25. Kai
— ? —
Kai
She hasn’t spoken to me since Sunday. I walked out of her apartment with the taste of her still on my lips and the sound of her voice telling me to go, and that was two weeks ago, and every day since I’ve checked my phone every five minutes for a text that never arrives and lain awake in the dark replaying every second of that afternoon, wondering if I pushed too hard or not hard enough.
She won’t answer my calls, sends them straight to voicemail without letting them ring, and she ducks out of events when she sees me coming, slipping through side doors and disappearing into crowds before I can get close.
I left her one message, on the fourth day, that I’m not proud of, four minutes of me saying her name and not much else, and I’ve listened to it back twice, and I sound like a man calling from the bottom of a well.
She didn’t call back. I didn’t expect her to. I called anyway.
I’m unraveling, and I can’t seem to stop.
The face in my bathroom mirror looks like a stranger, unshaven, hollow around the eyes, the face of a man people cross the street to avoid, the face that makes your grandmother grab your chin and demand to know when you last ate anything that wasn’t coffee.
I’ve lost more weight, and my suits hang on me differently now, looser in the shoulders, the trousers needing a new notch on the belt, and the staff at the house have started leaving food outside my study door, plates I forget to touch until they’ve gone cold.
The empire I’ve bled for feels like a stranger’s house, all these rooms full of expensive things, all this success, and none of it means anything when she’s not here to share it.
Tonight is the company anniversary party, a celebration of everything my father built, the legacy I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to honor, black tie, champagne, speeches about vision and the bright future ahead, and I can’t remember why any of it used to matter, and I put on the tuxedo anyway, because it’s my father’s company and my name is on the invitations, and there’s a difference between being a man who’s falling apart and being a man who lets a room watch him do it, and I’ve stopped being able to remember which one I’d rather be.
Dora agreed to be my date, but only after extensive guilt-tripping and a promise to shave, and I’ve managed one out of two, and she lets me know it the moment I pick her up.
She’s waiting on the porch when I pull in, under the extra strands of lights that are still up from the party, and she takes one look at me through the windshield and shakes her head before I’ve even got the door open.
“You look like you lost an argument with your own bathroom mirror,” she says, her silver hair perfectly coiffed, her dress elegant and understated in a way that makes my rumpled tuxedo look even worse.
“Thank you, Grandma. You look lovely too.”
“I’m serious, Kai. When’s the last time you slept through the night?”
“I don’t remember.”
She sighs, a sound with decades of worry in it, and pats my cheek with more force than strictly necessary. “That girl is going to be there tonight. I invited her.”
My heart stumbles. “You what?”
“She’s the company’s most famous former employee. It would have been strange not to invite her.” Dora settles into the car, smoothing her skirt with the air of someone who knows exactly what she’s done. “Also, I wanted to see you squirm.”
“You’re a cruel woman.”
“I’m a practical woman. You two have been dancing around each other for weeks.
It’s exhausting to watch.” She looks out the window at the canyon going by.
“She came to my birthday, you know. Wore the dress you bought her. Danced with the man who runs the bakery on Vermont and didn’t look at the door once, and I know because I watched her not look at it all night. ”
I don’t say anything. There isn’t anything to say to that, and Dora doesn’t expect anything, and we ride the rest of the way down the hill with the radio off and her hand resting on the seat between us, not on mine, just near it, the way it used to rest near me in hospital hallways.
I was in the kitchen for most of that party, refilling things that didn’t need refilling, because I couldn’t stand in the garden and watch my wife not look at me.
The party is at headquarters, the glass tower in Century City, and hundreds of people mill around the atrium with champagne in hand, celebrating a year of the things that used to make me feel like I was accomplishing something.
I spot Erika almost immediately.
She’s standing near the ice sculpture in a black dress that clings to her in ways that make my mouth go dry, her hair up, exposing the long line of her neck, laughing at whatever the person next to her just said.
She looks beautiful, and like she belongs here, and like she’s doing just fine without me, and that’s the part that hurts most of all.
I force myself to circulate, shake hands with people whose names I should remember but can’t, accept congratulations on a year I barely remember, smile and nod while people talk about the work in words that used to excite me and now sound like a language I’ve forgotten how to speak, and every few minutes I glance toward the ice sculpture.
She’s moved to the bar. She’s accepting a glass of champagne from a waiter.
She’s looking everywhere except at me. Except once, when she thinks I’ve turned to talk to someone, and I haven’t, and I catch it, and she catches me catching it, and looks away so fast her champagne tilts.
