Chapter Twenty
I started, that week, doing things I should have been doing for years, not as a performance of contrition, but because I could no longer stand the sight of my own laziness dressed up as busyness.
I woke up one morning that week and, before getting out of bed, made a short list on my phone of every task I could remember Isla handling in the past month alone, things I'd noticed only because I'd started, deliberately, to notice.
The list ran longer than I expected, longer than felt comfortable, and I sat with it for a while before getting up, understanding that the list itself wasn't the point.
The point was what I did with each item on it going forward, one at a time, without applause, without expecting credit for finally doing what should have been mine to do all along.
I called Christian's mother myself, direct, no forwarding it through Isla, to ask what she wanted for her birthday the following month, well ahead of time this time, and I wrote the date into my own calendar instead of trusting that it would somehow surface itself the week of.
I picked up my own dry cleaning. I learned, finally, after fifteen years, which of the four settings on the coffee maker Isla used every morning, and I started making the coffee myself before she came downstairs, a small thing, almost embarrassingly small, but one that felt, doing it, like the first honest labor I'd contributed to our mornings in longer than I wanted to admit.
I called my own mother too, one evening, mostly to ask her a question I'd never once thought to ask in thirty-eight years of being her son.
"Did Dad ever do anything like this?" I asked. "Say something he had to spend years making up for?"
She was quiet for a moment on the line. "Not the way you're describing," she said. "But your father had his own version of not seeing me clearly, for a long stretch in our thirties. He came out of it eventually. It took him longer than either of us would have liked."
"How did he come out of it?"
"He started asking me what I wanted, instead of assuming he already knew," my mother said. "It sounds so simple when I say it now. It took him about eight years to actually start doing it."
"I don't have eight years to figure this out," I said.
"No," she agreed. "But you have longer than you think, if you're willing to actually use the time instead of rushing toward some finish line where you get to stop trying."
I started paying closer attention at the office too, not just to Isla's history but to the present tense of what I was still asking of her without noticing.
I caught myself, one afternoon, about to text her and ask if she could handle a vendor question for the gala's post-event cleanup, an easy habit, the same reflex that had caused the fight over the hair appointment in the first place.
I stopped, deleted the text, and called the vendor myself instead.
It took me twenty extra minutes out of my day.
It felt, doing it, like a genuinely significant act, which surprised me, given how small it actually was.
I didn't ask her, during any of this, whether she'd noticed.
I didn't check in with her about whether I was doing enough, whether this counted, whether we were closer to some finish line called forgiveness.
I understood, finally, that asking those questions would turn the whole effort back into something about my own reassurance rather than her actual life, and I was determined not to make this about my comfort a single time more than I already had.
Merritt caught up with me that week to ask whether I'd approve a follow-up piece for the internal archive, something more detailed than the initial newsletter correction, and I agreed on the condition that she interview Isla directly rather than relying on secondhand accounts filtered through me.
"Are you sure?" Merritt asked, a little surprised. "I figured you'd want final approval on how it's framed."
"I don't want to frame it at all," I said. "I've spent fifteen years framing that story. I'd like this version to be entirely hers, if she's willing to give it."
Merritt looked at me for a moment like she was recalibrating something. "That's a different answer than I expected."
"It's a different me than you're used to, probably," I said, and meant it more plainly than the joke suggested.
Rhodes noticed something different at the office, the kind of comment that catches you off guard because it comes from someone who isn't trying to catch anything at all.
"You've been different this month," he said, over lunch. "Calmer. Less like you're running from something."
"I've had some things to work through at home," I said.
"With Isla?"
"With myself, mostly. Isla's just the person who finally made me look."
Rhodes studied me for a moment. "For what it's worth, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. I don't think I've seen you like this since before the company took off."
I thought about that on the drive home. Before the company took off. Before the pressure had calcified into an identity I'd stopped questioning, back when Isla and I had been simply two people figuring out a hard year together, without a title, without a story anyone else was watching us tell.
I started keeping a small notebook that week, something I never told Isla about, not out of secrecy but out of a kind of shyness about what it actually was.
I wrote down things I noticed, things I'd missed for years without knowing I was missing them.
The specific way she organizes the pantry, oldest items toward the front, a system I'd apparently benefited from for a decade without ever once asking how the groceries seemed to arrange themselves so sensibly.
The fact that she always knows, without checking, which of our friends have dietary restrictions, and quietly adjusts dinner party menus around them without ever making it a production.
