Chapter Three — Magnus
The morning had started normally enough, a nine o'clock call with a shipping partner in Savannah about a rate renegotiation that ran twenty minutes over because neither of us wanted to be the one to blink first, followed by a walk-through of the new sorting line with Brynn, who'd been pushing for the upgrade for a year and had finally worn the board down.
I liked days like that, ordinary and full, the specific satisfaction of watching a business I'd built from three trucks run like something with its own gravity now.
Grace had called around noon, a quick check-in between her own meetings, and we'd spent five minutes trading small updates, her signage walkthrough, my sorting line, nothing important, just the ordinary maintenance of two lives running alongside each other.
I hung up feeling the specific contentment of a marriage that didn't need anything dramatic to feel solid, and carried that feeling with me into the evening without any sense that it was about to be tested.
Garrett's divorce had gotten into my head in a way I didn't expect, following me around the office all week like a smell I couldn't place the source of.
I kept thinking about the version of him from fifteen years ago, the one who used to talk about Priya like she was the best decision he'd ever made, who'd cried actual tears at his own wedding and hadn't been embarrassed about it, comparing it to the man across the table from me now, hollowed out and strangely lighter for it, like grief and relief had gotten tangled together in him until he couldn't separate the two.
The private room at Hendrick's was our usual spot for the informal version of these dinners, the ones that weren't technically business but always ended up circling back to it anyway.
Garrett was there, and Alden Frost, who ran a commercial real estate firm and had known Garrett since business school, and two other guys from the regional logistics association board, Perry and Dale, most of them past forty, all of us successful enough to have earned the right, or so it felt in that room, to complain about our lives without anyone calling it ingratitude.
We spent the first twenty minutes on ordinary things, a proposed zoning change downtown that would affect three of our warehouses, Dale's daughter's college applications, a mutual acquaintance's failed restaurant venture that nobody was surprised about.
It felt like every other dinner we'd had in this room for the better part of a decade, easy and unremarkable, before the conversation found its way, the way it always eventually did with Garrett in this particular chapter of his life, back to the divorce.
"To freedom," Garrett said, raising his glass with a laugh that had no humor in it. "Or whatever this is."
"You don't have to toast to it," Alden said. "You're allowed to just be sad."
"I've done sad. Sad was months ago. This is the part where I try to figure out what I actually want instead of what I thought I was supposed to want.
" Garrett drained half his bourbon. "You know what's funny?
I keep thinking about all the things I didn't do because I was building a life with Priya.
Not big things. Small stuff. I never lived alone.
Not once. Went straight from my parents' house to a dorm to an apartment with her.
I don't even know what I like for breakfast when nobody's asking. "
"That's a strange thing to grieve," Perry said.
"Everything's strange to grieve when you're forty-six and starting over."
I found myself thinking, listening to Garrett, about my own version of that same small grief, the version where I hadn't actually lost the chance to know myself alone, but had simply never asked myself whether I wanted to.
It was an uncomfortable thought to have at a dinner table, and I pushed it aside before it could go anywhere.
The conversation drifted, the way these dinners always did, toward the larger question underneath Garrett's specific grief.
Dale mentioned he sometimes wondered what would have happened if he'd moved to Austin in his twenties instead of staying to run his father's dealership.
Perry said something similar about a job offer in finance he'd turned down to stay close to a girlfriend who hadn't lasted six more months after he turned it down, a fact that made everyone laugh except Perry, who looked like the memory still stung a little.
"If I could go back," Garrett said, quieter now, "I'd have gotten to know myself before I let someone else start deciding who I was going to be. I don't mean that as an insult to Priya. I mean it as an insult to myself, for not doing it first."
Nobody laughed at that one. It struck too close to the actual grief underneath it, and for a moment the table just sat with the discomfort of it.
"You ever think about that?" Garrett asked, looking at me. "You built something huge, Magnus. Bigger than any of us. You ever wonder what it would look like if you'd had the chance to do it without a wife and a mortgage weighing in on every decision along the way?"
Perry, quiet until now, shifted in his seat. "I don't think that's a fair question, honestly. Magnus built Murphy Freight with Grace right there the whole time. That's not the same as somebody holding him back."
