Chapter Twelve
I moved into the guest room that night. Isla hadn't asked me to. Staying in our bedroom after the conversation at the kitchen table simply felt like a presumption I no longer had the right to make.
I sat on the edge of the unfamiliar bed for a long time before I even tried to sleep, phone in my hand, scrolling back through years of old photos without any real purpose beyond needing to look at something.
I found one from the balcony of the old apartment, the two of us with a bottle of cheap wine, both of us laughing at something lost now to time.
I zoomed in on Isla's face in that photo, young and unguarded, and tried to remember what she'd actually been thinking that year, beyond the general impression of happiness the photo suggested.
I couldn't. I had a thousand photos like that one, documenting a marriage I apparently understood only from the outside, the visible surface of it, without ever once asking what ran underneath.
I didn't sleep much. I kept coming back to the account transfer form, the number on it, the date.
I'd known, in the abstract, distant way you know things you've stopped actively thinking about, that Isla's inheritance had gone into the company at some point during the hard years.
I could have told you that fact if you'd quizzed me on it directly.
What I hadn't done, in longer than I wanted to admit, was hold that fact next to the story I told about myself, the one where I'd had no one else to bet on, and notice how badly the two fit together.
There was no one else to bet on. I'd said it to a reporter with total sincerity.
I believed it when I said it. That was the part that kept me awake, more than the fight itself, more than the guest room's unfamiliar ceiling.
I hadn't lied. I had simply, somewhere across fifteen years of retelling the same story at the same dinner parties and interviews and board meetings, edited Isla out of my own memory so thoroughly that I no longer noticed the gap where she should have been.
I texted Rhodes at some point past midnight, unable to sleep, something noncommittal about needing advice, and he called back within minutes, groggy but willing.
"What's going on," he said, not really a question.
"I said something to Isla," I told him. "I think I might have broken something I don't know how to fix."
"Whatever it is, sleep on it before you try to fix anything tonight," Rhodes said. "Nothing good happens at one in the morning. You'll just make it about your own guilt instead of about her."
"That's uncomfortably accurate."
"I've known you a long time," Rhodes said. "Go to sleep, Christian. Deal with it in the morning, when you can actually think straight."
I didn't sleep much.
I thought about Rhodes's comment from a few weeks back, the one about Isla and old man Kessler's father, forty-five minutes on the phone that might have saved the account.
I'd laughed it off at the time, filed it away as a minor historical footnote.
Lying in the guest room, I found myself trying to remember the actual conversation, and I couldn't. I remembered that it had happened, the way you remember a fact from a textbook, but I couldn't remember her voice, her face, what she'd looked like making that call.
I had been in the building. I must have walked past the doorway of the small office we shared back then while she was on the phone with him. I couldn't picture it.
I thought, too, about Keaton's question earlier that week, the one about Isla's portfolio, and how easily I'd answered work got busy for both of us, as though her abandoned career had simply evaporated on its own, weather rather than a decision, and certainly not a decision that I had any part in.
Around two in the morning, unable to sleep, I went and stood outside our bedroom door, some old instinct pulling me there even though I had no plan for what I'd say if she woke and found me.
I could see a thin line of light under the door, which meant she wasn't asleep either.
I raised my hand to knock and then didn't, standing there for a long minute in the dark hallway, understanding, finally, that whatever I wanted to say wasn't ready yet, that showing up at her door in the middle of the night with nothing but raw guilt to offer would only ask her to manage my feelings one more time, the exact pattern I was supposedly trying to break.
I went back to the guest room and lay awake until the window started to lighten, running through fragments of the last fifteen years, trying to locate other moments like the one Rhodes had mentioned, other gaps I hadn't noticed because I'd never had reason to look for them.
I couldn't find many, not with any specificity, and that inability frightened me more than finding a dozen would have.
It wasn't that the moments hadn't happened.
It was that I had never built the habit of looking for them at all.
I got up before dawn and went down to the kitchen, and the folder was still on the table where Isla had left it.
