"Because I didn't fight for it," said Wes. "That was my failure, not his. He wrote it a year ago."
Agnes Halloran looked at him, and then at Anil, and then she nodded once, the way a farmer nods at weather.
"Well," she said. "You fought for it now."
* * *
Anil took the job at Pell & Goode anyway.
He told Margot first, the afternoon after the renewal, on a bench by the river with two coffees going cold between them. She cried, briefly, and then was annoyed with herself for crying, and then annoyed with him for being so calm about it.
"I wanted to leave as the guy who wrote 'Still Here,'" he said. "Not as the guy whose line got cut. Now I get to. That's the thing he gave me back, actually, if he gave me anything. Not the line. The ending."
"You could stay. Farrow would make you ACD tomorrow. I'd make him."
"I know you would. That's why I didn't tell you until it was done." He bumped her shoulder with his. "I'm not leaving because of Wes. I want you to know that. And I'm not staying because of him either. I'm going because a woman with an old bakery wants the thing I write at two in the morning, and I'd like to find out what that's like." He paused. "I told him, by the way. Before I told Farrow."
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'Okay.' And then he said, 'No—I mean it. That's good. That's right.' And then he asked if he could buy me a farewell lunch, and I said yes, as long as it wasn't a gift card." Anil drank his cold coffee and made a face. "We're not friends, Margot. I don't know if we'll be friends. But I'd work in a room with him again. A year ago I wouldn't have said that."
"That's not nothing."
"It's not nothing," Anil agreed. "It's just not everything. Most things aren't."
His last day was the fifteenth of February. Bettina organized a send-off with a cake shaped like a typewriter and a banner that said STILL HERE (IN OUR HEARTS), which made Anil laugh so hard he had to sit down. Dottie gave him a pair of reading glasses from her drawer, left behind in 2003, and told him they might as well have history.
* * *
The partners announced the Group Account Director appointment on the first Monday of March. It was Margot. The memo was four lines long and contained the phrase "on the strength of her record," which Constance Yu had underlined, Margot suspected, in a draft somewhere. Farrow came to her office afterward and shook her hand and said, "It's deserved," and she heard it echo across eighteen months and decided, after a moment, to let it be just a sentence.
Wes was not in the meeting where they announced it. He was not on her review. He had asked, Constance told her, to be kept entirely out of it, not because of the policy, but because he wanted, for once, to not be anywhere near something he could ruin.