13. Oliver #2
Drake is beside her during the Q&A, supplementing her answers with data, and I watch them work together and the ache that sits where the jealousy used to live is quieter today. Not gone. Named. Regret, Dr. Lin calls it. I’m learning to sit with it.
The gathering ends.
People filter out, handshakes, business cards, the particular energy of a room where money and possibility just shared the same air.
I’m heading for the door when she appears beside me, a glass of water in her hand, her face flushed.
Her eyes are bright in a way I haven’t seen since the car ride the night of the gala, and the brightness is aimed at the room, at the work, at the future she’s building one meeting at a time.
“What did you think of the partnership model?” I say. “The artisan cooperative structure, the revenue share with the rural producers. Is that scalable past the pilot?”
She blinks. The question lands and I watch her process it. Not flattery. Not generalities. A specific, informed question about an element of a plan she built. The kind of question she’s been waiting for someone in her life to ask.
“It’s scalable if the unit economics hold past fifty suppliers,” she says. “Which they will, because I structured the margins to absorb the volume increase.”
“You front-loaded the fixed costs in the pilot?”
“Obviously.”
Her mouth twitches. Not a smile. The muscle memory of one, the ghost of an expression she used to give me across the kitchen counter when I said a thing that landed right. The ghost is enough. Ghosts are proof the living thing existed.
I nod. “It’s good work, Eloise. The real kind.”
She holds my gaze for a beat. The flicker is there. Brief, real. Then she turns and walks back to her guests, and I leave through the back door and drive home with the flicker sitting behind my sternum, doing more work than the entire Alderton portfolio.
***
The house at midnight is a different kind of quiet than it used to be.
The whiskey is gone. I poured it down the sink four days ago and the cabinet it lived in is just a cabinet now, empty, holding nothing, and I’m learning to leave empty things empty instead of filling them with the wrong thing.
The pendant is still on the counter. I’ve moved it once, to clean the marble beneath it, and put it back in the same spot because moving it farther felt presumptuous and leaving it gone felt worse.
The gardenias are still dead and I haven’t replaced them because replacing them was always her act, not mine, and performing her rituals in her absence feels wrong.
I’m at the desk in the study. Her corner by the window is empty, the chair pushed in, the small table where she used to set her laptop still carrying the faint ring from a coffee mug she took with her when she left.
Work is spread in front of me. Reports I should read, projections I should sign. The machinery of the company that kept running while its CEO came apart and is now running alongside a man who is trying to reassemble himself into a version worth keeping.
I read the same paragraph four times. My eyes slide off the numbers and find the phone on the desk. Dark. Silent. I check it. Nothing. Set it face down. Pick it up. Set it on the desk. Check it again.
The wanting is physical. A pull behind my ribs that has a name I’ve started saying out loud on Mondays at 2 p.m. in Dr. Lin’s office.
The name isn’t jealousy. It isn’t possession or control or any of the words I used to mislabel it. The name is simpler and worse.
I miss my wife.
I miss the sound of her moving through rooms. The click of her laptop closing at midnight. The way the house used to breathe differently when she was in it, as if the walls noticed her and were grateful for the noticing.
I miss the navy shirt in the laundry basket.
I miss the tie routine I didn’t value until it was gone.
I miss the forehead kiss I gave every morning without understanding that the woman I was pressing my mouth against was pressing her fingers to the same spot hours later, holding the imprint the way you hold a candle in a room with no windows.
Back then, I didn’t know that but I know it now. The knowing is three years late and the lateness is measured in avocados and honey and towels folded in thirds and every other detail I’ve been cataloguing this week that should have been catalogued from the beginning.
I lean back in the chair and stare at the ceiling and wish for a craving. A ridiculous one, a midnight-specific one, the kind of request that only comes from a pregnant woman at one in the morning who wants a thing only one place in the city still sells. I’d drive anywhere.
Any hour. Any distance. Just to stand at her door for thirty seconds and hand over a bag and hear the sound of her voice saying “better” or “thanks” or “wrong tea” because wrong tea means she’s still talking to me and talking to me is enough.
The phone pings.
My hand is on it before the screen finishes lighting up. Eloise (Wife). The parenthetical glows in the dark study the way it has glowed on every screen for three years, the word in brackets that I chose because the label made me feel a thing I didn’t have the vocabulary for.
A message. Short. Specific.
Eloise (Wife): A lemon tart. Eloise (Wife): The bakery near the university. Eloise (Wife): They close at 1.
I’m on my feet. Jacket off the back of the chair, keys in hand, shoes by the door.
The house empties behind me and the midnight air hits my face at the garage entrance and the city is quiet and the roads are open and my wife texted me at midnight because she’s craving a thing and I’m the person she asked, and the asking is more than I deserve and I know it and I go anyway.
The car starts. The headlights cut across the driveway.
Oliver Ellington, who used to run boardrooms and close deals and arrive late to dinners his wife arranged, is driving across the city at one in the morning to buy a lemon tart because the woman he loves let him, and the letting is the only honest thing he’s earned in months, and he’s grateful for every crumb of it.
The streets are empty. The streetlights cycle green without stopping me and the city at this hour belongs to the insomniacs and the delivery drivers and the men who are trying to learn, three years too late, what it means to show up.
I drive.