“Duncan went around the office asking all the available women if they had ever had relations with you. I caught him near the end of his rounds and threw him out of the office.” Here, she looked even more uncertain. “And I told him that we would never do business with him again.”
“Good,” I growled. D
uncan might be one of our oldest, most reliable clients, but if what Abby had said was true, and I felt certain that it was or else she wouldn’t have said that, then I had no desire to ever do any business with the other man again.
One by one, it seemed like I was cutting all of the older guys out of our business deals, from Gerrard to Duncan. But there was nothing else I could do.
Was this the way that the business world was supposed to be? Somehow, I had never pictured things being this way, back when I was first in charge of the business. I had naively thought that somehow, things would get better and better, year after year. That at the end of the day, I would create some core group of people I worked with all the time, who knew me and the business, guys who shared the same values as me.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. I was starting to learn that naivety and ideals had nothing to do with the real business world.
I shook my head, pressing my fingertips against my eyeballs. “So what else happened?” I finally asked Abby.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I stared blankly at her for a moment. “I just assumed there was more to it,” I told her. “You told me that something had gone wrong. That you’d made a mistake.”
“I fired one of our best clients,” Abby reminded me.
I immediately shook my head. “Abby, I would have done exactly the same thing,” I told her. “If I had been running late for a meeting, I wouldn’t have seen Duncan out. Same as you, I would have assumed that he would just leave, like normal. Asking prying questions like that to my employees, I never could have suspected it. And if I had caught him doing that, then I would have terminated our contracts with him.”
Abby stared at me for a long moment, and I could see that she was seeking reassurance in my face. Again, I wanted nothing more than to hold her. But again, she stepped back away from me, her gaze turning away to the side. “I think I should just head home for the night,” she said dully.
“Abby, no,” I said, reaching for her. “I want you here.”
Abby shook her head, though. “I have a lot of things I need to think over,” she said.
“Like what?” I asked, actually puzzled. “Maybe I can help. Be your sounding board, if you will.”
“I don’t think so,” Abby told me, and it was like a knife to the heart. I flinched back, but I didn’t know what to say to her. She sighed. “I just don’t want to talk right now. I can tell that you’re pissed about the trial and all of the work stuff. And I just feel frustrated and out of sorts. Let’s give it a night or two. We’ll figure it out later. I’m going to go home.”
As she turned to head for the door, I wished that I could think of something to say to her, something to make her stop, to come back, to talk things out with me. I wanted to convince her that I wasn’t upset, that I wanted to talk things over with her. That I was happy to come home to her, that I wanted to just curl up on the couch with her tonight, maybe put on a shitty movie, cuddle, and relax.
I wanted a place that felt like home. That was all I had ever wanted. And with her, this place could almost feel like home.
But there she went, striding in quick steps away from me, carefully closing the door behind her. I stared at the solid wood, the echoes of the shutting door still resonating in my ears.
Had I lost her again? What had even happened just now? How did I make things better? I knew I couldn’t possibly figure out how to make things better without first figuring out just what it was I had screwed up in the first place. And I was afraid that to figure that out, I would have to go back to that night at the bar with Gerrard.
The money might not matter to me. But that didn’t mean there were no punishments and that I hadn’t screwed up. No, Abby had cooled things off with me once because she didn’t want anything to do with the kind of guy who beat up his former trusted advisor in a bar. Now, no doubt, she was thinking about all the other terrible things about me, things that the media had printed over the years.
Only half of those things were true, of course, but she couldn’t know which things were true and which were false. And at the end of the day, I supposed it didn’t really matter. At the end of the day, I just wasn’t a good enough guy. I could never hope to deserve someone like Abby.
I headed into the office, my gut churning with guilt and loneliness. With careful, measured movements, I poured a couple fingers of whiskey into a glass. Then, I sat down with my view over the city of Chicago, alone again in the night.
How many of those lights out there hid people who were just as lonely as me?
None of them, I was sure. There was no way there was anyone in the world who was as lonesome as I was at that precise moment.
Chapter 12
Abby
I HONESTLY COULDN’T tell you why I stormed out of Daniel’s on Friday night. I had been so relieved when he finally told me that he would have handled the Duncan situation in exactly the same way as I had. That he would have terminated the contract with Duncan as well. Because that was what I had really been worried about, that he wouldn’t understand what I had done. That he would tell me I didn’t have the authority to do something like that, or I had cost the business a vital account. I had expected that he would fire me.
But in the end, he seemed to understand and to support my decision. It was everything I had ever wanted to hear from him. But at the end of the day, I couldn’t help thinking about the rest of it.
He hadn’t taken my story at face value, not at first. He had all but accused me of lying to him, or stretching the truth at the very least. He had sounded so angry at me, somehow, when he had asked me if Duncan had asked me anything about my relationship with him. Almost as though Daniel was just angry about our relationship in general. Almost as though he didn’t want me there.