I sat with it a long time before I opened it again, looking at the account transfer form, at a number I now understood differently than I had the first time I'd seen it fifteen years ago, back when it had felt like rescue and nothing more complicated than that.
Underneath it, I found the estate document itself, my mother-in-law's name, the small collection of assets she'd left behind, modest by any standard, everything Isla's grandmother had managed to save across an entire lifetime, condensed into a single page of numbers that had become, in one afternoon, the entire operating budget of a company that would eventually be worth more than either of us could have imagined.
I thought about calling Orson, the accountant who'd handled our books through those years and still did occasional consulting for the company, to see what other records might exist from that period.
I told myself it was practical curiosity, a desire for facts.
It was also, if I'm honest, an attempt to locate some version of proof that would make the guilt manageable, a specific number I could point to and say, there, that's the debt, now let me pay it and move on.
I went into the office that Saturday, something I rarely did on weekends anymore, mostly to have somewhere to put my restlessness that wasn't the empty half of our house.
Keaton was there too, catching up on a project deadline, and he found me in the small kitchenette off the main floor, staring at a cup of coffee I hadn't touched.
"You look rough," he said, with the bluntness of someone young enough not to have learned better yet.
"Rough week," I said.
"Isla okay?"
The question, simple as it was, caught me off guard. "Why do you ask?"
"No reason, really. It occurred to me, working on some of the historical materials for the archive project, that I don't actually know much about her beyond, like, wife of the founder.
I asked her once what she used to do, and she gave me this whole answer that in retrospect was basically nothing.
I've been thinking about that conversation a lot this week, honestly, ever since the correction went out. "
"What made you think about it?"
"I don't know," Keaton said, shrugging. "I guess it just struck me as strange, that a woman who apparently ran half this company informally for two years managed to make herself sound like a footnote every time anyone asked her about it.
That takes a specific kind of skill, doing that convincingly.
I don't think most people could pull it off. "
I turned that observation over long after Keaton had gone back to his desk, the plain, accidental insight of someone with no personal stake in the outcome, someone simply noticing a pattern from the outside that I'd spent fifteen years failing to notice from the inside.
I pulled up the archive materials myself that afternoon, curious what else the company had accumulated about its own history without ever thinking to ask who else might belong in it.
There were old employee rosters, early client lists, a handful of photographs from company events over the years.
Isla appeared in exactly three of them, always at the edge of the frame, always smiling the particular smile of someone who understood the photo wasn't really about her.
I sat with those three photographs for a long time, feeling the specific weight of an absence that had been there the whole time, waiting for someone to actually look for it.
I called Isla that evening, more out of a need to hear her voice than any real plan for what to say. She picked up on the third ring, her voice careful, neither warm nor cold, the tone of someone conserving energy for a conversation she wasn't sure she wanted to have.
"I don't have anything new to tell you," I admitted. "I just wanted to hear how you were doing."
"I'm doing okay," she said. "Better than I expected to be, actually."
"That's good," I said, and meant it, even though some small, selfish part of me had hoped, shamefully, that she might be struggling as much as I was. "I talked to Keaton today. He said something about you that stuck with me."
"What did he say?"
"That you're good at making yourself sound like nothing happened, when something clearly did. He meant it as an observation, not a criticism. I think it's the truest thing anyone's said to me all week."
She was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line. "I've had a lot of practice," she said finally, and there was no bitterness in it, just a kind of tired honesty that hurt more than anger would have. "I should go, Christian. I have class tonight."
"Okay," I said. "Thank you for picking up."
"You're welcome," she said, and hung up, and I sat with the phone in my hand a long time after the call ended, turning over the plain fact that she had somewhere to be now that had nothing to do with me, a whole evening organized around something I hadn't planned and couldn't manage, and finding, underneath the ache of that, something like relief that she'd found it at all.
It would take me longer than I expected to understand that the debt wasn't the kind of thing a number could settle.