Chapter 31
Patrick
Quinn is excellent.
It took me a minute to retrain my ear for they/them. Habit, not resistance. Quinn is nonbinary, and the pronouns fit them the way precision fits everything else they do.
They arrive at eight fifteen every morning, twelve minutes before I do, with my schedule printed, my coffee ordered, and three flagged items already triaged.
They are organized in the genuine sense, the kind where everything has a system and the system has a logic and the logic never fails.
They don’t lose files. They don’t misspell client names.
They don’t leave Post-its on my monitor.
They are built like a collegiate wrestler and have a handshake that could crack a walnut. Their voice carries through glass. When David comes to confirm the car, Quinn greets him by name and asks about his daughter’s recital, which they learned about on day two.
Quinn is, by every metric, the best assistant I have had in a year.
I hate it.
Not them. They’re fine. Better than fine.
The problem is that efficiency creates time, and time is the thing I can’t afford right now.
When I was managing the chaos of a revolving door of assistants who couldn’t last a month, the gaps filled the hours.
Now Quinn handles things. Meetings run early.
The inbox is clean by noon. I find myself sitting in my office at two thirty on a Thursday with nothing urgent, nothing pending, nothing requiring my attention, and the silence fills with her.
Every time.
The calendar on my screen is open to four weeks from now.
I have counted. Four weeks have passed since she left.
Four weeks since she told me about Boston, about the theater company, about the role.
Eight weeks total. That’s what she said.
An eight-week run. Which means four more weeks until the run ends, until she comes back to New York, until the math changes.
I do this calculation daily. Sometimes twice. The part of me that built a company on discipline, on data, on controlled variables, the part that knows better, watches the other part scroll forward on the calendar counting days like a teenager waiting for summer.
It’s pathetic. I’m aware.
What I do with the time Quinn has freed up is replay things. Not memories, exactly. Memories implies something soft, something you visit on purpose. This is different. This is involuntary. Compulsive. A loop that starts without my permission and runs until something external interrupts it.
The sound she made when she laughed. The way she held her coffee with both hands like she was afraid someone would take it.
The way she looked at me across the desk when she thought I wasn’t watching, with something in her eyes that I still can’t name but recognized instantly because I was looking at her the same way.
The morning after that night, standing in my kitchen. The way she wore my shirt. All that happened later.
That one stays the longest.
And when I’m not replaying what happened, I’m constructing what comes next.
A thousand versions. I drive to Boston. I wait outside the theater.
I call her. I show up at Nadia’s. I write something.
I say the things I should have said when she was standing at her desk with tears on her face telling me she was leaving.
I say: Don’t go. Stay. Not because I need an assistant but because I need you, because Erick needs you, because this apartment has been a mausoleum since Sarah died and you walked in and turned on the lights.
I didn’t say any of that. I nodded. I let her go. It was the right thing to do, because I couldn’t give her what she wanted. Her freedom. The one thing I’ve been bracing for her to say from day one, the thing I thought I’d prevent by bringing Erick to the office.
When Sarah died, I thought that was the ceiling.
The upper limit of what loss could be. The emptiness she left, the guilt I carried, the three years of functioning without living.
I thought nothing could touch that. I built my understanding of grief around it.
That was the worst. Everything after would be measured against it and found smaller.
I was wrong. Not because this is worse. It’s not the same shape. Losing Sarah was a door that slammed shut. Final. Brutal. Loaded with the weight of what I should have done, what I didn’t do. That grief had guilt stitched into it, and guilt gives loss a sharpness that doesn’t dull.
Losing Elena is different. Elena is alive.
Elena is somewhere in Boston, in a theater, being the person she left to become.
And the specific agony of that, the thing that sits under my ribs and refuses to move, is that she chose to leave.
She looked at me, at this life, at everything I thought I was offering, and decided it wasn’t enough. That she was disappearing.
She felt the cage. She said it differently, said she was building her life around mine. But the meaning underneath was clear: staying with me meant shrinking. I was the thing she needed to escape.
That runs under my skin in a way Sarah’s death never did. Because Sarah didn’t choose to leave me. Elena did.
Erick draws pictures.
He has drawn six. I’ve collected them. He works on one every few days at his desk in the corner of his room, bent over the paper with his markers, the tip of his tongue poking out the way it does when he’s concentrating.
Each one features the same cast: a tall figure, a small figure, and Rex, the orange dinosaur who protects them.
