Chapter 9 #2
He's quiet for a moment. I watch his hands on the table — the knuckles, the veins, the tan line where the ring used to be.
These hands used to hold mine in the car on the way to events.
He'd rest his palm over my knuckles on the center console and squeeze once, a signal that meant I'm glad you're here.
I can't remember when that stopped. It didn't stop dramatically — it faded, the way all the good things faded, slowly enough that I didn't notice until the absence was the only thing left.
"I want to stay. Not near you. Not with you. Just — in the country. I'll get a room somewhere. I'll stay out of your way. I need to be in the same place as you right now because being on the other side of the world from you is the thing I can't do anymore."
"That's not your decision to make."
"I know. I'm asking. Not demanding. Not deploying. Asking."
I look at him. Silas Ryland, thirty-five years old, former CEO of Ryland Media Group, former resident of a Bel Air mansion with a canyon view, former man who never asked for anything because asking implied the possibility of no.
He is asking. He is sitting across from me in a café in Siem Reap with his palms flat on the table and his eyes wet and his body fifteen pounds lighter than the last time I saw him, and he is asking if he can stay.
"I can't stop you from being in Cambodia," I say. "It's a country, not my living room."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know what you asked." I pick up my coffee. The ice has melted completely. It's room temperature and diluted and I drink it anyway because I need something to do with my hands. "Stay. Don't come to my guesthouse. Don't come to the project site. Don't call me. If I want to talk, I'll find you."
"OK."
"I mean it, Silas. If you show up at my door, I'm gone. Next country. No forwarding address."
"I understand."
He stands up. He leaves money on the table — dollars, American, too much for two drinks in a Cambodian café, and the gesture is so Silas I almost laugh. Almost. He walks to the door and stops.
"Lucy."
"What."
"I sold the company."
The words land like a detonation. Quiet, precise, and devastating.
"You what?"
"Ryland Media Group. I sold my controlling stake to the board.
The deal closed last week." He doesn't turn around.
He's talking to the door, or to the street beyond it.
"It was the thing I chose instead of you.
Every meeting, every deal, every premiere — I chose it over you.
Over the marriage. Over the call. So I sold it. "
He walks out. The door closes behind him. The fan turns. The tourists at the other table have stopped laughing.
I sit in the café for a long time. The barista comes back and asks if I want another coffee and I say yes without hearing myself say it.
She brings it. I wrap my hands around the glass the way Silas wrapped his around the paper cup in the photo, and the symmetry of the gesture — the echo of it — makes me want to throw the glass at the wall.
I don't. I sit. I drink the coffee. I watch the street through the window, and every tall American man who passes makes my heart jump before my brain corrects it.
He sold the company. He sold Ryland Media Group — the thing he built from a production company and a dream and twenty years of the kind of ambition that doesn't sleep. He sold it because it mattered more to him than I did, and he decided it shouldn't have.
This is what sorry costs. Not money, though the sale is worth hundreds of millions.
Not gesture, though flying to Cambodia counts.
This is the sacrifice the genre demands — the one thing a billionaire can do that a regular man cannot, which is to divest himself of the empire that made him a billionaire.
He is no longer Silas Ryland, CEO of Ryland Media Group.
He is just Silas. A man in a gray T-shirt in a foreign country, asking if he can stay.
My hands are shaking. I press them flat on the table, the way he did, and I breathe.
I think about calling Lottie. She would know what to say — or rather, she would know exactly what to say and it would be the wrong thing, which is sometimes the same as the right thing.
He sold the company, Lottie, I would say.
And she would say: so what? A billionaire selling his company is still a billionaire.
He's not sacrificing — he's reorganizing.
And she might be right. The sale is worth hundreds of millions.
Silas is not going to starve. He's not going to suffer.
He's going to live in his Silver Lake apartment and write curriculum and eat at restaurants where the bills don't matter, and the only thing that's different is that the thing he chose instead of me no longer exists.
But that is different. That is the one sacrifice I said sorry needed to cost. Not money. Not comfort. Identity. He was Silas Ryland, CEO. Now he's just Silas Ryland, and the just is the part that matters, because the just is the part that's terrifying, and he did it anyway.
That evening, Finn texts me. Dinner?
I go to dinner. We eat at the Sivatha place again, the same table, the same fish, the same Christmas lights overhead.
Finn tells me about the generator, which has developed a new personality trait — it now quits at 1:45 instead of 2:00, which he interprets as the machine becoming more assertive.
I laugh. He tells me about Sophea's school, where the foundation assessment came back worse than expected, the whole building needs to be demolished and rebuilt, not just repaired.
He's upset about it in the specific, focused way of a person who cares about something for real.
"We'll budget it," I say. "Rebuild International has done school construction in four countries. I can get a proposal to David Chen by next week."
He looks at me across the table. Green eyes, tanned face, sandy hair catching the light from the Christmas bulbs. He smiles — not a Silas smile, not a strategy, just the face a man makes when a woman solves a problem he's been carrying.
"You're kind of amazing," he says.
"I'm kind of practical. There's a difference."
"There really isn't."
He is warm and easy and here, and the warmth and ease feel like a language I could learn to speak fluently if I chose to.
Finn asks questions and listens to the answers.
Finn doesn't check his phone. Finn looks at me when I talk and his eyes don't drift to the door or the window or the next interesting thing.
He is present in a way that Silas never was during the marriage and only became in the café today, when he sat across from me with his palms on the table and his voice cracking and no company left to be the CEO of.
But Silas's voice is in my head. I sold the company. And the weight of those four words sits in the space between me and Finn like a third person at the table — invisible, heavy, impossible to ignore.
Finn walks me to my guesthouse. At the door, he pauses.
"You seem somewhere else tonight," he says. Not accusing. Just observing.
"Long day."
He nods. He doesn't push. He says goodnight and walks into the warm dark, and I go to my room and sit on the bed under the mosquito net and stare at the wall and think about a man who sold an empire because it mattered more than his wife, and how that sentence can mean two completely different things depending on where you put the emphasis.