After Divorce, He Knelt

Chapter Two: His Empty World

The morning after Bianca signed the papers, Christian Vale ran twelve kilometers on a treadmill at five a.m. and felt nothing.

This was not new. The nothing had been with him for a while now a particular blankness that lived behind his sternum and expanded in direct proportion to how quiet his apartment got. He had addressed it the way he addressed most things that resisted resolution: by working harder, moving faster, making the silence too loud to hear properly.

It worked, mostly. The key was momentum.

He stepped off the treadmill, toweled off, and stood at the floor to ceiling window of the Vale penthouse, sixty three floors above the city, while the sun hauled itself over the eastern skyline. The view was extraordinary. He looked at it the way he looked at most beautiful things these days with recognition and nothing else.

His phone was on the kitchen island. He had sent the message at eleven fourteen last night. She had not replied. He had not expected her to, which was not the same as being fine with it.

Bianca. I hope the meeting today was as straightforward as possible. I'm sorry I wasn't there. He had typed and deleted another line four times something about hoping she was okay, something about the apartment, something that in each version managed to be simultaneously too much and not nearly enough. He had sent what remained and put the phone face down on the counter and gone to bed and not slept.

Marcus appeared at seven sharp, as always, a tablet in one hand and coffee in the other black, no sugar, the way Christian had taken it for fifteen years. He set both on the kitchen island and pulled up the day's schedule without preamble.

"Board review at nine. The Calloway acquisition call at eleven. Lunch with your father at one, though he's already requested it be moved to dinner and I've said I'd confirm." A pause. "The Whitemore charity gala is Thursday. Your mother's office called to remind you."

Christian reached for the coffee. "Cancel lunch."

"Dinner, then?"

"Whatever he wants." He drank. "Anything else?"

Marcus hesitated, which was notable. Marcus did not hesitate. He was thirty four, efficient to the point of being slightly inhuman, and had been with Christian for six years. In that time he had learned to deliver bad news with the same tone he delivered good news, which Christian appreciated. The hesitation now was a flag.

"What?" Christian said.

"The settlement was finalized yesterday. Ms. Hartley's office sent confirmation at four forty two p.m." Marcus kept his eyes on the tablet. "I thought you'd want to know it was completed without issue."

Christian set down his coffee. "I know," he said. "I was informed."

A beat. "Of course."

Neither of them said anything else. The city hummed sixty three floors below. Christian picked up his coffee again and walked toward his bedroom to change, and if the nothing behind his sternum sharpened briefly into something with edges, he did not acknowledge it. Acknowledgment was the beginning of a conversation he was not equipped to have before a nine a.m. board review.

He had built an empire on the discipline of attention knowing exactly which problems to solve in which order, which fires to walk toward and which to let burn themselves out. Emotion, in his experience, operated the same way. You could manage it by giving it an insufficient amount of oxygen.

He had been managing it for eleven months. Since the night she had looked at him across the kitchen of a penthouse that had every possible luxury except warmth and said, quietly, without drama, I can't keep doing this, Christian, and he had said nothing, because what was there to say, because she was right, because he had watched the marriage deteriorating with the same helpless clarity with which you watch something falling and know you are too far away to catch it.

He had said nothing.

That was the thing he came back to, in the gaps between momentum. Not the arguments they had been few, which was almost worse than many. Not the distance, which had grown so gradually it had acquired the familiarity of a piece of furniture. But his silence in that kitchen, the way he had simply looked at her and let her words settle and said nothing, as though she were a business problem he could table for a later meeting.

She had nodded once. She had walked to the bedroom. She had closed the door with a softness that was more final than a slam.

He had stood in the kitchen for a long time.

The board review went smoothly. The Calloway call lasted ninety minutes and ended in his favor. He ate lunch at his desk something Marcus ordered, something with protein, he barely registered what. By three o'clock he was in the middle of the quarterly projections when his phone lit up with a name he hadn't expected.

Lily.

His younger sister called on video, which meant she was at home, which meant she had nothing approaching subtlety planned for this conversation.

He answered.

Her face filled the screen round, expressive, the kind of face that announced whatever she was feeling approximately four seconds before she did. Right now it announced concern wearing the outfit of casual.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

"How are you?"

"Fine."

A pause. "Christian."

"I'm working, Lily."

"It was yesterday." She said it simply. No accusation, no flourish. Just the fact of it, placed between them.

He leaned back in his chair. Through the glass wall of his office he could see the trading floor below, twenty people moving in the coordinated blur of serious money being made. His name was on three buildings in this city. His signature was on more contracts than he could count. He ran things. He was good at it.

"I know it was yesterday," he said.

"Are you..... " She stopped. Started again. "Did you at least reach out to her?"

"I sent her a message."

Lily looked at him for a long moment with the particular expression she had been deploying since she was eight years old, the one that meant she found him both frustrating and entirely predictable. "A message," she repeated.

"She didn't reply."

"Christian. You didn't go."

"It was a legal proceeding."

"It was the end of your marriage."

He said nothing. The trading floor moved below.

"She asked about you, you know," Lily said. "After. She never said anything bad about you, not once, not even when Mom was...." She stopped herself. "She was always decent. She's a good person."

"I know she is."

"Then why..."

"Lily." His voice came out quiet. Not sharp, not dismissive. Just quiet and entirely finished. "I'm working."

His sister looked at him for another moment, then exhaled slowly through her nose. "Okay," she said. "Call me when you're ready to be a human."

The screen went blank.

Christian set the phone down on his desk and looked at it, and then looked at the city beyond his office glass, and then looked at his hands large, steady, capable hands that had built things and signed things and had not, in eleven months, once reached for the person they had always somehow known to reach for first.

He picked up the quarterly projections.

He got back to work.