20. Jackson
Jackson
Some mistakes cost money. Some cost pride. The worst ones cost the person you were trying to keep.
I just made the worst mistake of my life.
She’d misunderstood.
Kim did not come home that night.
I don't remember the drive. I remember the house being empty when I walked in. I understood, with the same cold clarity I use to read a balance sheet, that she wasn’t coming back.
This was Logan's fault. If he hadn't chosen that exact moment to ask that question.
I had blurted out the necklace line, which was the worst thing I could have said.
She didn't hear what came next. That the necklace was a lie I'd told myself.
That the real reason I couldn't stay away from her—the terrifying, non-strategic, uncontrollable reason—was that I was in love with her and couldn't see straight.
She didn’t hear that part.
It was past midnight. I couldn't sleep. I ended up on the conservatory floor with the cat.
Maple, who had spent the first month of my cohabitation treating me with the disdain of a creature who understood instinctively that I was not the preferred human in this house, had recently, grudgingly, ruled me acceptable.
She was the only one left who hadn’t walked out.
She climbed into my lap, which she had never done before, and settled there with the air of a being who was granting an enormous favor and expected gratitude.
"I ruined it," I told the cat.
Maple blinked at me.
"I had the one good thing in this house, and I ruined it because I couldn’t say three words at the right time."
She yawned.
"I should go after her. I should find her and explain. I should tell her everything. The safe, the necklace, the fact that none of it matters because I’m in love with her and I’ve been in love with her since she stood in my kitchen talking to a kitten about nutrition.
" I looked down at the cat. "Do you think she’d let me explain? "
Maple meowed. A single, decisive sound.
"So you think I should go after her?"
Another meow. Then she bit my thumb.
"Ow. Was that encouragement or criticism?"
She purred. Smugly. The exact expression Kim wore when she won an argument, and the resemblance was so precise that it hurt.
"You’re no help," I told her. "You’re also the only living thing in this house still speaking to me, so you’ll have to do."
Maple kneaded my leg with her claws, which I chose to interpret as solidarity, and the four kittens tumbled out from behind the potting bench and piled on top of me.
This is what remains. The animals she rescued.
The plants she watered. The traces of her everywhere, in every room, in every small domestic thing she’d touched and made warm, and I was sitting in the wreckage of it like a man who’d burned his own house down and was surprised to find himself homeless.
Monday morning. I was at my desk at six-thirty, which was normal. I was wearing a suit, which was normal. I was refreshing the building access log every four minutes to see whether Kimberly Bishop had badged through the lobby, which was not normal.
By eight o’clock she hadn’t appeared. I called Sophie.
"Has Ms. Bishop come in this morning?"
"Not yet, sir. Should I call her?"
"No. Let me know when she arrives."
At eight-forty-five I called Sophie again.
"Is Ms. Bishop in the building?"
"Still no, Mr. Whitlock. Would you like me to…"
"No. Just notify me."
At nine-fifteen I called a third time. Sophie answered before the first ring finished, and the words came out rehearsed, like she’d been waiting all morning for the chance to use them.
"Mr. Whitlock, Ms. Bishop has not entered the building. I have been watching the lobby entrance, the service entrance, the parking garage elevator, and the fire escape. She is not here. Would you like me to send a search party, or is this a personal matter?"
She'd come a long way from the woman who apologized to doorframes.
"It’s a professional inquiry, Ms. Lee."
"Of course it is, sir."
"You’re dismissed, Sophie."
"I’m going to lunch. I’ll keep watching the lobby. Professionally."
I hung up and stared at my phone. I had never in my adult life been dumped. I had ended every relationship I’d been in, and the possibility that someone had ended things with me first was both novel and deeply unpleasant.
I called Kim’s phone. It rang four times and went to voicemail. Her recorded voice, bright and professional and warm, said she wasn’t available and to leave a message.
I called again an hour later. Voicemail.
Again. Voicemail.
I was considering calling a fourth time when Sophie buzzed through with a delivery. A letter. Hand-delivered by courier, cream envelope, my name written on the front in careful, precise handwriting I recognized immediately.
I opened it. Inside was a single typed page. A formal resignation letter, dated Saturday, signed at the bottom in her cursive. Effective immediately.
I read it once. Then I tore it in half.
I was not accepting it. There was no version of my operating reality that included a permanent hole shaped like Kimberly Bishop.
I had spent years being a man who takes, and it had cost me the only thing I wanted to keep.
