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“Neither are you,” he pointed out.
“True,” she conceded, “but I’m married. I’m allowed to be complacent.”
“Perhaps I should have dated you,” Simon said.
Celia smiled thinly. “If I didn’t kill you, my future bride would have.”
“Ouch.”
“Love can be painful,” she said, “but mostly it’s worth it. You should give it a try.”
Simon smiled ruefully. “I’m not sure where I’d even begin. I’ve never had much of a spark with anyone.”
“Maybe,” Celia said, “You need to broaden your horizons. Or get a bigger net.”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t have a net,” he confessed.
“Are you happy?” she asked him suddenly.
“Happy? I’m not sure—”
“Do you feel as if there’s something missing from your life? And no, I don’t mean the company.”
Simon thought and it didn’t take him long to come to a conclusion. There was an indefinable gap in his life that niggled like food caught between two teeth. What he missed from life was companionship. As busy as he’d always been, it wasn’t something that had registered much. Now when he thought of days and nights stretching ahead of him with considerably less to fill the hours, he felt a pang of disquiet. It felt lonely.
“I could get a dog,” he said.
Celia sighed. “You’re utterly hopeless, sir.”
Tuesday, December 12
A penthouse apartment
The Loop
Simon wandered aimlessly around his penthouse apartment, feeling a little at loose ends. He had nothing to do, or at least nothing that needed his immediate attention. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so unencumbered. He had probably been that as a child, but he couldn’t remember it. Simon was, at heart, his father’s child and that was entirely the problem. His heart.
Simon’s grandfather had passed away before he was born, so he had no memory of him. He’d died, Simon had been told, during a board meeting. One moment he’d been arguing his point and the next he’d slumped over like a puppet whose strings had been cut. By the time the ambulance team arrived, he’d been dead for quite some time. Simon’s father, fresh out of Harvard with the ink still wet on his MBA, had taken over the company without a murmur. He’d run it until his death, although he’d had the grace to die at home, in his sleep, rather than at the office. Simon, with his own newly minted MBA from Harvard, took over the company and kept everything going.
He also made his first appointment with a cardiologist, just to be sure. The results were depressingly mundane. Simon had abnormally high cholesterol levels. High enough, considering his normal weight and level of fitness, not to mention his family history, to be congenital. He was started on a regimen of medications to control his cholesterol levels, given a diet to strictly adhere to, and orders to have blood work done in six months.
Simon did everything he was supposed to do. He followed the diet religiously, exercised in moderation, took his medications, and yet every year his cholesterol levels never improved. Rather, they slowly crept higher over the years. His doctor assured him that the levels would’ve been much worse without the intervention and he’d been fortunate to have sought treatment as early as he had. Simon had his forty-fourth birthday and quietly celebrated living longer than his grandfather. He reached forty-six, when his father had died, and passed that date by as well. He was beginning to think that he might have broken the cycle of early deaths for the men in his family when just before his forty-seventh birthday, he had a heart attack.
He'd been lucky in that it had happened at work. Just like his grandfather, during a particularly contentious board meeting, Simon had felt searing pain in his chest and left arm and knew his time had come. Only because technology had come a long way since the seventies, there was an AED in the room and Ms. Ingot, bless her efficient soul, had used it on him and kept him alive until the EMTs arrived. Unlike his father and grandfather, Simon had survived.
The incident, however, had shaken him badly. He was rich and successful and had a liver that was determined to kill his heart. He was started on a new medication that had just been developed and was still in the late trials. He started to periodically have the cholesterol filtered out of his blood. He and his doctor discussed the possibility of a liver transplant. They also discussed a steep reduction in stress.
Among other reasons, his heart was why Simon had never married. He didn’t want to leave a widow but he moreover didn’t wish to foist his condition onto any children he might have. Instead, again to his mother’s disappointment and loud disapproval, had started grooming his bright nephew into taking his place. Jeff had excelled at everything he’d been tasked with and Simon had no qualms whatsoever turning the company over to him, no matter what his mother thought.
Thanks to careful investing and good money management, Simon and his mother had more money than either could hope to spend in a lifetime. He didn’t need to work. He didn’t even particularly enjoy it, not the way Jeff did. Being the CEO of Prince Industries had been more of a habit for Simon than a true vocation. Giving it up was easier than he’d thought it would be.
What he had not counted on was the intimidating void before him. Not the void of death, as he’d feared most of his life and had become more or less accustomed to, but the unexpected void of purpose. He had, if he was both lucky and careful, decades left to live.
Beyond his work with charities, Simon had no idea at all how he was going to pass the time.
Celia’s advice rang in his head. He could find a companion. He tried to think of himself with a wife and came up blank. It didn’t feel right. If he was being honest with himself, it never had. Maybe he should do what he’d threatened and get a dog. He thought getting one might be, on the whole, far less stressful than trying to find a wife.
It was definitely a thought.