Someone asks me a question about next year and I hear myself answer it, and I have no idea what I said, and they nod like it was fine, and it occurs to me that I could have been saying nothing at all for months and no one in this building would have noticed, and that she’s the only person who ever did.
An hour in, I can’t take it anymore.
The balcony is empty, which is the only reason I chose it.
It runs along the outside of the atrium two floors up, glass wall on one side looking down into the party and open air on the other looking out over the city, and I stand at the outer rail with my back to the glass.
The night air is cool against my face, and the city spreads out below like a circuit board, every light somebody’s evening, people going about their lives without any idea that I’m up here falling apart.
I used to look at this view and feel powerful, like I’d conquered a thing, like all those lights were proof that I’d earned my place at the top, and now I just feel alone, and I stand here long enough that the cold gets into the tuxedo, and I don’t go back in.
“Hiding?”
Her voice makes me turn so fast I nearly drop my glass over the railing.
Erika stands in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself against the cool air, wary, uncertain, like she’s not entirely sure why she followed me out here.
“Something like that,” I manage.
She joins me at the railing, leaving a careful distance between us, and we stand in silence, shoulder to shoulder but miles apart, looking out at the city we used to dream about together from a rooftop that cost nothing.
“Dora cornered me at the champagne fountain,” she says finally. “Told me I was being a coward.”
“That sounds like her.”
“She said if I was going to spend the whole night not looking at you I could at least do it from closer up.”
“She said that to me too. Different words.”
“She’s not wrong.” Erika takes a breath. “I’ve been avoiding you.”
“I noticed.”
“I didn’t know what to say. After Sunday.” She’s quiet for a moment. “I still don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“Yes, I do.” She turns to face me, and her eyes are bright in the reflected city lights. “I’ve been thinking. About what you said, about what happened, about all of it.”
“And?”
“And I don’t know if it’s possible.” Her voice cracks slightly on the words. “What you want from me. What I’d have to give you to make this work.”
“What would you have to give me?”
“Everything.” The word comes out raw. “My trust. My future. My whole heart, again. And I already did that once, Kai. Look how it ended.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” She steps closer, and there’s a fierceness in her now that’s been building for two weeks of silence.
“Because you’re standing here telling me you’ve changed, telling me you want another chance, and I want to believe you.
God, Kai, I want to believe you so badly it hurts.
” Her voice breaks. “But I can’t survive loving a man who’s married to his company. ”
Married to his company.
I look down at the party below, all those people in their expensive clothes holding their expensive drinks, celebrating the thing I’ve spent my whole adult life building, the thing I thought would make my parents proud, the thing I chose, over and over, instead of her, and I see it.
Finally, standing on this balcony with the woman I love looking at me like a puzzle she can’t solve, I see what I’ve been too blind to see for years, and it isn’t complicated, and it was never complicated, and that’s the part that goes through me like cold water.
Every dinner I missed, I was down there.
Every night she went to bed alone, I was down there.
She’s been telling me for four years and I’ve been down there, and I called it building something.
The party below keeps spinning, the champagne keeps flowing, and I stand here silent, because I don’t have an answer for her, not yet, not one that means anything, and she watches me not answer, and her expression shifts, not into disappointment exactly, into a look that might be hope or might be goodbye.
“Whatever you decide,” she says quietly, “make sure it’s what you actually want. Not what you think will win me back.”
She turns and walks back inside, the door closing softly behind her, and I stay on the balcony for a long time, watching the city lights blur as the cold wind makes my eyes water.
Down in the atrium someone starts a speech, and I can hear my name in it through the glass, and applause, and I don’t go in for it, and nobody comes to find me, and I stand out here and let a room full of people toast a man who isn’t in it, and I understand for the first time that they’d manage fine.
They’d manage fine tomorrow. The only room in my life that wouldn’t manage fine without me is the one I’ve been standing outside of for a year.
Then I go find Dora.
She’s near the champagne fountain, holding court with a group of people who all look slightly terrified of her, and she sees me coming and excuses herself, reading a thing in my face that makes her own expression sharpen.
“I know what I have to do,” I tell her.
She studies me for a moment. Then she smiles, and it’s the first genuine smile I’ve seen from her in months.
“I’ve been waiting years for you to figure that out.”
Over her shoulder, through the atrium glass, I can see the balcony where I stood, empty now, and past it the city, and I don’t feel powerful looking at it, and I don’t feel alone either.
I feel like a man who’s finally read the last page of a book he’s been carrying around for a year, and knows how it ends, and just has to get there.