35. Cali
CALI
The Uber ride home is a blur of streetlights and my own reflection in the window, though I refuse to glance at it for long. There's no point—I know what I look like.
I look like a woman who fell for the cruelest lies of all.
Again.
By the time I let myself into the brownstone, I've stopped crying. Mostly. The house is dark and quiet without the kids. I stand in the foyer with their little rainboots lined up against the wall and breathe.
Then, when I'm composed, I go straight to my laptop.
Because I am not Old Cali. Old Cali would crawl into bed and cry into a pint of something. New Cali fights. So I sit down at the kitchen island, exactly where I built the worst spreadsheet of my life six weeks ago, and I open the company dashboard to see how bad it is.
Except I can't.
Authentication failed.
I type the password again. The same red error message pops up. Authentication failed.
I try the admin portal. The corporate filing service. The bank. The data infrastructure I begged and clawed to keep online, that Ronan cleared a forty-one-thousand-dollar invoice to save.
Access revoked. Please contact your account administrator.
I am the account administrator.
I try the fraud engine, but the login screen doesn't even argue with me. It just sits there, blank and polite, refusing to recognize the woman who made it.
I stare at the screen until the letters go soft and swimmy.
Here it comes. Not the cold, clean, flat deadness from the Phoenix hotel and not the fanged focus from the car line with Paula. This grief arrives all at once, a wave that drags me under without ever breaking. I fold in half over the counter and let out an inhuman wail.
It isn't the theft of the company that's killing me. Not entirely.
It's the napkin, worn soft at the corners from being handled by a wide-eyed optimist who thought, Maybe, maybe this could work.
It's You're beautiful, Calista Meadows, again and again, until I'd almost started to believe it.
It's the mirrors he stole so I couldn't make myself small.
It's I've loved you since before I knew your name.
It's a man on his knees telling my daughter he'd do his best to stay forever.
It's pancakes and caterpillars and octopuses and dancing like we were the only two in the room.
It's the fact that all of that was a lie. A sad, cruel, nasty, vicious lie.
The heartbreak lasts about ninety seconds. It's the worst ninety seconds I have had since a scale three thousand miles away told me my life was a lie.
Then I sit up. I wipe my face with the heel of my hand.
And I open a fresh spreadsheet.