4. Sebastian, Alone
Four
Sebastian, Alone
The apartment was too quiet.
I hadn’t expected that. I’d lived alone before Claire — plenty of years of it, a bachelor’s stretch in my twenties I remembered as peaceful, productive, comfortable. I’d assumed some version of that would come back to me now, like a coat I’d simply need to break in again.
Instead I stood in the kitchen at eleven at night, the whole apartment lit up because I hadn’t gotten used to turning off lights I wasn’t using — Claire had always done that, moved through the apartment behind me like a quiet correction, and now no one did, and the electric bill was going to be enormous, and I was standing there thinking about the electric bill instead of anything that actually mattered, because it was easier than the alternative.
I poured a whiskey I didn’t want and didn’t drink.
I wasn’t thinking about Vanessa nearly as much as Claire probably assumed. I was thinking about a version of my own life I barely recognized. Nine years of certainty, dismantled in one dinner conversation I still couldn’t fully account for.
Daniel Cho — my COO, a man I trusted with more of my actual life than I’d apparently trusted my own wife with, lately — called on Tuesday.
“You look like hell,” he said, which was Daniel’s version of concern.
“I’m fine.”
“You asked your wife for a divorce four days ago. You’re not fine. You’re the opposite of fine, wearing a very good suit.”
I didn’t answer that. We were in my office, the Whitfield deal spread across the table between us — six weeks of work, the kind of acquisition that would double Cole Capital’s hospitality portfolio if we closed it clean, and every conversation about it now had Vanessa’s name threaded through the paperwork like she’d always been there, waiting.
“Talk to me about Vanessa,” Daniel said.
Not unkindly. He’d known me since business school, had been at my wedding, had watched me build this company from nothing with a patience I didn’t deserve most weeks.
“Because from where I’m sitting, you didn’t leave your marriage for another woman.
You left it for a feeling you can’t name, and you’re letting everyone — including yourself — assume it’s about her because that’s a story that makes sense. ”
“That’s not—” I stopped. Started again. “I don’t know what it is.”
“That’s what worries me.” Daniel closed the folder in front of him. “You’re the most decisive person I’ve ever met, Sebastian. You’ve never once said I don’t know about anything in fifteen years. Not a deal, not a hire, not which restaurant to book. And now you’re saying it about your marriage.”
I didn’t have an answer for that either.
The truth was that seeing Vanessa hadn’t felt like desire.
It had felt like before. Before Cole Capital was anything.
Before two hundred employees and their families depended on my decisions.
Before every year became a slightly heavier version of the last, until I’d stopped being able to want something without immediately calculating its cost.
Vanessa hadn’t offered me a future. She’d accidentally handed me a mirror, and what I’d seen in it — a twenty-eight-year-old man who hadn’t yet learned to be tired — had frightened me so badly I’d mistaken the fear for longing.
Something in me had cracked open at that dinner, and instead of examining the crack, I’d done what I always did with anything broken. Solved it. Fast. Before anyone, including myself, could watch me sit in the mess of not knowing.
I’d asked my wife for a divorce the way I’d once restructured a failing portfolio company. Quickly. Cleanly. Before the damage could spread.
Except this wasn’t a portfolio company. This was Claire, who had said okay in a voice so calm it took me two full days to understand it wasn’t calm at all — it was armor, the kind you only need against someone you no longer trust to catch you.
“Go home, Sebastian,” Daniel said, gathering the Whitfield folder. “Actually go home. Sit in the quiet. Don’t call anyone. Don’t fix anything. Find out what’s actually in there before you do any more damage.”
I didn’t take his advice that night. I stayed at the office past midnight, reviewing acquisition terms I already knew by heart, because the numbers made sense in a way nothing else currently did, and because some coward’s instinct in me still preferred a spreadsheet to my own reflection.
But his words followed me the whole drive home. Find out what’s actually in there.
I let myself into the too-quiet apartment, poured another whiskey I wasn’t going to drink, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I stopped reaching for my phone to solve something.
I just sat with it. Badly. Clumsily. Like a man learning, very late, a skill everyone else had picked up years ago.
It didn’t feel like relief.
It felt like the first honest thing I’d done all week.