In some of them there’s a third figure. Smaller than the tall one, bigger than the small one. Dark hair. Blue scribbles for eyes.
He hasn’t asked about her in a week. He used to ask every morning.
When can we see Elena? Can you invite her over?
Can I call her? The questions stopped gradually, not because he forgot but because he is four years old and has already learned that some questions don’t get answered, so you stop asking and start drawing instead.
I told him Boston has a bad mail system. That the drawings might not get there, that the mail is slow, that sometimes things get lost between here and there. He accepted this with the solemn nod of a child who does not yet know when adults are lying.
The truth is I never asked for her address. I don’t have it. I have her phone number, which I have not called. I have her email, which I have not used. I have six drawings by a four-year-old who misses her, stacked on the kitchen counter in order, and nowhere to send them.
This is the thing I was trying to prevent.
This exact thing. The attachment, the loss, the look on his face when he started caring about her.
I tried. I kept the distance. I kept the rules.
Professional. Structured. Controlled. And none of it mattered because he loved her before I could do something about it.
I couldn’t protect him from this. I couldn’t even protect myself.
Alister calls on a Saturday.
Erick is with his grandparents for the weekend.
“I’m picking you up at seven.”
“No.”
“It wasn’t a question. Seven o’clock. Wear something that isn’t running clothes.”
“Alister.”
“Her name is Rebecca. She’s a partner at Whitfield Crane. She’s smart, she’s funny, she has a kid, she gets it. You’re going to have dinner, you’re going to talk to another human being who isn’t your four-year-old or your dead wife, and you’re going to remember that the world didn’t end.”
“I’m not interested.”
“You haven’t been interested in anything for a month.
That’s the problem.” His voice shifts, drops the performance, and I hear the friend underneath.
“Patrick. I watched you do this before. The disappearing thing. The thing where you function so well nobody notices you’ve left. I’m not watching it again.”
I close my eyes. Stand in my kitchen. The city hums outside the glass, indifferent to my preference for solitude.
“Seven,” he says. “Don’t make me come up.”
He hangs up before I can refuse again, which is a technique he perfected fifteen years ago and has never abandoned.
The restaurant is in SoHo. Alister picked it, somewhere new, somewhere with small plates and an Italian wine list and the kind of lighting that makes everyone look like they’re in a perfume commercial.
Rebecca is a litigation partner, mid-thirties, blonde hair, a mouth that moves constantly.
She talks about her daughter, about a case she just won, about burrata.
She asks about Erick. She asks about the company.
She is doing everything right and I am bored out of my mind.
Alister is across the table with his date, a woman named Lena or Lina, something close enough to something else that my chest seizes when he introduces her.
He doesn’t notice. He’s already into his second drink, doing his thing, being the version of himself that fills rooms and makes strangers feel chosen.
I nod at something Rebecca says. I pick up my glass. I put it down. The wine is excellent and it tastes like nothing.
This was a mistake. Not Rebecca specifically.
She is doing everything right and I am giving her nothing to work with, which is its own kind of cruelty, the quiet kind, the kind that doesn’t announce itself.
She laughs at something Alister says and I watch the laugh move across her face and I think, involuntarily, about a different laugh entirely.
One that arrived before its owner had decided whether something was funny.
Unguarded. Completely real. The kind you can’t manufacture across a dinner table from a man who is somewhere else entirely.
I have been making this comparison for five weeks. I am tired of it. I make it anyway.
I want to leave. I want to stand up, say goodnight, walk out into the SoHo air and go home to the apartment where Erick will be back tomorrow and the drawings are still on the kitchen counter and at least the emptiness there is honest. Here the emptiness is dressed up and seated across from me and asking about the company with the careful interest of a woman who deserves better than what I’m offering tonight.
Alister catches my eye across the table.
He is good at this, the double life of a divorced man who has figured out how to be present again, who has Max on alternate weekends and a different woman every few months and a genuine, baffling ability to enjoy a Saturday night for what it is. His look says I know. Stay anyway
I look away and move something around my plate.
That I was collected from my apartment by someone who loves me enough to be annoying about it, and that this is the version of help available to me right now, and I should be grateful. I am, technically, in the way you’re grateful for things that are true and entirely beside the point.
Under the table, something moves against my leg. Slow, deliberate. Rebecca has slipped off one shoe and is watching me with the calm confidence of a woman who has decided the evening needs a different direction. Her foot travels up my calf and stays there.
I put down my glass.
I look up.