7. Orion
— ? —
Orion
“You filed for what?”
The words hung in the air between us, and I watched my wife’s face for some sign that this was a joke, a test, anything other than what it sounded like.
Her expression didn’t change. Closed. Like she’d built a wall while I was gone and bricked herself safely behind it.
“Divorce,” she repeated. “My lawyer is drawing up the papers. You should expect to hear from her by the end of the week.”
I stood in the middle of the hospital room, flowers still clutched in my hand like an idiot, and tried to make my brain process what was happening.
The flight had been fourteen hours. I hadn’t slept.
I’d come straight from the airstrip, still wearing the same clothes I’d had on in Singapore, probably smelling like recycled airplane air and desperation.
And my wife was filing for divorce.
“Gianna…” I stepped toward the bed, toward her, toward my son sleeping peacefully in the bassinet beside her. “Can we just… can we talk about this?”
“We’re talking.”
“I mean really talk. Not…” I gestured helplessly at the hospital room, at the IV stand and the monitors and the industrial furniture designed for efficiency rather than comfort. “Not here. Not like this.”
“This is where we are, Orion. This is how it is.” She finally looked at me, and I flinched at the emptiness in her eyes. “I called you eighteen times.”
“I know. I saw the…”
“Eighteen times. While I was in labor. While I was terrified and alone and being told our baby was in distress.” Her voice stayed eerily calm, which was somehow worse than if she’d been screaming. “And you didn’t answer once.”
The flowers felt stupid in my hand. I set them on the windowsill, where they looked even more pathetic, a grocery store bouquet in a room full of institutional beige, like I’d thought I could fix this with bluebonnets and good intentions.
“The meetings ran late,” I started, and I heard how hollow it sounded even as I said it. “The deal was falling apart, and every time I tried to step away…”
“You were at a party.”
“That was after. That was… the deal closed, and the team wanted to celebrate, and I didn’t even want to be there…”
“But you were.” She cut me off, her voice sharp enough to draw blood. “You were drinking champagne with my sister while they were cutting our son out of my body.”
There was no defense for that. No spin I could put on it, no negotiation tactic that would make it sound better. I’d been at a bar, glass in hand, while Gianna was in surgery. While our son was being born. While she was calling me, over and over, and I…
“I didn’t know,” I said, and the words tasted like ash. “Gianna, I swear to God, I didn’t know you were in labor.”
“Because you didn’t answer your phone.”
“I had it on silent.” The admission scraped out of me like broken glass. “The notifications were… I was stressed about the deal, and I thought I had time, and I…”
“You silenced your phone.” Her laugh was hollow, humorless. “Your wife was nine months pregnant, due any day, and you silenced your phone because the notifications were stressing you out.”
I had no response. I’d done the thing she was accusing me of, and no amount of explaining would make it less monstrous.
“I made a mistake,” I said. “I know that. I know I…”
“A mistake is forgetting to pick up milk. A mistake is missing a dinner reservation.” She shook her head slowly.
“This was a choice, Orion. You chose to go to Singapore a week before my due date. You chose to silence your phone. You chose to celebrate with my sister while I was alone. And now I’m making a choice too. ”
“Please.” The word came out desperate, nothing like the voice I used in boardrooms and negotiations. “Tell me what to do. Tell me how to fix this.”
“You can’t fix it. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you.
” She turned away from me, facing the window, her shoulders rigid.
“I’ve spent two years waiting for you to choose me.
Waiting for you to show up. Waiting for you to be the man you were when we first met, the one who looked at me like I was the most important thing in the room.
” Her voice cracked, just barely. “I’m done waiting. ”
I stood there, useless and completely out of my depth. I’d negotiated deals worth billions. I’d stared down hostile boards and aggressive competitors. None of it had prepared me for this.
None of it had taught me how to beg.
“I love you,” I said.
“I know.” She didn’t turn around. “That’s not enough anymore.”
The silence stretched between us, unbridgeable.
I looked at my son. My son, who I’d barely glimpsed, who I hadn’t held, who had entered the world while I was ten thousand miles away toasting champagne.
He was so small, so perfect. So completely unaware that his parents’ marriage was ending before he was three days old.
“Can I at least…” My voice broke. I had to stop, swallow, try again. “Can I hold him? Please.”
