18. Gordon
— ? —
Gordon
The papers are signed. As of nine o’clock this morning, the company with my name on the building doesn’t belong to me anymore.
I’ve been working up to this for weeks, and everyone who gets paid to talk me out of things tried to talk me out of it.
They used a lot of careful words that all meant the same question, asked a dozen different ways.
Are you sure. Are you sure. Are you sure.
One of them suggested, very gently, that maybe I should talk to someone first, and I told him I’ve spent months talking to someone, and the someone is the reason I’m doing this, and he didn’t have a follow-up.
They looked at me the whole time like I’d lost my mind.
Maybe I have. Probably I have. One of them has known me for eight years and asked, quietly, near the end, what I was going to do with myself now, and I told him the truth, which is that I’m going to learn how to be a husband, and he laughed before he realized I wasn’t joking, and then he didn’t know where to look.
The truth is simple enough that none of them could hear it.
This company took everything from me. My time, my attention, my marriage.
Eleven years of dinners, every anniversary that mattered, the woman who pawned her sewing machine so I could have a future.
I fed all of it into this thing with my name on it, and the thing got bigger and bigger and gave none of it back. I’m not letting it take anything else.
What I thought about while I signed, page after page after page, wasn’t the company at all.
It wasn’t the money either. Money stopped meaning anything to me the day I understood that all of mine put together couldn’t buy back one Tuesday dinner from 2019.
It was Eliza at the kitchen island at four in the morning with a cake she made from my aunt’s recipe, still in her dress, waiting for a man who forgot she existed.
I built this whole empire for a girl who used to set a table for two.
Somewhere along the line it became the reason the table was only ever set for one.
The strange part is how ordinary the ending was.
Ten years of eighteen-hour days, gone in six weeks of signatures.
No storm, no ceremony. The people taking it off my hands shook my hand on the way out, and one of them told me I was brave, and I stood there thinking that brave would have been leaving the office at six o’clock on a Tuesday eleven years ago.
When I finished the last page, my hand was cramped and my coffee was cold, and I waited to feel something enormous.
It doesn’t feel like relief. It doesn’t feel like anything, really, just a dull absence where the weight used to be, and underneath the absence, very quiet, something that might eventually grow up to be peace.
I sat alone in the empty room for a while after everyone left.
Ten years. I missed my anniversary for this company.
I missed hundreds of dinners for this company.
I let a stranger run my marriage for this company, and on the day I signed it away, the whole thing took forty minutes, and the people who now own my life’s work had lunch plans after.
The leak hits at noon.
My phone starts buzzing while I’m eating lunch in my hotel room, a sandwich from room service that I ordered because I should eat, not because I’m hungry.
The first notification is from a news app.
The second is from my assistant. The third is from someone at the company, a terse text that just says Call me.
I don’t call him. I open the news app instead.
GORDON brYCE STEPS DOWN: BILLIONAIRE CEO TRANSFERS MAJORITY OWNERSHIP AFTER SCANDAL
The article is speculation dressed up as reporting. Sources close to the situation. People familiar with the matter. The usual weasel words that mean somebody wanted their name in the paper without actually putting their name in the paper.
The comments are already piling up.
Finally facing consequences.
Rich people have it so hard.
Imagine giving up billions for a woman who’s divorcing you.
This is actually kind of sad if you think about it.
Don’t think about it. He doesn’t deserve your sympathy.
I close the app. My phone keeps buzzing, the assistant again, people from the company, a reporter who got my personal number from somewhere, my lawyer, the assistant again.
Somewhere in the stack there’s a text from Lucas, one line, saw the news, you good?
I look at it for a while. For a long stretch Lucas wouldn’t answer my calls, and I earned that, and now he’s the one person in the list who wants nothing from me.
I text back, honestly no idea, and he sends back a thumbs up, and that’s somehow the most normal exchange I’ve had in weeks.
I turn the phone off.
I’ve been living in this hotel for three weeks now.
The house was too big, too empty, too full of memories I can’t handle.
Every room reminded me of something. The kitchen where she made my aunt’s chocolate cake.
The bedroom where we used to sleep tangled together.
The nursery she dismantled while I was at work, the one I didn’t notice was empty for eight months.
The hotel is anonymous. Impersonal. A bed, a desk, a bathroom, a window that looks out on other buildings. Nothing to remind me of anything except how much I’ve lost.
I spend the early afternoon doing nothing, which I’m still learning how to do.
I watch part of a movie without following it.
I stand at the window and look at the building across the street, where people are working at desks the way I worked at desks for the last ten years, and I try to remember what I thought all of it was for.