So I was going to become a man who gives, and I was going to do it loudly, and persistently, and without dignity, until she believed it.
I canceled the two o’clock meeting with the Tokyo team. I told Sophie I was leaving for the afternoon. She looked at me with undisguised fascination and said, "Good luck, Mr. Whitlock."
"Thank you for the unsolicited speech, Ms. Lee."
"You’re welcome. You clearly need it. Professionally."
I drove to Beacon Hill.
Kim’s apartment was in a walk-up on a narrow street that smelled like rain and bus exhaust and the Thai restaurant on the corner. I parked the car, which looked absurd on this street, a European SUV gleaming among ten-year-old sedans, and I knocked on the door of unit 3B.
The door opened. It was not Kim.
It was Katelyn.
I’d met her once, at the hospital, a sharp-eyed woman in her mid-twenties with her sister’s curls. She stood in the doorway in a university sweatshirt and joggers, holding a coffee mug with a librarian joke on it.
She was staring at me the way a border guard looks at a man whose passport photograph doesn’t quite match his face.
"My sister isn’t here," she said.
"Where is she?"
"She wouldn’t want me to tell you that."
"Ms. Bishop…"
"Katelyn. And you can drop the corporate voice, Mr. Whitlock."
I looked at her with what I hoped resembled sincerity. "I need to see her, Katelyn."
"Why?"
"Because I love her."
Katelyn looked at me. She took another sip of coffee. The silence lasted long enough that I could hear the television in the apartment next door and a child crying two floors down and the Thai restaurant venting garlic into the stairwell.
"She’s angry, Jackson."
"She has the right to be."
Katelyn’s mouth twitched. She was fighting a smile.
"Speak of the devil…"
Katelyn's gaze shifted past my shoulder, toward the stairwell. Her eyebrows lifted.
I turned around.
Kim stood on the landing in jeans and a loose sweater, her hair down, her face bare of makeup. A grocery bag in one arm, keys in the other. She was staring at me with an expression that contained approximately seventeen emotions, none of which I could read and all of which I deserved.
Katelyn looked between us long enough to draw her own conclusions, then gave her sister a look I couldn't interpret and stepped back into the doorway, blocking the entrance to her apartment.
"Kim," I said.
"What are you doing here, Jackson?"
"I came to tell you something I should have said weeks ago." I took a step toward her. She didn’t move. Her eyes were red-rimmed and guarded and absolutely merciless. "I love you. I’m in love with you. I have been in love with you since you argued with me on a terrace about my own family and didn’t back down, and I was too afraid to say it because I’ve never said it to anyone and I didn’t know how to make the words sound like they were big enough. "
"You love me." Her voice was flat.
"Yes."
"The way you loved getting access to your mother’s safe? That kind of love?"
"No. The kind that made me lie awake every night watching you sleep and knowing I didn’t deserve you. It terrified me, Kim, because I’ve controlled everything in my life since I was twenty-two years old, and I can’t control this, and it’s the first time that’s ever felt like a good thing."
Her chin was up but her eyes were full, and I could see the war happening behind them, the part that wanted to believe me fighting the part that had been burned.
"I don’t believe you," she said.
"What would it take? What could I possibly say that would make you trust me again?"
She looked at me for a long time. "You should go, Jackson."
"Are you coming back to the estate?"
"No."
"Kim." I reached into my jacket and pulled out the torn resignation letter. "I’m not accepting this."
She looked at the shredded letter. A fraction of something crossed her face, maybe incredulity, maybe the ghost of humor at the sight of a billionaire’s tantrum.
"You can’t refuse a resignation."
"I can because you’re not an employee, ten percent of the company belongs to you. You’re contractually bound to the estate under the terms of Greta Whitlock’s will. You agreed to one year. We’re not at one year."
Her eyes went sharp. "Are you threatening me with a legal clause, Jackson? Right now? In the middle of what you’re calling a love confession?"
"It wasn’t a threat." I’d heard how it sounded the moment it left me, and hated it.
"I don’t know how to do this without sounding like a contract, Kim.
So I’m going to do it badly. I’m informing you that I love you.
That I will go on loving you regardless of how long you choose to be angry with me.
And that I am not approving this resignation, not because of the will, but because I refuse to let you walk out of my life over a sentence you didn’t let me finish. "
She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no. She looked at me with those hazel eyes, the ones I’d fallen asleep watching, the ones I’d woken up reaching for, and then she turned and entered her apartment and closed the door.
"I’ll wait. However long it takes, Kim. I’ll wait."