Chapter 10
Patrick
I’m talking to Sarah’s photograph.
I know how that sounds. I know it because I’m aware, every time I do it, that it’s the behavior of a man who is not entirely okay.
But Erick is sleeping, the apartment is quiet, and the photograph is on my bedside table where it has been since I moved it from the living room after she died, and sometimes there’s just nothing else to do.
“I’m not going to forget you,” I tell her.
She doesn’t answer. She never answers. She just looks back at me from inside the frame the way she always does, that particular expression, something between amusement and exasperation that I must have caught on a bad day or a very good one, I can’t remember anymore which.
That’s what keeps me awake at night. I’ve learned to carry the grief, the guilt, the exact weight of what I did and what it cost. What I can’t bear is forgetting.
I hate the way details slip, like the sound of her voice.
I have videos, I watch them sometimes, but the voice in the videos and the voice in my memory have started to diverge in small ways I can’t identify or correct.
The way she smelled. The exact weight of her hand.
She’s slipping.
And in the space where she’s slipping, something else is moving in.
“I’m sorry,” I tell the photograph. “I can’t stop. I’ve tried.”
What I’ve tried and failed at, for two months now: not thinking about Elena Brown.
Not thinking about the way she looks in the dresses she wears with a specificity of purpose she thinks I haven’t clocked.
Not thinking about her perfume, which she changed sometime in the fifth week and which hits the back of my brain every morning in a way I can’t argue with.
Not thinking about the look she had on her face when I stood behind her at the computer and didn’t step back when I should have. Not thinking about her mouth.
I’m at my desk by seven and I’m fine. I’m controlled.
I’m a man who runs six miles before breakfast and built a company from a name into something that matters and raised a child largely alone for three years.
I’m not undone by an assistant who brings me cookies and asks if I slept well with her particular brand of targeted casualness that she thinks I don’t see through.
I’m fine.
I’m reading through the morning’s email stack at eight forty-five when I find it.
The vendor confirmation for the Castellano collection shipment. Dated eleven days ago. Flagged to Elena’s inbox. Below it, an automated follow-up from the logistics company. Below that, another one, marked urgent. Below that, a message from the vendor’s account manager asking where the response is.
I go through the whole chain. I already know what I’m going to find at the bottom of it.
Nothing. No response. No forwarding. No calendar note. No mention of it to me at any point in eleven days.
I sit back.
The indemnization alone is going to be significant. The delay has pushed the collection launch into a different quarter. The vendors are owed a formal response within the next twenty-four hours, or this gets messier.
I close my eyes. Open them. Look at the email chain again.
I pick up my phone and dial her extension.
“Come to my office.”
She appears in the doorway forty seconds later, which tells me she was already bracing for something. She has a notepad. She always brings a notepad to serious conversations now, like the notepad will help, like the notepad will absorb whatever’s coming.
I turn the screen toward her and let her read.
I watch her face. She reads the chain. Her expression goes through several things quickly: recognition, calculation, something like dread, and then, and this is where it starts, the pivot to defense. Her chin lifts slightly.
“I got that confirmation,” she says. “I saw it.”
“And.”
“And there were about fourteen other things happening that day, including the Marchetti call going long and the building maintenance people showing up without any notice and—”
“Elena.”
“I’m not making excuses. I’m giving you context.”
“The context doesn’t change the outcome.” I keep my voice level. “The shipment is delayed. We owe an indemnization. The vendor has been waiting eleven days for a response.”
“I understand that.” A beat. “What I don’t understand is why I’m supposed to know that a shipment confirmation requires an immediate vendor follow-up when nobody told me that.
You don’t tell me things. You send me into situations and expect me to figure out the protocol by instinct, and when I get it wrong because nobody explained what right looks like, you sit there with that face and act like I did something deliberately. ”
The room goes quiet.
“That face,” I say.
“You know what face.”
“Enlighten me.”
She puts the notepad down. “The face that says I’m incompetent.
The face that says you knew this would happen.
The face you make when I walk into your office with something and you take it without looking at me because if you look at me it’s too much effort to pretend I’m not here.
” Her voice doesn’t shake. She’s not panicking.
She’s angry, and the anger is genuine, and it lands differently than I expected.
“I’ve been here two months. You’ve explained exactly three things to me directly.
The rest I’ve been guessing at because asking you questions is like trying to have a conversation with a very handsome wall. ”
A very handsome wall.
I’m on my feet before I know I’ve stood up.
“I need you to understand,” I say, “that the cost of what just got missed is not a small number.”
“Then tell me the number.” She doesn’t step back. “Tell me the number, explain to me what I missed and why it matters and what the right process is, and I promise you it will never happen again. That’s all I’ve ever needed. Just tell me.”
We’re three feet apart. I don’t know when that happened.
“What do you need from me?” I say. My voice has changed and I can hear it.
“I need you to stop acting like I’m invisible.”
I don’t mean to close the distance. I genuinely don’t mean to do what I do next.
But she’s right there, and she’s furious, and her blue eyes are doing something I’ve been cataloguing for two months with careful, futile discipline. I cross the last foot between us and I kiss her.
She makes a sound against my mouth, surprise more than anything, and then her hand is in my shirt and she’s kissing me back with a focus that tells me she’s been waiting for this longer than I have and is not wasting a second of it.
I pull back. My hands are on her face. I have no memory of putting them there.
“I can’t do this.” My voice sounds wrong. Rougher than I intend.
“Patrick.” Just my name. Just my name in her voice, with everything underneath it.
“You don’t understand what you’re asking.”
She reaches up and unbuttons the top button of her dress.
Then the second one.
Underneath is black lace. Like the one I saw two months ago on the couch and have not been able to fully stop thinking about since.