Gianna was quiet for a long moment. Then she shifted, reaching into the bassinet, lifting Alex with the careful tenderness of someone who’d been doing this alone for days. She held him out to me without meeting my eyes.
I took him.
He weighed nothing. Seven pounds of blankets and new life, warm against my chest. His eyes were closed, his face scrunched up in sleep, his tiny fists curled against his cheeks.
I looked down at him and felt something crack open in my chest, something I’d kept locked away for years, buried under deals and ambition and the relentless forward motion of my life.
“Hey,” I whispered. “Hey, Alex. I’m your dad.”
He didn’t respond, obviously. He was two days old. But something in his face shifted, like he was listening, like he knew.
“I’m going to be better,” I told him. “I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to figure it out.”
Gianna watched me hold our son, and for a moment, just a moment, I saw something flicker in her eyes. Something that looked almost like grief.
“You should go,” she said quietly.
“Gianna…”
“Please.” Her voice wavered. “I can’t do this right now. I can’t look at you holding him and pretend everything’s okay. Just… go. Please.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to plant myself in this hospital room and refuse to leave until she agreed to give me another chance. But I’d spent two years bulldozing over her boundaries, dismissing her concerns, treating her needs as obstacles to be managed rather than requests to be honored.
That was what had gotten us here.
So I pressed a kiss to my son’s forehead, memorizing the smell of him, the impossible softness of his skin, and handed him back to his mother.
“I’m not giving up,” I said. “I want you to know that. Whatever it takes, however long it takes, I’m not giving up on us.”
She didn’t respond. Just held Alex against her chest and stared out the window, waiting for me to leave.
I left.
***
The hallway outside her room was fluorescent-bright and endless, identical doors stretching in both directions. I made it about twenty steps before my legs gave out.
I leaned against the wall and tried to breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way my therapist had taught me years ago when the panic attacks had started. I hadn’t had one in a long time. Hadn’t needed to.
Apparently, watching your marriage implode in real-time was enough to bring them back.
What have I done?
The question circled in my head like a vulture.
I’d taken the struggling ranch my father left behind, the one my mother had kept alive through sheer stubbornness, and built Cliff Holdings on top of it.
Made my first million at twenty-three, my first billion at thirty-one.
Been called a visionary by people who didn’t know what the word meant.
I’d grown a ranch into an empire. Cattle, energy, real estate, investments.
The kind of diversified Texas wealth that made old money nervous.
And I couldn’t keep my wife.
A nurse walked by, glanced at me with concern, asked if I needed anything. I shook my head without looking at her. What was I supposed to say? Yes, I need a time machine. I need to go back two days and answer my goddamn phone. Or maybe not leave my wife for a deal.
My cell buzzed in my pocket.
I pulled it out, half-hoping it was Gianna, that she’d changed her mind, that she was going to give me one more chance.
It was Demi.
Great trip! Let me know when you want to debrief. Drinks?
I stared at the message.
My wife had just told me she was filing for divorce, and Demi Porter wanted to get drinks. Like we were colleagues who’d closed a routine deal, not two people at the center of a catastrophe.
I thought about Gianna’s face when she’d mentioned the Instagram photo. The champagne. Demi’s arm through mine. While they were cutting our son out of my body.
I thought about all the late nights in my office. The way Demi had always found reasons to linger. The bourbon she’d poured without asking, the way she’d leaned too close, smiled too long.
I thought about how spectacularly, catastrophically stupid I’d been.
My thumb moved to her contact. Scrolled to the bottom of the options.
Block this caller.
I tapped it.
Then I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor of the hospital hallway, expensive boots and all, and put my head in my hands.
A janitor pushed a mop past me, gave me a look that suggested he’d seen worse, and kept moving without comment.
This is rock bottom, I thought. This is what rock bottom looks like.
Somewhere down the hall, a baby cried.
And I sat there on the cold linoleum floor, surrounded by the smell of antiseptic and the hum of fluorescent lights, and made myself a promise.
I was going to fix this.
I didn’t know how yet. Didn’t know if it was even possible. But I was going to try.
Because the alternative, a life without Gianna, without Alex, without the family I’d been too distracted to appreciate, wasn’t something I could survive.