6. Sebastian, Alone
Six
Sebastian, Alone
The apartment was too quiet.
I hadn’t expected that. I’d lived alone before Claire — plenty of years of it, actually, a bachelor’s stretch in my twenties that I remembered as peaceful, productive, entirely 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 around me 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 in my kitchen 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 want to be honest about what I was thinking that week, because 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, even to myself.
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 months 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 somewhere in it, threaded through the paperwork like she’d always been there, waiting.
“Talk to me about Vanessa,” Daniel said.
Not unkindly. Daniel had known me since business school, had been at my wedding, had watched me build this company from nothing with a specific, patient loyalty 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 the fifteen years I’ve known you.
Not about a deal, not about a hire, not about which restaurant to book for a client dinner.
And now you’re saying it about your marriage. ”
I didn’t have an answer for that either.
The truth — the thing I hadn’t said to Claire, hadn’t said to Daniel, had barely let myself think in full sentences — was that seeing Vanessa hadn’t felt like desire.
It had felt like before. Before Cole Capital was anything.
Before the weight of two hundred employees and their families depending on my decisions.
Before every year became a slightly heavier version of the last, until somewhere in there I’d stopped being able to remember what it felt like to want something without immediately calculating the cost of wanting it.
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.
I didn’t know that yet, not with any clarity.
I only knew that something in me had cracked open at that dinner, and instead of sitting with the crack, I’d done what I always did with anything broken.
I’d tried to solve it fast, decisively, 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 had taken 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. Just find out what’s actually in there before you do any more damage.”
I didn’t take his advice. Not that night.
I stayed at the office until past midnight, reviewing acquisition terms I already knew by heart, because the numbers made sense in a way nothing else in my life currently did, and because some coward’s instinct in me still preferred a spreadsheet to my own reflection.
But I thought about what he’d said 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 wanted to admit, 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.