16. Cameron
— ? —
Cameron
She called it goodbye. I’m proving her wrong.
The note is in my wallet. That was goodbye.
Sign the papers. Six words in her careful handwriting, and I’ve read them so many times the crease is going soft.
I didn’t sign. I’m not going to. But I kept the note, because it’s the first thing she’s given me since she left, even if what she was giving me was the door.
It’s two in the morning, the night before her software launch.
Hannah’s at her desk looking like she hasn’t slept in days, which is accurate because she hasn’t.
The demo keeps crashing whenever more than fifty users log in simultaneously.
Her speech is a disaster, revised so many times the original draft is unrecognizable.
And her ADHD is winning, scattering her attention across a dozen urgent tasks until she can’t complete any of them.
The office looks like a war room after the war lost. Whiteboards covered in launch-day logistics, pizza boxes from two nights ago nobody’s thrown out, a wall of sticky notes that started as a system and became an ecosystem.
On her monitor, error messages scroll past in red, the demo dying over and over no matter what she feeds it.
Her developers went home at midnight because she made them, because she’ll run herself into the ground before she lets anyone else do the same, and now it’s just her and me and the hum of servers that won’t cooperate.
I could take over. Fix the server issue myself, I’ve got the technical background. Rewrite the speech, I’ve done enough of them. Solve everything and prove how invaluable I am.
But that’s not what she needs. That’s what the old Cameron would have done, swooping in to save the day and making her feel small in the process. The new Cameron, the one who’s learning, knows better.
She hasn’t mentioned that night. Not once in the week since.
She came in the next morning with her spine straight and her eyes forward and a look that dared me to say one word about it, and I didn’t, because I’m learning, and because a man who’s been given goodbye doesn’t get to negotiate the terms. But she didn’t move my chair out of her office either.
I’m keeping score in inches now. That one counted.
Everyone has a name for what I’m doing. My mother calls it a midlife crisis.
Summer, according to the office grapevine, calls it too little too late, but keep watering the flowers.
I don’t care what anyone calls it. She said goodbye, and she’s still here, and so am I, and every day both of those things stay true is a day I haven’t lost.
“Hey.” I set a fresh cup of coffee at her elbow, the handle turned toward her hand. “When did you last eat?”
“I don’t remember.” She doesn’t look up. Her cursor blinks in the middle of a sentence she’s rewritten four times while I watched. “What day is it?”
“It’s tomorrow. Technically.”
“Then yesterday. I ate yesterday. Probably.”
“I’ll order Vietnamese.”
“I don’t have time-”
“Your brain needs fuel.” I order from the Vietnamese place she loves, the one whose menu I know by heart now, and when the food arrives she eats garlic noodles straight from the container with her eyes still on the screen, chopsticks in one hand, trackpad under the other.
Twenty minutes later the container is empty and her shoulders have come down an inch.
I move around the office quietly, not taking over, just creating order.
Gathering the scattered papers into stacks organized by priority.
Moving the reference materials closer to where she keeps reaching for them.
Clearing a path through the debris so she can think.
Her highlighters go back in the mug, sorted the way she sorts them, warm colors left, cool colors right.
Her noise-canceling headphones move from under a pizza box to the corner of the desk where her hand always goes looking for them.
None of it is heroic. All of it is what I should have been doing for five years.
Outside, the city is doing its 2 a.m. impression of quiet, a siren somewhere, a bus sighing past. In here it’s just the servers and her breathing and the small sounds of a person at the end of her rope trying to braid it longer.
“Where’s the speech?” I ask.
“Laptop. Somewhere. I’ve rewritten it nine times and I can’t-” Her voice cracks, frustration and exhaustion breaking through. “I can’t read it anymore. The words keep moving around on the page.”
I know what that means. Even now, even to me, she almost didn’t say it. I watched her try three other sentences first. I know what it costs her to admit it, to acknowledge the thing she’s spent her whole life trying to hide.
I pull her laptop toward me. Find the speech file. And I start reading it aloud.
She stares at me. The exhaustion on her face makes room for something else, something wary and disbelieving, like a stray watching a hand held out flat. “What are you doing?”
“Reading your speech. So you can hear what you wrote.” I keep my voice steady, neutral, like this is a perfectly normal thing to be doing at this hour. “You told me once that you process better by listening. That your ears catch what your eyes miss.”
“You remembered that?”
“I remember everything you’ve told me, Hannah.” I meet her eyes and hold them. “I was just too busy to show it.”
I read the speech. Her words, out loud in my voice, in the empty office at two in the morning: “I built this for the kid in the back of the classroom who can’t make the words sit still.
I built it for the adult who has read the same paragraph four times on the worst day of their life.
