You, With a View(88)

Oh god. I compartmentalize that and run to my car, backing out of the driveway at a speed my parents’ next-door neighbor will probably post about on the neighborhood online message board. Doesn’t matter to me. Theo’s alone, processing this news, and he doesn’t have to be.

I get to the city in record time. When I park at his house, I squint up at the living room windows. There’s no movement.

My heart pounds against my ribs as I climb out of my car. I head toward the front door, but then I hear it—sad boy music, drifting out on the light breeze from the backyard.

“Shit,” I mutter.

There’s a slender alleyway between his house and the next one, so I make my way down it. The music gets louder the closer I get; it’s a really sad song, which is saying a lot considering it’s Radiohead. When I get to his gate, I reach over and unlatch it, swinging it open.

Theo is slouched in a chair at the patio table. His left hand is circled around a drink resting on his knee, and his cheek is propped on his right hand. He’s staring out at nothing. If he hears me, he doesn’t acknowledge it.

It’s an achingly solitary picture.

“Hey,” I call quietly, closing the gate behind me.

He looks over and my heart falls all the way to my feet. His hair is mussed, eyes subtly rimmed red. His expression is blank as he watches me slide into the seat next to him.

“You saw,” he says.

“Yeah, I did.” I swallow against my helplessness seeing him like this. So leached of emotion, no trace of that dimple.

“I’m surprised you’re here.”

I frown, confused. “Why wouldn’t I be? You just got horrible news.” His gaze bounces away, but he doesn’t say anything, so I press on. “You must be in shock.”

A humorless huff bursts from his mouth. “Shock isn’t the word for it.”

“What is the word?”

For a moment, he doesn’t say anything. Then he inhales sharply and starts talking, blasting past my question. “It’s like every time I think I’ve done something worthwhile, every time I think I’ve gotten to a place where it’s safe to say, okay, this is success, I’ve finally done enough, it’s still not fucking enough.”

“Enough for wh—”

He sets his drink on the table and leans forward, scrubbing both of his hands over his face with a frustrated grunt. “And I can’t even deal with the fact that I’ve been pushed out of my own company by myself. They had to put that fucking statement out right away, and my dad’s been calling me all afternoon. I’m never going to hear the end of how I wasted that first fifty K he gave us, even though we’ve grown it so exponentially I can’t do the math off the top of my head.” His laugh is humorless. “I guess it’s not we anymore. I need to stop saying that.”

I scoot closer, laying a hand on his arm. Our knees press together, and my body wants to take it further, curl up on his lap. No matter how close I get, though, there’s a distance between us, shaped like his profile as he looks away.

“Talk to me,” I say. “Tell me what happened. Are they even allowed to ambush you like this? Just tell you it’s over? Can’t you fight that, like, legally?”

Theo’s silence extends, long and tight. Finally, he says, “They didn’t ambush me, Noelle.”

“What do you mean? The article I read said it was a surprise.”

“Sure, to the general public. Not to me.”

Unease drips into my veins. “I’m not really following.”

He stares off into the distance. “This exit has been in the works for weeks, and our arguments over the direction of the business for months longer than that. Like I told you, they want to take the company in a new direction. Our investors want it, Anton and Matias want it, everyone wants it but me because I can’t let go of the idea that it’s already what it should be. And I pushed so fucking hard—” Again, he wipes at his face with his hand. “The investors wanted me gone, and Anton and Matias ultimately agreed. When I decided to come on the trip, they’d just given me paperwork to buy me out of my equity. I knew what I was coming back to. It wasn’t a surprise. I mean, Jesus, even the psychic knew.”

A finger snaps in my mind and I’m back in that room. Sitting next to Theo with that painted eye gazing down at us. Remembering what Flor said: This is going to happen no matter what. It’s happening.

I remember him calling it bullshit after, then holding me when I cried over how real it felt to me.

I remember the way I confessed everything.

“Wait, did you know what you were walking into today?” I say quietly, as a hurt I can’t properly identify winds itself around me.

“I wasn’t positive it would be today, but . . .” He trails off, shaking his head. “No. Yeah. I knew it was over.”

Memories from the previous two days stretch between us in the ensuing silence—me at his door Saturday morning, the way his hands gripped me while he whispered that he’d missed me after less than twenty-four hours apart. The ebb and flow of our conversations, and the quiet we shared, where this information would have fit perfectly. How I talked his ear off about my anxiety over my Tahoe trip this week. The way he listened and reassured me, all while holding on to his own anxiety with tight fists.