Chapter 8
Ross
For the next forty-eight hours, I’m a ghost in my own life.
Pacing the hallways, I stare at a phone that refuses to ring and draft a dozen emails I never send, mostly because I’m afraid she’ll block me.
Luckily, I do find out that she’s at Wren’s house, thanks to her parents finally putting me out of my misery after a stern if you bother her, we’ll kick your ass speech.
So I bide my time, waiting for the perfect moment, when I have something tangible to show her. She’s heard my spiel.
When I finally drive to the office, it’s not out of desire, but necessity. The silence at home has become a physical weight I can no longer bear. I walk into the building like a dead man clocking in, hoping the firm’s chaos will numb the sensation of the ground crumbling beneath my feet.
The fluorescent lights scream, a low-frequency hum drilling directly into the soft tissue behind my eyes. The brightness is aggressive, bouncing off the polished marble floors and stabbing at the ache in my head.
Stopping in the breakroom doorway, my skin feels too tight, buckling under internal pressure.
I haven’t shaved. My jaw is shadowed by two days of failure.
My tie, the silk one Margot bought me for our fifth anniversary because it matched the Mediterranean, hangs limp against a shirt that’s a roadmap of wrinkles.
I’m a walking violation of the firm’s aesthetic standards, a condemned building waiting for the wrecking ball.
But for once in my life, I don’t care.
Even though it’s only 7 a.m., Chan, my only real friend here, is already in the breakroom.
He sits at the small, granite-topped table, back perfectly straight, stirring his coffee with a wooden stick. He doesn’t glance up when I enter, but he senses me nonetheless, must be my usual straight posture turned slouch.
I move toward the coffee station on legs that feel like unreinforced concrete. The air is stale, recycled one too many times through the building’s filtration system. It feels thin in my lungs.
Reaching for a ceramic mug, my fingers twitch, not just from caffeine withdrawal, but from the neurological fallout of total collapse. I grab the handle of the glass carafe instead. The glass is hot against my palm, a shocking contrast to the cold sweat slicking my skin.
I tip the carafe, but my hand betrays me.
The stream misses the mug by half an inch, hitting the white laminate counter. It forms a dark, steaming puddle that spreads with terrifying speed, threatening to drip onto the floor. I watch it expand, paralyzed, an inkblot test I’m failing in real time.
“You’re off your axis, Ross,” Chan says, his tone professional, detached.
I set the carafe down with a hard clatter that echoes too loudly in the small room. “Axis is gone, Chan. The whole site is crumbling.”
“Sit.”
I collapse into the chair across from him, lacking the energy to hold the posture of a senior architect. My shoulders slump, head hanging heavy, the granite table cold against my forearms.
Chan finally looks at me. His eyes are dark, analytical, stripping away the layers of my exhaustion until he sees the raw, jagged nerves beneath. He knows the difference between professional burnout and personal annihilation.
“You look like you’ve been living in a car,” he observes.
I love the man, but damn, what an asshole.
“Might as well have been.” I rub my face with both hands, the stubble rasping like sandpaper against my palms. “I destroyed it, Chan. On Valentine’s I went home. I tried. I turned off the phone, almost ate the damn lamb. Thought I was fixing us.”
Chan stops stirring. Tap. Tap. The wooden stick hits the rim of his mug, a metronome counting down my time. “Then what happened?”
“We went to bed.” I laugh, a short, ugly sound that scrapes my throat. “I was there. Present. I stared at her, and I felt that connection we used to have before I became Arthur’s favorite tool. I thought I’d brought us back.”
I pause. The memory of Margot’s face in the dark, the way her eyes had softened, twists like a knife in my gut.
“But while falling asleep, I called her the wrong name.”
Chan’s eyes narrow.
“I called her Tabitha.”
A squeak from the hallway. For a moment, I worry that someone overheard at the worst possible moment, but no one comes in. The silence that follows is a vacuum, sucking the oxygen out of the room.
So I continue, “In bed. On Valentine’s Day.”
Chan sets his mug down. He doesn’t look shocked, which is almost worse. “Muscle memory.”
“That’s what I told her!” I lean forward, gripping the table edges until they dig into my flesh. “I told her it was the project. That I’ve spent fourteen hours a day with Tabitha for three weeks. I told her the name is on every memo, every draft, every goddamn pixel of the Dubai model.”
“Doesn’t make it okay,” Chan rightfully says.
