27. Nate
NATE
Nate went back to work the same night she left.
It was the only thing he knew how to do with a house that had too much air in it, so he sat at the kitchen island with his laptop and his phone and worked until two in the morning. Then he went to bed and lay there not sleeping for three hours, and then he got up and worked again.
By the end of the second day, he was further ahead than he’d ever been at work, and he felt a greater emptiness than he ever had as well. He still had everything he’d had two months before, but it seemed the light had been sucked out of the world.
Because Jasmine was no longer in this life with him.
“Are you sleeping?” Radha asked on the third morning.
“Yes,” he said.
“I received an email from you at four a.m.”
“I wake up early.”
A pause on the line that registered as judgment. “Nate.”
“Is there something you needed, or—”
“There are seventeen items on your calendar today. You’ve added nine of them yourself in the last forty-eight hours.”
“I’m catching up.”
“You weren’t behind.”
“I’ll call you back. There’s something I need to tend to.”
He put the phone down and looked at the kitchen island, which was clean and empty and smelled of nothing in particular because the candles were gone.
Marisol had aired out the house the day after Jasmine left.
She’d probably been thinking it would be good for Nate, resetting the place so that he could move on faster, but it only made him worse.
He wished she hadn’t opened all the windows and thrown out the candles and the bookmark and the hairbrush Jasmine had left behind. But he didn’t say that to Marisol.
The work helped, in the way that work had always helped.
It gave his mind somewhere to be that wasn’t the thing he was avoiding, and for stretches of an hour or two, he could almost believe he was fine.
He was good at the work. He’d always been good at the work.
It paid back exactly what you put in, which was a quality he’d valued his entire adult life, and which he was finding, this week, somewhat less comforting than usual.
The problem was the gaps. The twenty minutes between calls when there was nothing immediately demanding his attention.
At the end of the day, when the messages had all been sent, the calls had all been made, and the house settled into its quiet.
He’d been here alone before, many times, in this house and the penthouse and countless hotel rooms in dozens of different cities.
He’d never particularly minded the quiet.
It had always felt like neutral territory.
A place to recharge before the next day’s work.
It didn’t feel neutral now. Now it felt like an absence, which was different, and worse, and not something he’d been prepared for.
He kept reaching for things that weren’t there. The sound of the speaker from the east wing. The smell of whatever candle she had going on any given evening.
He was in the middle of a risk assessment on a new acquisition, reading the same paragraph for the third time without absorbing it, when his phone buzzed with Graham’s name.
He looked at it for a moment. Then he answered.
“Nate.” The gloating dripped down the line. “I think we both know why I’m calling.”
“I imagine you’re going to tell me,” Nate said through tight teeth.
“A hundred million dollars.” He said it with the satisfied precision of a man who had been looking forward to saying it. “The arrangement is over, the story’s out, and everyone knows she moved out of your house. I’d say that settles it fairly clearly.” A pause. “I’ll send wiring details.”
Nate leaned back in his chair. He looked at the ceiling.
He thought about the beach and the sand dollar and a woman laughing until she couldn’t breathe, and he thought about the kitchen the night she’d told him about the diagnosis, and he thought about the look on her face as she’d walked out of this house with two suitcases and the words: “We never have to speak again.”
“I’m not paying,” Nate said.
A silence. “I beg your pardon?”
“The bet was to marry her within the year. The year isn’t over.” He kept his voice easy, the way he kept it easy in negotiations when he had less on the table than the other person thought. “And our story isn’t over. Not even close.”
A longer silence. “She walked out, Nate. It’s been all over the internet for days.”
“She walked out of my house,” Nate said. “That’s different from walking out of the story.”
“You’re delusional.”
“I’ve been called worse.” He sat forward and closed the document on his laptop. He wouldn’t be reading it tonight. “I’ll be in touch about the wiring details. Mine or yours, we’ll see.”
He ended the call before Graham could say anything else.
Then he sat in the quiet of the kitchen for a while, phone face-down on the counter, and thought about what he’d just said. Not the part about the bet. That was reflex, the same instinct that had always made him refuse to fold. He’d worry about the hundred million when it came to it.
He thought about the other part. Our story isn’t over.
He hadn’t said that for Graham’s benefit. He’d said it because it was true, or because he needed it to be true. But what did it matter? What he did know was that he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet.
He thought about everything Jasmine had said before she left. She’d been right about most of it. He didn’t enjoy admitting that, but he’d spent enough of his life being honest with himself in private to do it properly when it mattered.
She’d been right about the bet, about the emails, about the gap between what he’d risked and what she’d lost. He’d told her she’d known the risks, which was technically true and humanly unforgivable. Her knowing what could happen wasn’t an excuse for how people were treating her.
Nate was good at building things. He’d built a company that was taking over the betting world. He was good at identifying what was broken and fixing it. He was good at the long game.
What he wasn’t good at was the personal stuff. Understanding people’s needs and meeting them.
But was that really an excuse for him to stay shut away in his stupidly large house for the rest of his life? To not go out there and take risks, open his heart?
He didn’t need to travel the whole world to know that Jasmine was special. He’d let her slip through his fingers twice now, and if it happened a third time, he would kick himself until the day he died.
She was not a deal to be closed. She was not a problem to be solved or a narrative to be managed.
He’d been an idiot. He knew it and was sorry for it, and their time at the beach house had been the best ten days of his entire life. He didn’t want to go back to the version of his life that had existed before a woman had moved her candles into his east wing and refused to let his house be a tomb.
He picked up his phone. He didn’t call her. That wasn’t the right move, not yet. Not while she needed the space she’d asked for. But he held the phone and let the intention settle in him, solid and clear, the way the best decisions always felt before he acted on them.
He was going to win her back. Not with a strategy, not with a number, not with anything that could be put in a contract or shaken on in a bar. Just with the truth, told by a man who had finally run out of reasons to protect himself from it.