Eleanor had told Paul Oduya she would have the founder’s answer by half past four, and at four exactly she sat down at her desk to read it.
Josh had printed it for her. He printed everything for her now, without being asked, which was the kind of thing she would remember about him when all of this was over and she was deciding whose career to spend the rest of her credibility on. It was one page. It was from Marcus Reed, forwarded through the account Seth had set up, and she had been nearly certain what it would say.
She knew the type. She had sat across tables from forty years of them, the ones who ran toward a camera the way other people ran from one, and Marcus Reed was a pure specimen — a man who had written too much every time he was frightened and said too much every time he was not. She had offered him the seat on Tuesday expecting him to take it in both hands. She had put it would help you at the bottom because it was true and because she had assumed he needed the nudge the way a cat needs a nudge toward a bowl of cream.
She read the page.
It should be you, it said. You and the Council, nobody from the company, not me. It said to put the boringest person she had at the front. It said his face would make Tuesday about the manhunt and the three of them instead of about the boxes. It said he would work anyone she wanted off camera, all day, and then it said, keep the founder off the stage.
Eleanor read it twice. She did not read things twice anymore.
She had been wrong about Marcus. Not about the man he had been for two weeks — she had him exactly right there — but about whether he could stop being that man for one email on a Sunday. He had wanted the seat his whole life, but had done the correct calculation, come to the same answer she wanted him to reach, and turned it down. She did not know many people who could do that. She was not sure she could have, at his age.
So that settled who the boring one at the front would be.
It was going to be her.
She sipped on her coffee. After Tuesday came the timeline, and after the timeline a year, maybe two, of being the face the world looked at when it wanted to know whether the fix was real — hearings, cameras, the morning programs, a thousand rooms, every one of them needing a calm old woman to say yes, keep going. She was seventy-four. She had a chair at home that was better than this one and a garden she had not stood in since the Tuesday this all started. She had allowed herself, in the worst of the last two weeks, to think about the part that came after this was over, which was going home.
The part was not going to happen for a long time.
She could have handed it to someone else. There were younger people on the Council who photographed better and slept more and would have taken it gladly, for exactly the reasons Marcus Reed had just declined it. That was the problem. The job needed the one person who wanted it least, because wanting it was the disqualifying thing — it was what would have gone wrong with Marcus, and it would go wrong with anyone who reached for it.
She wanted it least of anyone in the building. That was why she was perfect for it.
Josh knocked and leaned in. “Oduya’s on at four-thirty. Do you want me to tell him the founder said no?”
“Tell him the founder said the fix is real,” Eleanor said, “and gave us a quote to that effect, and then tell him the founder is staying off the stage, and that he is right to.”
“And the face? He’s going to ask who.”
“Tell him I’ll be the face.”
Josh looked at her for a second longer than he needed to, and then he nodded and went to set up the link.
Eleanor turned the printed page face down on the desk and drank the rest of her coffee. Then she opened a blank message to Oduya, so he could not later pretend on camera that the idea had been his, and typed one line.
Paul — I will be the Council’s public face for the transition, effective Tuesday, for as long as it takes. E.V.
She sent it, and then she sat in the chair in the going-dark office and thought about the garden she was not going to see, and then she picked up the phone to find out how many mornings a week the networks were going to want her and whether any of them would let her do it with her shoes off.