12. Cameron
— ? —
Cameron
Friday. Five days of showing up to her office like it’s my job.
I arrive before she does every morning, letting myself in with the key the building manager handed over once I proved to him who actually owns his building.
I set up in the corner with my laptop, a makeshift desk cobbled together from a filing cabinet and a piece of plywood one of her developers found in the storage closet.
A week ago my mornings were a tower with my name on the directory, an elevator full of people who went quiet when I stepped in, a schedule run to the minute.
Now my morning is a filing cabinet, a piece of plywood, and a woman across the room who hasn’t said good morning to me once since I set up camp.
It’s the best job I’ve ever had. I mean that.
It scares me how much I mean that. The Meridian deal closed this week without me in the room, and the machine didn’t even hiccup. Turns out it never needed me at all.
I answer emails I don’t care about. I pretend to work on projects that don’t matter. And I watch her.
Not in a creepy way. At least, I hope not in a creepy way. I watch her, desperate and hopeful and terrified all at once.
The first week, the flowers arrived at nine every morning.
Different arrangements each day: roses on Monday, lilies on Tuesday, an elaborate orchid display on Wednesday that the florist assured me conveyed “apology and devotion” in the language of flowers, whatever that means.
I asked if there was one that meant I was a fool and I’m learning, and she said people usually just wrote that on the card.
Hannah refused every delivery. The first day, the receptionist took them and distributed them to other tenants in the building.
I watched strangers walk out carrying my apologies like they’d won something, and the next morning I started carrying them in myself.
This morning it was peonies, pale pink and absurdly delicate, and I stood in her office at 6:40 a.m. arranging them like it was surgery.
The break room shelf has become a garden.
The youngest developer waters everything without being asked, and nobody talks about where the flowers come from, the same way nobody talks about the plywood desk or the man sitting behind it.
Now I swap the vase on her desk each morning before she arrives, yesterday’s blooms migrating to the break room until the whole office smells like my apology.
She doesn’t acknowledge them. She doesn’t throw them away, either.
On Thursday I watched her stop next to the vase on her way past, and for one second her hand came up and moved a stem half an inch to the left, the way you’d fix a crooked picture in a house you loved.
Then she saw me seeing her and her face closed like a door.
I choose to see all of it as progress.
Her developers have learned to work around me.
They hold their morning standups in the far corner, voices low, cutting glances at the billionaire in the corner who used to run a company and now spends his days watching his estranged wife review code.
I’ve memorized their names, the way they orbit Hannah like planets around a sun.
Her lead developer is protective of her in a way that makes me want to punch him and thank him in equal measure.
The UX designer pretends I don’t exist but leaves an extra muffin on the break room counter every morning.
The youngest one, fresh out of college, actually asked me once if I needed help with anything and seemed genuinely confused when I said no.
Her lead developer cornered me at the coffee maker on Wednesday.
He didn’t raise his voice. He just refilled his mug, looked at me the way you look at a problem in the code, and said, “She’s the best boss I’ve ever had.
Whatever you’re doing here, do it right or don’t do it at all.
” Then he walked away before I could answer, which was fine, because I didn’t have one.
They’re good people. She’s built a good team. I’m proud of her, which feels strange to admit even to myself, because pride implies I had anything to do with it when the truth is she built this despite me, not because of me.
She works like nobody I’ve ever hired. Hours of absolute stillness, a pencil disappearing into her hair, and then a burst of typing like the code did it to itself.
Sometimes she argues with the screen under her breath.
Sometimes she wins. I could watch her do it for the rest of my life, and I understand now that I had that exact job and resigned from it one late meeting at a time.
Today I escalate.
The car arrives at seven, before anyone else shows up.
I watch the delivery driver position it in her parking spot, attach the oversized bow to the hood, tuck the card under the windshield wiper.
It’s the same model she’s been driving for years, deliberately the same, because I know better than to buy her something flashy.
Newer, safer, with all the features her old one doesn’t have, and nothing about it that says look what I can afford.
That part took restraint. I’m learning restraint late, the way you learn a language as an adult, badly and one humiliation at a time.
She mentioned once, in passing, that her car was on its last legs.
Two hundred thousand miles and counting, check engine light perpetually glowing, strange sounds from the transmission that she’d learned to ignore.
She said she was worried about it dying on the freeway someday, leaving her stranded.
I filed that information away like I filed away everything she ever told me, storing it for later use without ever actually doing anything about it.
Until now.
The card took me an hour to write. Draft after draft, trying to find words that didn’t sound pathetic or desperate or both.
The first draft apologized for everything and sounded like a legal settlement.
The second one quoted our wedding vows and I tore it up before I finished reading it back.
In the end I kept it simple: Your safety matters to me.
