Chapter 12 #2
"Because you can't. Because this is what you are, Silas.
This is the thing. Not the voicemail, not the twelve hours, not Leandra's cancelled meetings.
This. The reflex. The part of you that sees an opportunity to build something and lights up like a switchboard, and the lighting up is so automatic and so total that you don't even notice who's in the room when it happens. "
He is quiet. The café noises fill the space — the sizzle of a wok, conversation in Balinese, the shrieks of monkeys in the trees. A waitress brings him a water glass without being asked, the way waitresses do with men who look like they need something to hold.
"I'm not going to do it," he says.
"You don't know that."
"I'm telling you — "
"You told me a lot of things, Silas. You told me you'd be home for dinner.
You told me the conference call would be quick.
You told me you'd look at my seawall." My voice is steady.
I am surprised by how steady it is — the anger is there, the devastation is there, but it's arriving as precision rather than heat.
"And every time, you meant it. That's the worst part.
You weren't lying. You meant every promise. You just meant the next thing more."
He closes his eyes. His hands on the table curl into fists and then flatten again, the effort of keeping them still visible in every tendon.
"I came here to tell you," he says. "Not to hide it.
Not to take the call and make the deal and have you find out later.
I came here because you asked me to be honest, and this is the honest thing: the call happened.
The opportunity is real. And standing in my room in Ubud hearing Jared describe it, I felt — something.
The old feeling. The thing I told you I didn't miss. "
"You said you didn't miss the company."
"I don't miss the company. I miss — " He opens his eyes.
The blue-gray is wet. Not crying: the pre-crying, the held state, the version where the tears exist but haven't been permitted.
"I miss being good at something. I miss the competence.
I miss walking into a room and knowing I can build the thing that needs to be built.
The company was the wrong version of that, too big, too corporate, too far from the work.
But the impulse underneath it, the wanting to make things, that's not something I can amputate. It's what I am."
"I know it's what you are. That's what I'm afraid of."
We look at each other across the table. His nasi goreng is getting cold.
The monkeys have moved to the roof of the café and are having a territorial dispute directly above us, which in any other context would be funny but right now just feels like the universe providing ambient chaos to match the internal kind.
"I need to go," I say.
"Lucy — "
"I need to go." I stand. I leave money on the table — mine, not his — and I walk out of the café and down the road toward the ravine path that leads to my guesthouse, and I do not look back because looking back is a gesture and I am done with gestures.
I call Lottie from the balcony. It's three in the morning in New York, but Lottie answers on the second ring because Lottie has never in her life let a call from me go unanswered, and that fact — the consistency of it, the reliability, the absolute certainty that when I call Lottie she will pick up — hits me now with a force I wasn't prepared for.
"What happened," she says. Not a question. An instruction.
"An old business partner called Silas. Offered him a new studio. Full creative control. Everything he lost."
Silence. Then: "And he told you."
"He flew to Bali to tell me."
"That's the move, Lucy. That's the play.
He tells you about the opportunity so you see how noble he is for considering turning it down, and then he turns it down and you're supposed to be grateful, and six months later another opportunity lands and this time he doesn't tell you because you've already established the precedent that he makes the right choice, and then it's another year of dinner getting cold while he's on the phone — "
"He hasn't said yes."
"He hasn't said no either, has he?"
The accuracy of everyone in my life — Finn's you-seem-somewhere-else, Silas's Malibu seawall, Lottie's he hasn't said no — is starting to feel like an indictment.
Everyone sees the things I try to keep hidden.
I am not the locked room Finn described.
I am a room with glass walls, and everyone walking past can see the furniture.
"This is why you don't go back, Lucy." Lottie's voice has dropped into the register she uses when she is not being funny, when the performance has been stripped away and what's left is the girl who has been my best friend since college and has watched me shrink inside a marriage for five years and has been too careful and too loyal to say what she actually thinks until now.
"He sold the company. Great. He flew to Cambodia.
Great. He sat across from you and said pretty things about Sunday mornings and crosswords and the version of himself who noticed when you were tired.
Great. But the first time someone waves a shiny new building in front of him, his hands start moving.
His hands start moving, Lucy. That's not a choice.
That's a reflex. And you cannot build a life on a man whose reflexes are the problem. "
"I know."
"Do you? Because you sound like you know and you also sound like you're about to find a reason it's different this time.
And I love you, and I will support whatever you decide, but I need you to hear me say this one thing clearly: the earthquake wife narrative was powerful and clean and it got you out.
You don't have to go back in to prove you're brave enough to forgive.
Leaving was the brave thing. Staying out is the brave thing.
Going back because a man made his sorry expensive enough is not bravery. It's a purchase."
The word purchase sits in my chest like a stone.
I want to argue with it — want to say that what Silas is doing is not a purchase, that the grovelling is genuine, that the change is real.
But Lottie's point is not that the change is fake.
Her point is that the change is irrelevant if the reflex survives.
And the reflex survived. I saw it survive at a café table in Ubud, in the movement of his hands, in the brightness of his eyes, in the way his voice changed when he described a man offering him a chance to build something.
"What do I do?" I say.