My voice has risen. Cyrus approaches me, but I hold my arm away from my body so he can’t come any closer. I wipe my face roughly with the back of my sleeve and try to steady myself. “I could’ve forgiven you for taking me off the board. I told myself it was fine, that you were cornered and didn’t have a choice.”
“I didn’t take you off the board, you quit.”
“Because you chose Marco and Craig over me.”
“You made me choose—you didn’t have to. You didn’t have to make it personal.”
Cyrus sits down on the sofa, but I stay standing, holding my back as straight as I can, as if this will give me some purchase on the situation. “I hate who you are in this,” I say, gesturing to my phone. “My mentorship program, Cy—did you have to take that from me too? It was such a tiny thing—you couldn’t let me keep it?”
He shakes his head. “It’s not me, it’s just a persona.”
“So you did it on purpose.”
“I spent the whole time telling him how much I love you.”
“Yeah, so everyone can be like, ‘Ooh, she has the best husband in the world.’？”
“What else did you want me to say?”
The thought comes out before I can really register it. “The truth. Which is that you’re pimping something your wife invented and peddling it as your own.”
I’ve drawn blood. Cyrus’s face closes. “So that’s what you think. That I stole something from you.”
I circle around and sit across from him. “I don’t think you stole it,” I say, my voice softening. “I think I let it be yours and you let me be sidelined. You diminished me and I allowed it to happen.”
He pauses for a moment and I think maybe we can bring it back. The next time he apologizes, I think, I’ll relent. “It’s Hegelian,” he says.
I try to load my silence with as much of a fuck-you as I can manage.
“You and I are in a dialectic; we created this situation together. I’m as much a product of you as you are of me.”
“Hegel? Really? You’re going to hit me with Hegel?”
“I never wanted any of this in the first place. I was perfectly happy living my medium-size life when you came along and forced me to become Cyrus the Great. And now you resent me.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it. You enjoyed every minute of it.”
“I didn’t have a choice. The two people I love most in the world are telling me to do something, and I have to go along with it because if you left me, I’d have nothing.”
“Don’t act like we forced you to do it, Cyrus. That we somehow threatened you.” I can feel myself going to a place from which it will be impossible to return. But it’s too late; I am already there. “And anyway, Jules would never leave you.”
“But you would?”
In that split second, I make up my mind. “You’ve allowed yourself to become someone I no longer respect. You can blame me or tell me it’s Hegelian all you want, but it’s who you are now. And I’m not playing anymore, Cy. You’re going to have to go the rest of the way on your own.”
Cyrus moves very slowly. He puts on his shoes. He winds his scarf around his neck. He shrugs into his coat. And then he’s gone into the snow and the night, a trail of unsaid words following silently behind him like a clutch of shadows.
Fifteen
THE END
It’s the start of a new year. Rory’s Christmas tree, the one he grew in his lab, has come down, and there’s the smell of fresh paint on the walls, and Tenth Avenue is dusted with snow, and we are in the boardroom because Li Ann has called us to a meeting. Everyone’s here: Destiny, the founder of Freud, the twins from No Touch, Rory, and of course, Jules and me and Cyrus and Marco.
When I arrived at Utopia that first day, still sweaty from the bus ride, no idea why I’d been summoned, Li Ann had told me that she was preparing for the apocalypse. The afterworld, she called it. I was inspired and possibly a little bemused by the idea, and although I showed up and built our platform and talked often about how we were going to deal with the end of the world, I didn’t for a second imagine I would see it in my lifetime.
Well, according to Li Ann, it’s here.
She says words like “pandemic,” “virus,” “death rate,” and “vaccine.” I try to thread it all together. There is a virus. It has a high death rate. It will cause a pandemic. And there is no vaccine.