Chapter 14: The Break

I stand in the hallway for a long time. The elevator is there, waiting. All I have to do is press the button and step inside and descend and leave this building and his life.

But I'm not pressing the button. I'm just standing there, my hand hanging at my side, aware that I'm at a crossroads and every direction leads to a future I'm not prepared for.

And I realize as I'm standing there that I'm not actually leaving. I'm not actually pressing that button. I'm just standing here processing what's happened. I'm just taking a moment so I can think clearly about the choice I need to make.

I'm supposed to quit. I'm supposed to tell him that it's over. I'm supposed to walk away from Ashford Ventures and from him and from whatever this is between us.

But I'm going to do it from a place of clarity. I'm going to do it from a place where I've heard the full truth and made a choice based on complete information, not based on incomplete data or half measures. I'm going to quit knowing exactly what I'm walking away from.

I press the button for the elevator. It arrives immediately, like it's been waiting for me. I step inside. The doors close.

And I realize that I'm not actually going to quit. Not yet. I'm actually going to take the time I need to figure out whether the things he's told me change anything about how I feel about him.

I'm actually going to find out if love built on manipulation can ever be real. I'm actually going to try to figure out whether obsession can transform into something sustainable.

I'm actually going to do something that any reasonable person would tell me not to do.

The elevator descends. It passes the fortieth floor, then the thirty-fifth. The numbers count down like a countdown to something inevitable.

I'm going to go home. I'm going to sit with this confession for a night. And then tomorrow, I'm going to make a choice about whether Damien Ashford is someone I can be with or someone I need to leave behind forever.

I'm going to decide whether love built on surveillance can ever be real.

The elevator opens on the ground floor and I walk out into the lobby and I don't look back.

I don't call in sick. I don't email a resignation letter. I don't send a message explaining my absence. I just don't come to work on Friday.

I turn my phone off and I spend the day in my apartment not moving, not thinking, not doing anything that requires me to be present in my own life. I lie on my couch and I stare at the ceiling and I wait for something to change, though I'm not sure what change would even look like.

Around 10 AM, I turn my phone back on and I see seventeen emails and twelve text messages. All from the office. Some from Margaret asking where I am. Some from Damien asking if I need anything. All of them are just statements of fact, unemotional, controlled, exactly the kind of thing he would send if he respects my space.

But they're the first sign that he's letting me go.

I turn my phone off again and I don't turn it back on for the rest of the day.

Saturday morning, I pack a bag without really thinking about what I'm packing. Clothes. Toiletries. My laptop, though I don't know why. I drive to my mother's house in Connecticut, and the drive takes two hours and I spend all of it thinking about how to explain this to someone who's been through her own version of loving someone complicated.

My mother is sixty-three and she's learned to read my face before I've learned to read it myself. She takes one look at me when I arrive and she doesn't ask questions. She just makes me tea and she lets me sit in silence for however long silence is what I need.

"Bad?" she asks eventually.

"Complicated," I say.

"Men usually are," she says. "Good men are anyway. Bad men are easier because the choice is clear."

"He's not good," I tell her. "He's complicated and he's damaged and he's done things to me that he shouldn't have done."

My mother nods like this makes sense to her.

"Did he hurt you?" she asks.

"Not physically," I say. "He just took something that wasn't his to take. My privacy. My autonomy. My ability to choose him without manipulation."

"And now?" she asks.

"Now I don't know if what I feel for him is real or if it's just a response to his manipulation. I don't know if I love him or if I love the idea of him. I don't know if it's possible to build something real on a foundation of things that were never real."

My mother makes more tea. She's been married to my father for forty years and she's learned a lot about foundations and how they crack.

"Your father didn't tell me about his testimony until after it was done," she says. "He didn't tell me that he was going to destroy someone's company. He didn't tell me that he was going to cause someone's suicide. He just made a choice and he lived with the consequences. And I had to decide whether I was going to stand with him in those consequences or whether I was going to leave."

"Did you ever regret staying?" I ask.

"Every day for about six months," she says. "And then I realized that regret was a luxury I couldn't afford. What was done was done. The only choice I had was whether to have a partner in the aftermath or whether to have regret and isolation. I chose partnership."

I'm sitting with that. I'm sitting with the idea that I might need to make a similar choice.