The particular hour of the evening, always around eight, when she finally allows herself to sit down, having spent the rest of the day in some form of quiet motion on someone else's behalf.
I didn't write these things down to present them to her as evidence of my transformation, some tally I could produce later as proof of effort.
I wrote them because I was terrified, if I'm honest, of losing the noticing itself, the same way I'd apparently lost it once already without ever noticing it was slipping away.
I wanted a record, even a private one, that I could return to on the days when old habits threatened to reassert themselves, when the pull toward assuming things would simply handle themselves the way they always had started to feel stronger than the newer, harder habit of actually paying attention.
Damon noticed the notebook once, sitting on my desk at the office, and asked what it was. "Just some notes," I said, and left it at that, and he didn't push, though I caught him giving me a curious look before he moved on to whatever he'd actually come to discuss.
At home I found Isla in the kitchen, and instead of asking what she needed, I simply started on dinner myself, something I hadn't done regularly in years, and I didn't ask for credit for it, didn't wait for her to comment on it.
She noticed anyway, the way she notices most things, watching me from the doorway for a moment before coming to sit at the island.
"You're cooking," she said.
"I'm trying to," I said. "It might not be good."
"I don't need it to be good," she said, and something in her voice, lighter than it had been in weeks, made me look up from the pan. "I just need it to be you doing it, and not me managing it from the sidelines while you do something else."
"I'm trying to stop doing that," I said. "The something else. I'm trying to actually be here instead of just occupying space near the people I love while my attention is somewhere else entirely."
She didn't say anything to that, but she stayed at the island while I finished cooking, and we ate dinner together for the first time in weeks without either of us managing the conversation carefully around the edges of what had happened, just talking, ordinary and unremarkable, about her class, about a difficult client of mine, about nothing that mattered and everything that did.
Later that week, his mother called to thank me, unprompted, for remembering her birthday early this year. "Christian called me himself," she said, delight plain in her voice. "He never does that. Usually I have to remind him twice, or I just hear about it from you."
"He's trying," I said, and found that I meant it without reservation, for the first time.
A few days later, I ran into Talia at the grocery store, of all places, both of us reaching for the same brand of coffee, and she seemed almost startled to see me there, doing something as ordinary as shopping.
"I keep meaning to say something to you," Talia said, a little awkwardly, "about the correction that went out.
I helped draft it, and I want you to know it wasn't just Christian's idea in some vacuum.
He came to me insistent that it needed to be accurate, no matter what it cost, and I've worked with a lot of founders.
Most of them protect the myth at all costs, even when they know better. He didn't."
"Thank you for telling me that," I said, and meant it, surprised at how much it helped to hear the story corroborated by someone who'd watched it happen from the professional side rather than the personal one.
"For what it's worth," Talia added, before we went our separate ways, "I've also noticed him being different around the office.
Calmer, I guess is the word. Less like he's performing confidence and more like he's actually settled into it.
I don't know what's happening at home, and it's not my business, but whatever you're both doing, it's visible from the outside. "
I thought about that exchange for the rest of the day, the strange experience of hearing your own private struggle described back to you by someone who had no access to the private parts of it at all, only the visible outline, and finding that the outline, at least, matched what I hoped was actually true underneath it.
Talia mentioned, a few weeks later, that she'd started keeping a different kind of file on the company's history, informal notes from conversations with longtime employees about what they actually remembered from the early years, separate from anything meant for press or investors.
"I don't know what I'll do with it yet," she told me, over coffee one afternoon. "Maybe nothing. I just think somebody should be keeping an accurate record, now that we've started telling one."
"That's a good instinct," I said.
"I got the idea from watching you," she admitted.
"Watching how much air came out of the room once the true version finally got told.
I keep thinking about all the other true versions sitting around unspoken, in other companies, other marriages, probably.
Makes you wonder how much of what everybody accepts as history is really just the version that was easiest to tell at the time. "
"I think about that a lot these days too," I said.
"For what it's worth," Talia added, "Isla agreed to let me include a fuller account of her role in the internal archive. Merritt's handling the interview. I just wanted you to know, in case it matters to you, that she didn't ask for your approval on any of it. She's telling it her way now."
I felt something complicated hearing that, pride and a small, humbling ache together, understanding that the story now belonged to Isla in a way it never fully had before, and that my job, going forward, wasn't to help her tell it.
It was simply to have earned a place in the parts of it that were actually mine.