"I'm not saying she held him back," Garrett said, already a little defensive. "I'm asking if he ever wonders."
"Everybody wonders things. Wondering's not the same as believing it."
I should have said no immediately, cleanly, the way a happily married man is supposed to answer that question. Instead I found myself turning the question over, actually considering it, which was already the wrong move.
"Sometimes," I admitted.
"Like what?"
And then I was listing them, almost without meaning to, the way you start pulling a thread and suddenly there's a whole sweater unraveling in your hands.
Singapore, the distribution hub I'd walked away from four years back because the timing never worked with Grace's father's illness and a business that couldn't survive a bad quarter overseas.
The acquisition three years ago that would have doubled our regional footprint if I'd had the stomach to take on the debt required.
The years early on when travel wasn't really an option because somebody needed to be reliably home, and it had always ended up being me who stayed.
"Man, you had all that on the table?" Dale asked, sounding genuinely surprised. "I didn't know Murphy Freight was ever that close to Singapore."
"We were close. It didn't happen."
"Why not?"
"Timing," I said, which was true and also not the whole truth, because underneath the timing was a version of the decision that had a lot more to do with my own nerve than with anything Grace had asked of me.
Perry whistled low. "That's a big fish to let get away. I'd have lost sleep over that one for years."
"I did, actually. Still do sometimes."
"Timing meaning what, exactly," Alden said, not quite letting it go. "You had capital. You had the partner lined up. What was the actual timing issue?"
"Grace's dad was sick that year. It felt like the wrong time to be building something on the other side of the planet."
"That's not nothing," Alden said. "But it's also not really an answer. Plenty of guys would've found a way to do both."
"Maybe I'm not plenty of guys."
"So you're saying Grace cost you the life you might've had," Garrett said. It wasn't cruel, exactly. It was just Garrett, drunk on his own bitterness, looking for company in it, reaching for a comparison that would make his own losses feel less isolated.
I could have corrected him in that exact moment. I had the sentence ready, somewhere underneath the scotch and the exhaustion and the strange pull of being agreed with by a room full of men who understood, or claimed to understand, exactly what I meant. I didn't say it.
"Sometimes I wonder," I said instead, and it felt easier than it should have, sliding the weight of my own hesitations onto a shape I could point to and call marriage, instead of admitting that most of those decisions had been mine, made out of a fear I didn't want to examine too closely, a fear that had nothing to do with the woman waiting for me at home and everything to do with whether I actually trusted myself to survive failing at something that big.
Alden watched me for a long moment, something unreadable in his expression, but he didn't say anything either.
The waiter came with the check, and the conversation moved on to something about a zoning dispute Dale was dealing with, a warehouse permit stuck in review for months over a drainage easement nobody could seem to resolve, and I found myself half-listening, offering the occasional useful thought about a similar issue we'd navigated years back, while the rest of me stayed lodged on the sentence I'd just let stand uncorrected.
Dale mentioned, toward the end of the meal, that his daughter had gotten into her first-choice school, and the table shifted easily into congratulations, Garrett managing something like genuine warmth for the first time all night, and for a few minutes it felt like any other dinner we'd had in that room, ordinary and unremarkable, the earlier exchange folded back into the general noise of four men eating steak and complaining about small things.
I drove home twenty minutes later telling myself the whole exchange hadn't meant anything, that it was just men talking, the way men talk when one of them is drowning and the rest of them are trying to figure out how deep the water actually is.
I turned the radio up louder than I needed to, some old habit from years of commuting when I wanted to drown out my own thoughts rather than sit with them, and by the time I pulled into the driveway I'd mostly convinced myself of it.
Grace was already asleep when I got in. I stood in the doorway of our bedroom for a moment, watching her breathe, one arm thrown over the pillow where I usually slept, and felt something uncomfortable move through me that I didn't have a name for yet.
I got ready for bed quietly, brushing my teeth in the dark so I wouldn't wake her, and lay down beside her, and she stirred slightly, murmuring something that might have been my name, and settled back against me without fully waking.
I told myself it was nothing, and went to sleep anyway, and slept fine, the specific ease of a man who has not yet had to reckon with anything, because nothing has come looking for him yet.