But this is different. This is deliberate.
She wore this knowing it might come to this, knowing she might win, and looking at her face I can tell she’s known for longer than today.
She did this on purpose.
“You’ve been doing this on purpose,” I say.
“Yes,” she says.
That’s all. Just yes, her eyes on mine, her dress open, the black lace underneath, her full mouth still red from being kissed.
Something in me that has been holding for three years simply lets go.
I reach out and finish what she started with the buttons, slowly, watching her face as I do it.
She doesn’t look away. The dress slides off her shoulders and she lets it go, and she is standing in my office in black lace with the Manhattan skyline behind her and the light falling across her in a way that hits me somewhere I don’t have a name for.
I pull her back in and kiss her the way I’ve been trying not to imagine for two months.
Deep, unhurried, my hands in her hair, her hands pulling at my shirt like she has a plan and she’s executing it.
She’s warm everywhere, the warmth I felt that day on the couch, impossible and real, and she makes a sound against my mouth that I feel in my spine.
I reach behind her and unhook the bra. She lets me. Her skin is smooth and warm and she arches into my hands like she was made to be touched, her head tipping back, and I put my mouth on her throat, her collarbone, lower.
“Patrick.” My name again, different now. Unsteady.
I pick her up. She wraps her legs around me without hesitation, arms around my neck.
I carry her to the couch in the corner of my office and lay her down.
Take a second to look at her. Dark hair spread across the cushion.
Skin pale, soft, luminous. Her breasts perfect, the kind of perfect that makes you feel stupid for a moment, just standing there.
Nothing left but black lace. She’s so fucking beautiful it does something to my chest I wasn’t prepared for.
She pulls me down by the collar.
“You wanted this.” My voice doesn’t sound like me.
Lower. More honest than I usually let myself be.
I slide my hand down her stomach, under the lace and caress her.
She pulls in a sharp breath. “Tell me.” I say while I draw gentle circles around her wetness not giving her yet what I can feel she needs.
She’s so beautiful, and I want her to know it, I want her to know how much I desire her, how much I want this.
“I want you.” Her nails dig into my shoulder. “Yes.”
“How long.” I say while I tease her more, I can already feel how wet she is and I slowly enter one finger just at the entrance. She feels incredible, she’s all wet all warm.
“Since the beginning.” She moves against my hand and makes a sound I want to hear again.
I introduce my finger deeper, then add a second one while I circle her clit with my thumb. She’s gasping, and moaning and I’m so damn hard it hurts. She says my name between moans. And I can’t believe this is actually happening.
She comes apart slowly, then all at once, her whole body pulling tight, her voice breaking open in a way she’s clearly trying and failing to control. I stay exactly where I am and give her every second of it. She’s shaking slightly when it’s over, her fingers twisted in my hair.
She reaches for me. Her hands are sure, direct, nothing performative about it, she knows what she wants and she takes it. She looks up at me while she does it and I grit my teeth against the sound that wants to come out of me.
“Condom,” I say.
She reaches to where her dress fell and produces one from somewhere that makes me look at her differently and want to laugh at the same time, this woman, this absolutely unprecedented woman, and then there’s no room for anything else because she’s rolling it on and pulling me toward her.
I give her what she wants, what I want, what I’ve been dreaming so much it started to feel like real.
I want to savor every minute of it, so I push into her slowly, watching her face.
“Christ.” I say it into her hair. She’s tight and warm and she makes a sound that undoes everything I thought I knew about managing this.
I start to move.
I take my time. Long, deep, deliberate, learning exactly what makes her breath catch, what makes her dig her nails in, what makes her say my name in that broken, specific way.
I want to know all of it. I want to know it the way I know the design of everything I’ve ever built, with complete precision and full attention.
“You’re going to remember this,” I tell her. Low, close to her ear, my hand in her hair. “Every time you think about what you wanted from me. You’re going to remember exactly what it felt like.”
She says my name. More than once. Each time a little more undone than the last.
I give her everything I have.
It’s the middle of the morning.
We both seem to remember this at the same time.
There’s a moment where neither of us moves and neither of us speaks and the air has the specific quality of something that can’t be taken back. Then she reaches for her dress. I button my shirt. I don’t look at her while I do it. She doesn’t look at me.
She finds the rest of what she came in with. Notepad. Pen. She picks them up from the floor by the couch without comment.
I go back to my desk. She goes back to the door.
And it happens then, unprompted, nothing in the room to trigger it: Sarah’s face. Not the photograph, not a memory I chose. Just her face, arriving without permission, the way it sometimes does. The exact shape of her eyes. The expression she had the last time she was really, fully looking at me.
The guilt doesn’t come slowly. It comes all at once.
I turn toward the window. My hands are on the back of my chair.
“I can’t do this,” I say. The same words I said before. They mean something different now.
Elena is still in the doorway.
“I understand.” Her voice is level. Not cold, level, with something underneath it that tells me she’s running the same calculation I am. “Yes. You’re right.” A beat. “This will not happen again.”
She says it the way you say something you need to be true. The way you say something out loud to make it real.
I don’t turn around.
She closes the door behind her.
The next morning I do what I tell myself is practical.
I tell Maria I'll take Erick to preschool. But first, the office.
The moment Elena sees him, she'll understand. Women like her, young, beautiful, the kind who could have anyone, don't sign up for this. She'll see a four-year-old and do the math.
She's ten years younger than me. Funny, sharp, the kind of woman who knows she has options. She should be with someone unburdened. No dead wife he still talks to, no grief that never fully left.
She deserves that. And the second she sees Erick, she’ll let this go, and so will I. That will be the end of it.