“I know! I’ve let this firm take up so much space in my head that there’s no room left for the person who actually loves me.”
My voice rises, cracking under the strain. I can’t stop the flood.
“Tabitha is everywhere. She’s the one who brings me the specs, stays until 3 a.m., understands the glass-to-steel ratio. I’ve built my life around Tabitha’s presence and Margot’s absence. I didn’t just say the wrong name. I revealed the wrong reality.”
“You didn’t say the wrong name, though. You proved to your wife that you aren’t present,” he continues, his voice a low, measured hum.
“You proved that when you close your eyes, you aren’t in your bedroom.
You’re in your office. At your drafting table.
You’re thinking about the load-bearing capacity of a project that doesn’t love you back. ”
“I thought if I secured the partnership, I was securing our future. I thought it was a necessary sacrifice.”
“You didn’t sacrifice for the marriage, Ross,” Chan says, his voice flat. “You sacrificed the marriage.”
I flinch. The truth hits like a physical blow to the chest.
“What am I supposed to do? I can’t un-say it. I can’t erase the last three weeks. I can’t stop being the man Arthur Keane built me to be.”
“You need a nuclear solution.”
“A what?”
“A nuclear solution. No half measures. No apologies and no ‘it was about the project.’ You have to tear it all down and start from the dirt up.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Resign.”
The word hits the room like a concussive blast. My breath hitches. The office around me, the sleek surfaces, the high-end finishes, the million-dollar blueprints—feels like it’s tilting, sliding toward the sea.
“Resign? I’m six months from partnership. Arthur will kill me. He’ll blackball me from every firm in the city.”
“Arthur Keane doesn’t care about you,” Chan says. “He cares about the skyline. If you died tomorrow, he’d have your replacement’s name on the door by Tuesday. Is that the man you’re sacrificing your wife for?”
I sink back into the chair. The image of Arthur, the Emperor, flashes through my mind. Cold. Exacting.
“She won’t come back,” I say. “Even if I quit. She’s already gone.”
“Then you quit for yourself. You quit so you can remember who Ross Calder is when he’s not an architect. Anything less is noise.”
Chan stands up, his coffee finished. He looks at the door, then back at me. For a second, the cool, detached mask slips, revealing a deep, exhausted envy.
“You know why I’m telling you this?” he asks, his voice dropping low. “Because I can’t do it. I have a mortgage that eats half my paycheck and twins starting private school in the fall. I’m shackled to this place, Ross. I’m a lifer.”
He grips his empty mug, knuckles tight. “You aren’t. Not yet. You’re standing in the open cell door, wondering if you should leave. Don’t check the lock. Just run.”
He checks his watch, the mask sliding back into place. “The meeting is at noon. Arthur expects a masterpiece.”
When he leaves, I’m alone.
The spilled coffee has dried into a sticky stain on the counter. Looking at it, I see the map of my future. Messy. Ugly. A total loss of structural integrity.
I stand. My legs shake, but my mind is strangely clear.
Walking out of the breakroom, I pass the bullpen. Tabitha is at her desk, back to me, typing with a frantic, rhythmic intensity. The clicking of her keyboard sounds like the soundtrack to my life.
As I walk toward Arthur’s corner office, past the models of skyscrapers that scrape the heavens, I know the truth.
Career or not, my obsessions should start, and end, with my wife. My life.
And the only way to save the foundation is to let the whole thing fall.
Reaching the heavy glass doors of the executive suite, I spot Arthur inside, back to me, staring out at the city he helped shape. He looks powerful. Indestructible. Meanwhile, when I catch my reflection in the glass, I see the man who has lost everything.
My hand reaches for the brushed steel handle. It is cold, heavy, solid.
Resign, Chan said. Nuclear solution.
But as I look at Arthur, at the city, I falter. I’ve worked seven years for this view. If I quit now, I’m not just losing a job; I’m losing the identity I built to be worthy of her. I can’t offer her a husband who is unemployed and broken. I have to offer her a winner.
I can fix this, I tell myself, the lie smooth and practiced. I just need to finish the Dubai render. Then I’ll have the leverage to demand time off. Then I’ll go to her.
I don’t open the door to quit. I open it to work.
“Arthur,” I say, stepping into the lion’s den. “I have the new specs.”
It’s the wrong choice. And deep down, in the pit of my stomach where the coffee stain is burning a hole, I know it.