“We are going to do amazing things together. I am going to help you soar, Bette.”

“What you need in a COO, right?”

They alighted from the cart.

Bette smiled as she watched her new COO address her ball, carefully estimating the distance she’d have to hit her hybrid club in order to get the ball clear off of the bunkers on the left.

Right. Lea is exactly what I need.

xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Bette and Tina’s duplex, New York, the next evening.

Bette hit the mute button on her remote when Tina burst into her office. Her wife rarely did so – when Bette shut the door, this meant she couldn’t be disturbed.

Tina’s eyes burned with a keen, desperate light, and there was a certain tension, a vibrating nervousness in her body, as she gripped the door knob. “We need to talk.”

“Are you alright?”

“Umm… yeah, but…”

“Richard and I have to work out whether we should pull the trigger on the sale of a cache of gold from the batch we’d relocated from the salt mines in the border of Austria and Germany, babe ..”

“Can it wait, Bette?”

“We’ve got a lot to cover, yet, honey, and not a lot of time to plan.”

“It’s important, Bette.”

“You know I would hang up right now if I could, babe …”

Richard was talking in the background as they exchanged a long look. The moonlight, paving a silvery path into Bette’s office from the floor to ceiling window, split Tina’s face, so that half of it was illuminated, strangely tense, taut, and nervous, while half was shaded in darkness.  Bette couldn’t make out its meaning, but somewhere, in the back of her mind, she sensed “a shoe drop.”

She opened her mouth to tell Tina she was hanging up, and was about to unmute her end of the call with Richard but suddenly, Tina turned on her heel and walked stiffly towards the door. She replied over her shoulder, “Fine, I’ll take a shower, and we can talk after you’re done with Richard.”

She left Bette’s office as suddenly as she’d entered it, and yanked the door shut behind her.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Tina wiped her tears away with the fluffy bath sheet before she toweled off.   Bette had left her smartphone in the bathroom, and the playlist she’d tabbed to was still playing in the speakers that she’d wirelessly connected to.  Tina realized Bette had been in athleisure wear while talking to Richard in her office, so she must have been intending to shower after a work-out, but Richard must have interrupted that.