"Anil," said Margot. "Go talk to Anil. Not for me. Don't you dare do it for me. Do it because you owe it to him."
* * *
Anil Bhatt had an offer letter in his desk drawer, under a stack of index cards, from a small shop across the river called Pell & Goode. Eleven people. A converted bakery with exposed brick. The title was Associate Creative Director, and the money was a little more, and the founder, a woman named Ottilie Goode, had told him over lunch, "I read your work for a year before I called you. I want the thing you write at two in the morning." He had until the fifteenth of January to answer.
He had told no one, not even Margot. He loved Margot. He also knew that if he told her, she would fight to keep him, and she would win, because she always won, and he would never know if he had stayed because he wanted to or because she'd been persuasive.
So when Wes Delacroix pulled a chair up to his desk on Wednesday morning, with the Halloran renewal brief in his hand and the expression of a man about to jump into cold water, Anil's first thought was not about Halloran at all. It was: *I don't have to listen to this. In three weeks I could be gone.*
It made him oddly patient.
"I want to talk about last March," said Wes.
"Okay."
"I told you I'd go to the wall for your line. I told you in front of everybody. And on the morning of the pitch, Farrow said he didn't like it, and I swapped the order of the deck and didn't tell you. You found out in the room. In front of the client."
"I remember," said Anil. "I was there."
"I know you were there. I'm not—I'm not telling you something you don't know. I'm saying it out loud because I never did." Wes looked at the brief in his hands. "I could tell you I didn't have time to warn you. That's a lie. I had forty-five minutes. I spent them in the bathroom telling myself it didn't matter which slide went first. It mattered. I knew it mattered. I didn't want to have the fight with Farrow, and I really didn't want to have the conversation with you afterward where I told you I'd had the fight and lost. So I skipped both. And then I gave you a gift card." He winced. "A *gift card*."
"It was a good bookstore," said Anil.
"Anil."
"I bought a very expensive book on typography with it." He leaned back in his chair. "What do you want, Wes?"
"I want 'Still Here' to lead the renewal. I'll put it first. I'll present it myself if you want, or you can, or—"
"No."
Wes stopped.
"It's not a gift," said Anil. "You don't get to give it back to me. It was mine. It's still mine." He took the brief out of Wes's hands, gently, and opened it. "If 'Still Here' goes in the renewal, I'll pitch it. To Farrow first. Myself. In his office, on Friday, before the deck is locked. And when he says it sounds like an obituary—and he will, he says it about everything that has more than one syllable of feeling in it—you're going to be standing next to me. And you're not going to move. That's what I want. Not your help. Your feet."