The Keychain

Chapter 8: The Same Key

Her arms came around me from behind and locked around my chest. Her face pressed flat against my back, between the shoulder blades, and she was shaking hard enough that I felt it in my own ribs.

I stood still and looked out at the yard.

"Don't go," she said. Her voice was wet. "Don't go, don't go, don't—"

I let her hold on.

"Why are you doing this to me?" she said. "We're fine. We've always been fine. Why are you the one leaving?"

The sprinkler head near the walk was ticking. Somebody three houses down was running a mower.

"If it's him," she said, "I'll move him. Another division, another floor. I'll keep him out of my office. If that's what this is, I'll do it tonight."

She talked like the whole thing was a department I'd complained about.

"And the car," she said. "That car. I'll make it up to you. I'll get you one."

She let go of me with one arm. Something metal pressed into my palm and she closed my fingers around it with hers.

It was a key fob. The tan leather one, the star worn smooth at the corner. The extra key to that car. The one I'd asked her for in April and she'd told me the timing was wrong, and then in June it was that car he drove off the lot in.

"Take it," she said. "It's yours. I should have given it to you a long time ago."

"Eight years," she said. "You're not going to stand there and tell me you can throw away eight years."

I looked down at my hand and at the fob sitting in it.

Then I took her wrist, and I pulled her arm off me, and I put the key back in her hand and folded her fingers over it and pushed her hand away.

"No," I said.

"What do you mean, no—"

"It's not him," I said. "It's not the car."

"Then what."

"I'm tired," I said. "I want to live alone for a while. That's all it is."

She stared at me.

"That's not a reason," she said.

"It's the reason."

"I don't accept it."

"I'm not asking you to."

She moved in then. She came in with her mouth, one hand up at the back of my neck, and I turned my head and stepped back off the porch and she caught nothing but air.

I walked down the walk. She didn't follow me past the gate.

I had my hand on the car door when something hit the window above the porch, and then something else did, and after that it didn't matter what it was.

I drove home.

For a few days after that, she sent messages.

The first one came at two in the morning. It said the team was handling things fine without me. The second one came the next morning, with a photo of the project board in my old office, all the sticky notes rearranged, and a line under it that said the numbers were up. A few days later she sent a picture of her at dinner with him, both of them lit from the side, and then a picture from a parking lot with the hood of that car in the corner of the frame.

I read every one of them. I answered none of them.

Before I stopped loving her, that first photo would have worked. I would have sat with it for an hour and picked it apart. Now I read it, set the phone face down, and went back to what I was doing.

The messages stopped after a while.

Then one night I was scrolling and there it was in my feed: him, on a rooftop somewhere with a drink in his hand, arm around a man in an open-collared shirt, both of them smiling wide. The caption said something about a closed deal and a new partnership. The location tag was a hotel downtown, and the company name under it was one I knew.

That was the firm that had come to me first. Their man had sat across a table from me for two hours and talked dollars, real dollars, and I had gone home and told her I wouldn't put the team on it. She had asked me why not. I had told her. She had gone quiet and then she had changed the subject, which for her was the same as an answer.

Now he had them.

I put the phone down on the table and looked at the wall for a while. There was nothing to do about it. I wasn't going to call her, and I wasn't going to warn her, and she was going to find out, and when she did it was going to land on her and nowhere else.

So I picked the phone back up and finished the deck I was working on.

The week after that, we closed our first deal at the new place. Not large. Large enough to matter. I stood in the lobby with the client's people and shook hands and walked them out to the elevator, and when the doors shut I turned around and one of the guys was coming at me from the other end of the hall, almost running.

"Boss."

"Slow down."

He got to me and stopped and put a hand on the wall. His face was the color of somebody who'd just come in from outside in July.

"It's him," he said. "J. He got played on the project he signed. Fifty million dollars of her money, gone. Just—gone. She's locked herself in her office. She's been in there since this morning."

He held out his phone.

On the screen, a hallway. Glass wall at the end of it, blinds down. J. on his knees in front of the door in a suit, both hands flat on the carpet, crying, papers spread around his feet in a fan. Somebody off camera was saying his name over and over. The door behind him did not open.

I watched it to the end.

Then I handed the phone back.