I built it because nobody built it for me. ”
She closes her eyes and listens, and I watch her hear her own thinking for the first time in nine drafts.
Then again, slower, giving her time to catch the rhythm and the flow. We edit together, her dictating changes, me typing them in, until the words stop fighting her and start sounding like her voice.
“Not ‘accommodate,’” she says at one point, eyes still closed. “That word sounds like a hotel. Say ‘built for.’”
I change it. Read the sentence back. Her mouth moves along with the words, testing them, and when they fit she nods once, sharp, the way she does when code compiles.
By four in the morning, we have something beautiful.
Her phone buzzes on the desk. Her lead developer, texting from home: the overnight fix held, everything’s stable, and he’s going back to sleep.
She reads it twice, and some knot between her shoulders finally lets go, and I hand her the coffee she forgot she had without either of us making anything of it.
“Cameron…” She’s looking at me like she’s never seen me before. “The interview. You made fun of this. Called me chaotic. Called me scatterbrained. Made the whole world laugh at the way my brain works.”
“I know.” I move to kneel beside her chair so we’re eye level. “I was wrong. Cruel. I’ve hated myself every day since.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“Because I’m a coward.” The truth scrapes raw coming out, but I owe her this honesty.
“The reporter was pushing and the camera was rolling and I reached for the easy joke instead of defending the woman I love. I wanted to be charming. I wanted them to laugh with me instead of looking too closely at me. And I sacrificed you to do it.”
The words hang in the office hum. I’ve never said them out loud before, not even to myself, and hearing them in my own voice is like reading an indictment I wrote and then buried. There’s no version of that sentence where I’m the good guy. I stopped looking for one a long time ago.
She’s quiet for a long moment. The server hum fills the room, and somewhere outside a garbage truck works its way down the block, the city getting on with the ordinary night while she decides what to do with my honesty.
Tears stream down her face, and I want to wipe them away but I don’t dare touch her. Not now. Not when she’s finally hearing what I should have said months ago.
“Do you know what it’s like?” she whispers. “To hide something your whole life, to finally trust someone with it, and have them use it to entertain strangers?”
“No.” The word costs nothing and everything.
“And I’m sorrier than I know how to say.
” I take her hands, holding them loosely so she can pull away if she needs to.
Her fingers are cold the way they always are past midnight, and mine close around them the way they always did, and for a moment neither of us acknowledges that our hands remember how to do this without us.
“Let me prove I can be better. Not with words. With actions.”
She doesn’t answer. But she doesn’t pull away either.
Behind us, her laptop pings with an email notification. The press list for tomorrow’s launch. I glance at it automatically, then freeze.
“Hannah…”
“What?”
“Marisse is credentialed. For your launch.”
The reporter from the gala. The one who pushed me into saying the things that broke us.
Her name sits on the credentialed list between two trade journalists like a knife in a drawer of spoons, and I can already see the story she’s planning to write.
Something cold and old and useful moves through me, the boardroom thing, the part of me that knows how to end careers.
I breathe until it passes. This isn’t my fight. She made that clear, and she’s right.
Hannah’s face hardens. “Let her come. I don’t need you to fight my battles.”
“I know you don’t.” I meet her eyes steadily. “That’s never stopped me from wanting to.”
She holds my gaze for a moment longer than she needs to. Then she turns back to the screen, and the subject is closed, and the wanting stays where it lives, in my chest, unspent.
At five in the morning, mid-sentence, she loses.
I watch it happen: her eyes close on a blink that doesn’t end, her head tips, and she folds down onto her crossed arms with the abruptness of a power cut.
The launch is in five hours. The speech is done.
The servers are holding. There is nothing left tonight for her to fight, so her body finally stops asking permission.
I take off my jacket and drape it over her shoulders. Half-conscious, she pulls it tighter around herself, and I hear her murmur something that might be my name.
What she murmurs is my name. Not Cameron. Cam. The syllable she took away weeks ago, given back unconscious, and I stand there in the dark office absolutely destroyed by it, one syllable taking me apart more thoroughly than the divorce papers did.
I stand there watching her sleep, and I think about tomorrow. The launch. The press. Marisse with her red lipstick and her loaded questions.
Hannah doesn’t need me to save her. She’s going to save herself.
But I’ll be there. And if anyone tries to hurt her, they’ll have to go through me first.
Outside the windows, the sky is starting to gray at the edges.
Launch day, arriving whether we’re ready or not.
I pull a chair to the corner where I can see both her and the door, and I sit down to keep watch over the woman who told me to sign the papers, wearing my jacket in her sleep.
When the gray turns to gold I’ll make myself leave, so she wakes to her launch day and not to me. But not yet.