So she went.
Farrow's office had a window that looked out over the river and a framed photograph on the credenza of the old Lisle Brothers building, which had been torn down in 2008 to make room for a parking structure. There was sheet music on the corner of his desk. Margot had worked for him for six years and had never noticed it.
"Sit down, Margot," he said. He took his glasses off, which he never did. Without them his face looked older and less finished. "I imagine you have something to say to me, and I imagine I deserve it, and I would rather you said it sitting down. I'm too old to be shouted at by someone standing over me."
"I'm not going to shout."
"No," said Farrow. "You wouldn't. That's always made you more frightening than the people who do."
She did not sit. Then she did.
"You took something from both of us," she said. "You didn't even give us the dignity of telling us it was a rule. You told him it was a choice, and you let me find out it was nothing at all. I spent a year and a half thinking I'd humiliated myself on a rooftop."
Farrow looked at his hands.
"Dottie told you about ninety-nine," he said. It was not a question.
"She told me some."
"Then you know I've watched an office eat two people alive. One of them was me." He turned the reading glasses over in his fingers. "After that, I decided it would never happen again under my roof. I knew I couldn't write it down. I knew a lawyer would laugh at me. So I did what cowards do with rules they can't defend, which is that I enforced it one conversation at a time, privately, where nobody could check my work. I did it to Wes. I did it once before, to a pair in media, years ago; they both left within the year, and I told myself it was a coincidence." He was quiet. "When the chanting started at the party, I stopped playing. I'd like to tell you it was because I was worried for you. I think I was mostly frightened of seeing it all again. I sat there with my hands in my lap like an old fool, waiting for a disaster that wasn't mine."
"It wasn't a disaster," said Margot. "It was a photo booth."
"Yes," said Farrow. "I'm beginning to understand that."
He put the glasses back on.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That's a small word for eighteen months. I don't expect it to do much. I've told the partners I'll accept whatever they decide. I've taken myself off your review because I'm not sure anymore that I can see you clearly, and you deserve to be seen clearly. And I've told Wes that what I said to him was wrong, and that the job was his on the work, and always was." He paused. "He said that wasn't the point. He said the point was that he took the deal. I told him I'd made it very easy to take. He said that didn't make it less his."
"That sounds like him lately," said Margot.
"Does it?" said Farrow. "It doesn't sound like the man I promoted."