As if summoned by my envy, she appeared in the doorway, talking to a man as she walked in. “And send a letter to Gibbs straight away. If the board makes a move, it won’t be without every lawyer in the city knowing about it. Hello, Ivy.”
I knew that it would be appropriate to stand and drop a small curtsy, but Molly and I were beyond that. Beyond being falsely courteous to each other. She seemed to think so as well, because after dismissing her servant, she sank into the chair across from me without so much as a handshake.
“Why are you here?” she asked bluntly.
“I wanted to talk.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course you did. Is it about Mr. Markham? No, don’t answer, of course it is.” She leaned back in the chair, and the change in light illumined the red lining her eyelids. She’s been crying, I realized. I hadn’t thought Molly was capable of tears, but when I looked at her closely, I could see the way her nose was chafed, as if by repeated swiping with a handkerchief. I could see the way her sapphire gown had uncharacteristic wrinkles in the silk, as if she’d been wringing her skirt under a desk or a table where no one could see.
It wasn’t my place to say anything, but she really did seem upset. “Is everything okay?”
I expected her to snap at me or to ignore me. Who was I, after all, to ask her about her life? It had been clear to me since this summer that we would never be friends.
But to my surprise, she answered honestly. “No. No, nothing is okay.”
She stood and walked over to a low credenza, where she unstoppered a decanter of whiskey. The habit was so like Mr. Markham’s that I felt another pang of jealousy. They were such a good match in so many ways…
She poured herself a glass and then poured one for me without asking. She handed it to me and then sat back down. “The board of my company is trying to force me to marry.”
“Why?”
“Fuck if I know,” she said, taking a practiced sip of her drink. “I suppose they think that they’ll have more luck controlling me if I have a husband who’s on the board as well.”
“I was under the impression that your company was doing quite well under your leadership.”
“It is,” she said fiercely. “It’s doing more than well. But that’s not enough for those vampires. They want more, more, more, and at a human cost I am not willing to deliver on. They forget that I am the daughter of a dock-worker before he worked his way up, and I refuse to pay those men a penny less than what they’re worth. As a consequence, we have a workforce of strong, experienced and loyal employees. If they think they can threaten me into submission, if they think they can come into my home and demand I take the yoke of some man so I’ll be more docile…” Her voice shook with barely repressed anger and she turned her head away. But not enough that I couldn’t see a tear well over and spill down her cheek. She ignored it, letting it fall into her glass.
I flashed back to the men pouring out of her front door. “They were the men outside.”
“Yes, they were,” she said bitterly. “They’ve all banded together, apparently, in some last ditch effort to ‘bring me under control.’ They plan to sell their shares and abandon the company if I don’t fall in line.”
“But surely they don’t want to do that—the company is so profitable. I imagine it would be hard to walk away.”
“Yes, which is why they are trying to force me into capitulating instead leaving. They want to stay. But they want me neutered if they do.” She was silent for a moment, then burst out, “God, I wish I could haul them back in here and wring their necks!”
I didn’t know what to say. There was no comfort to be offered, really, nothing that I could say that would be something she hadn’t thought of on her own. But I felt like it would be rude not to address her agitation. So I offered my honest observation. “You seem like the type of woman who gets what she wants. I have no doubt that you’ll get the best of them. Somehow.”
“Somehow,” she repeated, staring at the window past my head. And then her eyes refocused, regaining their usual acuity. “And I’m quite sorry to have confessed all this to you. You don’t have any stake in this mess, and it’s apparent to me that you don’t care—and you don’t need to care because we’re not exactly friends, are we?”
I shrugged. I did care, actually, in some strange way. Maybe Molly wasn’t a friend, maybe I would always be jealous of her past with Julian, but she was in my sphere and I didn’t wish her anything but success. And there was something satisfying about seeing another woman wrestle her way into the world of men with nothing but sheer force of will.
“Regardless,” she said, “I do feel a peculiar kinship to you right now. It’s Julian, I suppose, but perhaps it’s more than that. You also seem like the type of woman who gets what she wants, although maybe you don’t know it yet. Perhaps we are both cut from the same cloth.”
“That’s actually why I came to visit,” I said. “I need to know if I am. Cut from the same cloth, that is.”
Molly finished her drink and set her glass on the table. Artfully looped curls trailed along the silk shoulder of her dress. “And how exactly do you think I can help you?”
I couldn’t think of a response to that because I didn’t know. Coming here, all I’d held in my mind was the vague impression of Molly’s confidence, her surety, the way she didn’t seem to carry any guilt or shame about being the kind of woman preachers railed against on cold Sunday mornings.
I wanted to know how she could fuck so freely, how she could let herself be fucked in all the ways she wanted, without worrying about being subsumed by the darkness that seemed to accompany these tides of lust. It was hardly the topic for polite conversation, but I didn’t have it in me to equivocate or dissemble. So again, I chose honesty.
“I love Julian,” I said. “I love everything about him. His thoughts, his company, even his fits of melancholy. And I love the way he fucks me. But you know what he’s like. He’s…”
“Dark?” Molly supplied. “Overwhelming? Volcanic? Excruciating? Consum—”
“Yes,” I cut her off. “All of those.”
“Sorry,” she said and then examined her fingernails. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”