The honest answer is her. It was always supposed to be for her, and somewhere along the way it stopped being for anything at all.
Eliza shows up at four in the afternoon.
I hear the knock and assume it’s housekeeping, because nobody else knows the room number except my assistant and my lawyer, and both of them have learned to email.
I open the door in sweatpants and a t-shirt I’ve been wearing for two days, and there she is, winded like she took the stairs two at a time, fury in her eyes, and my first thought before anything else is that she found out where I’m staying, which means at some point she wanted to know.
“You gave up your company.”
“I gave up the thing that took me away from you.”
“That’s not-” She makes a frustrated sound and pushes past me into the room.
She looks around, taking in the generic furniture, the unmade bed, the room service tray I haven’t bothered to put in the hallway.
“That’s not how this works, Gordon. You can’t just throw away everything you built and expect me to be impressed. ”
“I’m not doing it to impress you.”
“Then why?”
She’s planted in the center of the room, her arms crossed, her whole body rigid with anger.
She’s wearing work clothes, a blouse and dark pants, and I wonder if she came straight from the office, if she saw the news and dropped everything and drove here without thinking about what she was going to say.
“Because I don’t want it anymore.” I close the door and turn to face her.
“I wanted it because I thought it would prove something. To your parents, to myself, to anyone who ever looked at me and saw a poor kid who wasn’t good enough.
But it didn’t prove anything. It just took everything that mattered. ”
“Including me.”
“Especially you.”
She’s crying. I don’t think she notices, or maybe she does and she doesn’t care. The tears are running down her cheeks and she’s not wiping them away, just standing there in the middle of my hotel room looking at me like I’ve finally lost my mind.
She might be right. It doesn’t feel like losing anything.
“This feels like another purchase,” she says. “Like you’re trying to buy your way back into my life by sacrificing something big.”
“I know how it looks.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because I don’t know any other way to show you.
” I stop, close enough to touch her but not touching.
“I’ve never been good with words, Eliza.
So I do things instead. Grand gestures. Big sacrifices.
But you don’t want things. You want me. And I don’t know how to give you that without giving up the stuff that kept me from you. ”
She wipes her face with the back of her hand. “It’s not enough.”
“I know.”
“I can’t just forgive you because you made a sacrifice.”
“I know that too.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“Nothing.” The word hurts coming out. “I don’t want anything from you, Eliza. I just want you to know that I’m changing. Not because you asked me to. Because I finally understand what I should have seen all along.”
She stares at me. I can see her processing, weighing, deciding. Her eyes are red and her mascara is smudged and she’s never looked more beautiful to me than she does right now, standing in this ugly hotel room, crying and furious and still here.
“Charlie asked me to dinner,” she says finally.
The words hit somewhere deep. Charlie. Her boss. The man who drives her home at night, who sees her every day, who’s building something with her while I’m tearing everything down.
“Oh,” I say.
It’s all I can manage. There are a hundred things lined up behind it, none of which I have any right to say.
Don’t. Please. He doesn’t know that you talk in your sleep, or that you can’t watch scary movies alone, or that you cry at dog food commercials and deny it.
He doesn’t know anything yet. That’s the whole appeal.
He’s eleven years of blank pages, and I’m eleven years of things I’d give anything to cross out.
“I haven’t said yes yet.” She picks up her bag from where she dropped it by the door. “I don’t know what I’m doing. About him, about you, about any of this.”
“But you’re considering it.”
“I’m considering everything.” Her voice is steady now, controlled. “Including the possibility that I might be happier with someone who didn’t spend eleven years making me feel like nothing.”
Like nothing, she said. Not invisible. It’s worse, and she knows it, and she means it.
She leaves, and the door doesn’t slam. That’s the detail I can’t get past. She closes it the way you close a door in a sleeping house, quiet, controlled, final, and I stand there listening to her footsteps fade down the carpeted hallway until there’s nothing left to listen to.
I stand in my hotel room and let myself feel it. The jealousy, the fear, the desperate urge to run after her and beg her not to go.
I don’t. I stay where I am. I let her go.
She might be happier without me.
And I might have to learn to live with that.
The room gets dark slowly, and I don’t turn on the lights.
I sit in the chair by the window with my phone face down on the armrest, and I run the conversation back the way I used to run failed negotiations back, looking for the move I missed, and there isn’t one.
That’s the part I keep arriving at. There’s no move.
There’s no offer, no leverage, no number.
There’s just a man she might say yes to, and a man she already said no to, and time, and which one of us she thinks about when the day goes quiet.
I don’t follow her. I don’t call. I sit in the dark and wait for morning.
But I can’t stop thinking about Charlie’s name in her mouth.