Page 69 of Wreckage and Rain

It is worse.

I did this.

I am the reason her name is on these papers. I am the reason she is in another state building a life that does not have me in it.

She didn’t leave our marriage.

I gave her no reason to stay.

She didn't leave me. I made her leave.

My ears start to ring. The room goes a little too bright at the edges. My breath does what it has been doing since the bathroom floor of that hotel.

I stand up.

I sit back down.

I stand up again because I can't stay in this chair.

My father walks into my office without knocking.

"What was that."

"Divorce papers."

He doesn't say anything.

He stands in the doorway and he looks at me and his face does what it does when one of his deals is in trouble. The calculations. The damage estimate. The contingency tree.

"Get a lawyer, son. Today. The firm's counsel can recommend somebody who works fast."

"That's the first thing you're going to say to me."

He looks at the floor. He looks at me. He does the calculation one more time. Then he says, "We will get through this. The firm has weathered worse. Calloway won't back out. The board will hold."

He turns. He walks out.

I sit at my desk in an office in a business I was supposed to inherit, in a job that has just survived a public divorce filing because my father has already filed it away as something the company can absorb, and I understand for the first time what my wife has been telling me all along.

He never saw me.

Not when I was four, not when I was fourteen, not when my mother stopped asking me how I was, not when I married a woman he didn't approve of, not when I closed Tidewater three days early. He has never seen me. He has only seen the version of me that runs the firm he built.

The man who is married to Summer King. The man who let her down. The man who is now divorcing her on paper. That man, my father has never seen.

Summer was the only person who ever saw that man.

I close my office door. The first time I have closed it since I started here. I sit down on the floor with my back against it.

I did this.

I did this.

I did this.

I take out my phone. I don't call my wife. I don't call her father. Dom's been quiet for weeks and his people are still working it, and for the first time since that hotel room I want them to hurry. I want a name. I want to know what happened to me, and then I want to know what to do about it.

Chapter 17: The Reckoning