It always has. I’m sorry it took me this long to show it. -C
She arrives at 8:15 a.m. I watch through the window as she stops short at her parking spot, circles the car, reads the card. Even from here I can see her shoulders stiffen, can read the tension in her spine as she processes what I’ve done.
She tears the card in half without finishing it. Both halves go into her coat pocket instead of the trash. I notice that. I notice everything now, exactly the way she said.
Twenty minutes later, she storms into the office and throws the keys at my chest.
“What the fuck is this?”
I catch the keys before they hit me, barely. “Your car has two hundred thousand miles on it. This one’s safer.”
“I don’t want your car, Cameron.”
“It’s not about want. It’s about-”
“About what? About you swooping in with your money and your grand gestures and acting like that makes up for years of nothing?” She’s pacing now, too angry to stand still, and her developers have all suddenly found urgent business elsewhere.
“You didn’t notice my car when we were married.
You didn’t notice that I was driving something held together with prayers and duct tape while you bought yourself a new car every year.
But now that I’ve left, suddenly you’re paying attention? ”
“I noticed. I just didn’t-”
“Didn’t act. Didn’t care enough to do anything about it.
Didn’t prioritize me over whatever meeting or deal or crisis was more important that day.
” She stops pacing, faces me directly, and her eyes are bright with fury and something underneath that looks too much like hurt.
“That’s the problem, Cam. You noticed everything. You just never did anything.”
She’s right. I know she’s right. And I don’t have a defense that isn’t an excuse. The worst part is that she’s describing a stranger and the stranger is me: a man who kept a mental file of his wife’s needs the way you keep receipts you never intend to return anything with.
“I’m not trying to buy your forgiveness,” I say quietly.
“I know I can’t. I know flowers and cars and showing up every day doesn’t undo the damage I did.
But I don’t know what else to do, Hannah.
I don’t know how to prove I’ve changed except by changing.
By being here. By paying attention to the things I should have paid attention to all along. ”
“Don’t you have a company to run?”
“I took a sabbatical.”
She goes still. “You what?”
“Indefinite leave. Told my parents why.” I watch her face as the information lands, watch her process what that means for a man who was raised to believe the company was the only thing that mattered.
“They wanted me to sign the papers and be done with it. Pretend this marriage was just a mistake I made in my twenties.”
“And your father?”
“Didn’t say anything at all.” Which was worse, and we both know it. Jack Jasper’s silence has always been the loudest voice in that house.
“And what did you say?”
“I told them I’d rather lose the company than lose my wife.” The words come out raw, more honest than I intended. “You said I love my work more than I love you. You were right. And I’m going to keep showing up until I’ve made you wrong. Every day. However long it takes.”
Something shifts in her face. Not forgiveness, not yet, maybe not ever. But something.
“Some things stay broken,” she whispers. But she doesn’t sound certain anymore.
Neither of us moves. Out in the main room a phone rings and someone answers it, business continuing, the world refusing to hold its breath just because ours is held.
She looks at the flowers on her desk. She looks at me.
For a moment I think the whole thing is about to break open, one way or the other.
My phone buzzes on the filing cabinet desk. I silence it without looking.
It buzzes again. I silence it again.
Her eyes drop to my hand on the phone, and I watch her expression harden.
“Old habits,” she says quietly. “That’s what you are to me now, Cameron. Old habits that I’m trying to break.”
She walks out of the office. I don’t follow her.
I sit there with the keys she threw at me, turning them over in my hand, the dealer tag still bright and stupid on the ring.
Then I put them in the top drawer of the filing cabinet, next to the growing pile of florist receipts, and I leave the drawer open a crack, in case she changes her mind. She won’t. I leave it open anyway.
My phone buzzes a third time. I pick it up to throw it across the room, then stop when I see the notification.
Fourteen missed calls from my mother.
The most recent voicemail is eleven seconds long. “Cameron. This foolishness ends now. Call me back.” No hello, no goodbye, the same voice she used when I was nine and late for a photographer.
I ignore them. I’ve been ignoring them for a week, ever since I told her about the sabbatical and she threatened to have me declared mentally incompetent. Let her call. Let her rage. She can’t take anything from me that I haven’t already lost.
Three hours later, I’m on the sidewalk outside the coffee place across the street, picking up the team’s afternoon order with my lawyer in my ear, when movement at the curb catches my eye.
A sleek black town car pulling up to the curb, the engine kept running, a driver rounding the hood to hold the door like this is a state visit. The back door opening. My mother stepping out, smoothing her skirt, heels clicking on the pavement, heading straight for Hannah’s building.
I feel my stomach drop. Whatever my mother has come to do, she has come to do it in person.
And Prentiss Jasper only does damage in person.
My lawyer picks this exact moment to read me an entire letter down the phone, and it takes me three tries to make him stop, and the crosswalk light takes a year.