“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.
I think back to what Flor told Theo, my heart starting to beat fast: You’ve been placed with resources in your life that will help you move on, but you have to allow that resource to help you.
I was there, not just on the road with him—when he was sitting on all of this, too—but in his house, his bed, his life. His real life, and he didn’t tell me.
Something in my heart fractures. For him, and myself.
“Theo,” I breathe out. “Why didn’t you say something?”
He looks down at my hand, still curled around his arm. “I didn’t know what to say to you. I thought maybe I’d figure out how to break it to you before the statement went out, but that didn’t happen, obviously.”
How to break it to me? I shake my head, lost. “I mean before. All those times I asked if you were okay, all those times we talked about your work and what it meant to you? We spent the entire weekend together—”
He averts his eyes, setting his jaw stubbornly. “I didn’t want to mess it up with this.”
I stare at him, long enough that he finally looks at me. “It wouldn’t have messed anything up. I want to know things, including the things that hurt.”
“Even the things that show you I’m not the guy you think I am?” he says, a challenging glint in his eyes. They’re so dark I can’t make out the emotions lurking there. It makes him seem like a stranger.
I frown. “What does that mean? Who do I think you are?”
“Not the guy who got fired from his own company, that’s for fucking sure.”
There’s a beat of silence while I process exactly what he’s saying. “Hold on. You think I would judge you for that?” Theo simply appraises me, and his silence sounds like a YES screamed between us. My blood heats. “I don’t know if you remember, but I aired all of my dirty laundry to you. Now it feels like you were just patting me on the head—”
“I didn’t pat you on the head,” he snaps, straightening.
“Well, you sure didn’t share any of this in return, apparently because you thought I’d think you were a failure. So, not sure what that says about me,” I shoot back, my throat tightening. He opens his mouth, his brows flattening into that stern line, but I press on, averting my eyes. “I mean, clearly there’s no comparison between us. I lost a menial job I couldn’t stand, and you lost the company you founded and led to multimillion-dollar success, but—”