The Matchmaker's Gift(28)
It turned out she didn’t need to bring anything. The conference table was already covered with pizza boxes, beer, and a few bottles of wine. Despite smelling like a fraternity house, the room itself was designed to impress, with lush silk carpets, steel-framed paintings, and an eastern-facing wall made entirely of fifteen-foot floor-to-ceiling windows. A dozen twentysomething junior associates were present, dressed in standard “weekend-at-the-office” attire: jeans and T-shirts, sneakers, glasses. Abby had put in a little more effort—she’d worn her good jeans and put in her contact lenses.
Will introduced her to a few of his colleagues, grabbed two beers, and led Abby over to a quiet spot by one of the windows. Outside, the sun slipped out of sight; the sky darkened from pale blue to navy to pitch. Someone dimmed the room’s overhead lights, and everyone turned their eyes to the river.
Boom! Ba Boom! As the first set of fireworks lit up the sky, oohs and aahs filled the conference room. Ba Boom Ba Boom! A kaleidoscope of reds, violets, and blues hung in the air beyond the glass, almost close enough to touch. From the corner of her eye, Abby caught Will staring, a look of admiration etched on his face.
“Thank you for inviting me here,” she told him. “The view is absolutely beautiful.”
“Like you,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her lips. Will had made sure they were far enough away from the others so that the moment felt almost entirely private. But still, Abby was caught off guard. Behind the glass, the skyline erupted again, spraying flashes of color in all directions. It was an intimate moment, and it should have been romantic, what with literal fireworks going off around them. But as much as Abby wanted to give in to the excitement, she could not summon the same sparks for Will that crackled outside his office window.
When the fireworks display was over, Abby made her excuses. “I have a lot of work to go over before tomorrow,” she said.
Will did his best not to appear disappointed and insisted on walking her to the elevator. They shared a hug and quick kiss goodbye before she traveled down from the forty-first floor to the building’s marble lobby. Somewhere in the middle of the rapid descent, Abby felt her stomach flip. Alone in the narrow, paneled box, she could not silence her inner voice—a voice that spoke with her grandmother’s lilt and every bit of Sara’s trademark nerve. It was as if her grandmother were beside her, whispering into Abby’s ear.
He’s a nice boy, mameleh, but nice isn’t everything. My urologist was a nice man, too, but I never wanted to marry him.
* * *
When Abby got back to her apartment, she poured herself some wine, plopped down on her sofa, and pulled Victor étoile’s file from her bag. She and Diane had a call with him in the morning, and Abby wanted to be prepared.
Diane had warned her that Nicole’s demands were “ambitious,” but Abby preferred the more straightforward term—greedy. The model wanted one million dollars plus a 2 percent stake in Victor’s company for every year that the two of them remained married. That meant that if the marriage lasted five years, Nicole would get five million dollars plus 10 percent of étoile. Although the business interest was capped at 10 percent, Nicole was to receive substantial bonuses on the couple’s ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-year anniversaries.
There were other demands, including trusts for future children and “reasonable” arrangements regarding the division of Victor’s time between the offspring of his first marriage and his second. Any real estate the couple purchased after their marriage would be Nicole’s alone in the event of a split.
Abby knew that Diane would never allow Victor to accept such one-sided terms. He had spent the past twenty years building étoile—last year it did over four hundred million dollars in sales. A man so fiercely obsessed with his company and his brand would never agree to grant his second wife such a huge stake in his business on such an accelerated basis.
But the next morning when Abby joined Diane on the conference call with Victor, the designer did not sound half as resistant as Abby expected. In fact, he seemed more worried about upsetting Nicole than he was about her lawyer’s list. He urged Diane to “compromise” and to come up with “creative solutions.”
“My priority,” Victor said, “is to make sure that Nicole is happy.”
Diane grimaced and mouthed a string of inaudible curse words into the air.
“I understand that, Victor,” she said carefully. “But my priority is to make sure that you are happy. And I don’t mean now. I mean five years from now when, on the off chance that you are not still blissfully wed, Nicole will own ten percent of your company. Ten percent, Victor, of the company you spent your entire life building. What if you’d given ten percent to your ex-wife?”
“Nicole is nothing like Patrice.”
“Patrice was nothing like Patrice, until you divorced her.”
From the telephone’s speaker, Abby and Diane could hear Victor’s heavy, frustrated sigh. “What do you want me to do, Diane?”
“You don’t have to do anything. This is what you hired me for. Abby and I are going to draft an agreement, and we’re going to present it to Nicole’s lawyer. I will go over the terms with you first, but I don’t want you sharing the document with Nicole. Let her lawyer review it with her. It will be easier for you both that way.”