaurant in the South End.”

“Let me check.” Catherine put her phone on speaker while flipping through her digital calendar. Erin didn’t have to look at hers, because she was generally free. They made plans, she let Catherine go to Nathan and their bed, and she made her way uphill past old redbrick houses and condos, the street sometimes claustrophobically narrow.

That conversation had not been what she’d been looking for, though she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what she’d wanted from Catherine. How had such a short conversation been laden with so many landmines? She didn’t know which of them not to think about first.

Definitely not the one that was Hayley, her ex, who had turned out to be more interested in her money than her. Catherine’s parry to her simple question about work came in a close second. Catherine thought Erin wanted to know all the dirt about the product road map and marketing efforts, and, well, she was right. Just because Erin had left didn’t mean she’d stopped caring about what they’d built together—the technology and their people, both. And last, but not least, there was the fact that her schedule was wide open, which riddled her with shame.

The light by her front door offered a warm greeting, haloed with the faint humidity in the air. The three-story building she’d bought after the acquisition sat on a corner a few minutes’ walk from the State House. Because it had already been subdivided into a first-floor apartment and a unit that spanned the second and third floors (and a roof deck), she continued to rent out the apartment, using a property management company so the tenant didn’t know he was living downstairs from the owner. He and Erin passed in the night—or the front hall—every so often, but otherwise it was like he wasn’t even there.

Her key rasped into the lock, and she opened the door into soft quiet. She took the stairs, clad in a red runner, without making a sound, like she was sneaking up on the emptiness of her apartment. If you could call 2,500 square feet in the prime of this neighborhood a mere apartment. She could have gotten a house like Catherine, but if she thought this solitude was tough to take, she couldn’t imagine having a whole house of it.

She let herself into her space, dropped her keys on the entryway table, and started her circuit around the main floor, turning on every light and starting some low music to keep herself company. Distressed wood floors and paneling that ran up one of the walls in her living room warmed the whole space. She had worked with a designer to make the place hers, transforming it into a harmonious whole that reflected tastes Erin hadn’t even known she’d had.

It felt both hers and not hers. She was most comfortable watching TV from the sectional in front of the wood wall and making calls and putting together presentations at her desk in the spacious office nearby. The rest was top of the line but not quite…right. When hunger forced her to, she pulled something ready-made out of the fridge, often eating it while standing at the counter instead of at the nearby dining table.

She perched now on a stool at the breakfast bar, her head resting on her hands, one finger stroking back and forth across her lips, and stared into the gleaming space she rarely used. Whatever was wrong with her home was entirely her fault, but she hadn’t found her way to fixing it yet. What a waste. The whole place was a waste. She was a waste.

And this was why she was supposed to keep herself busy.

Officially, she was a consultant—at least that’s what her business incorporation papers said. It wasn’t completely a lie: she’d had a few short gigs since she’d hung out her shingle. Drawn by her name and track record, some people were interested in paying her good money to tell them what a healthy corporate culture looked like and how to achieve it. She’d quickly found that consulting mainly consisted of telling people what to do and just hoping that they would actually do it after you walked out the door. Engagements that were longer, where she could help them with follow-through, would maybe be more rewarding, but she’d have to actually try to find those.

She shook her head. She could build a company out of a few packages of ramen, but she couldn’t seem to put her mind to this. She told herself she didn’t have to work, ever, but that didn’t sit well, not just with her stolid middle-class upbringing but also with her sometimes overactive brain. It didn’t cope well with stillness, but since leaving Nuvio—or, to be honest, throughout her last year there—she hadn’t been able to choose what to charge off into. Her engine was revving in neutral, but she had crippling ennui and no partner to brainstorm exciting ideas with.

To say it was a bad combination was like saying Moby Dick was a guppy.

She’d cut all ties to the group she and Catherine had built, relinquished responsibility for its road map and marketing, and left Nuvio to “do something important.” That’s what she’d said to Catherine, and here she was, months later, having done nothing but find a favorite restaurant and make more embarrassing money on her few consulting engagements. She used to have a ton of reasons to respect herself, but they’d evaporated with each week that peeled off the calendar. Honestly, she had a hard time looking at herself in the mirror.

Tonight, unlike Catherine, she still had hours before she’d be able to sleep, so she hauled herself over to her couch, shrugged off her blazer, stretched out, and turned on the TV. She’d find something mindless to watch, a series that would lead her from one episode to the next without conscious volition, all without shutting off the music that was playing through speakers throughout her downstairs. The more she put between herself and echoing solitude the better.