Wrong Inbox, Right Heart

Chapter four

Marcel's POV

I didn't believe in coincidence. I was a man who built things, structured things, reduced chaos to systems and systems to outcomes. Coincidence was just a word people used when they hadn't identified the correct variable. I'd built a billion dollar company on that principle and it had never once steered me wrong.

Which made it harder to explain why I was looking forward to a text from a woman I didn't know.

By Thursday it had become a habit. Not an obvious one. I wasn't checking my phone every ten minutes like some teenage boy. But there was a particular quality to the evenings now, when the workday wound down and Petra stopped sending updates and the apartment got quiet in that particular way large, expensive apartments get quiet, which is different from peaceful and closer to hollow. In that quiet I found myself reaching for my phone and opening our thread the way you'd reach for a lamp in a dark room. Automatic. Necessary.

Holly talked differently than anyone in my life. She wasn't performing for me. She didn't know who I was. I was aware of that in a way that was both clarifying and, frankly, a relief. She knew I worked too much and that I'd once killed a succulent because I forgot it existed for three months, which had made her laugh in a voice note so bright and unguarded that I'd listened to it twice. She didn't know about Bouska Group or the towers with my name on them or the profile the Financial Times had run last spring with the headline Ice in His Veins: Marcel Bouska and the Art of the Cold Deal.

She knew I'd been hurt before, she'd guessed it, actually, in that careful intuitive way she had, asking one night whether I was always this careful about not sharing too much or whether something had happened. I hadn't answered directly. But I hadn't denied it either.

What I hadn't told her: her name. Catherine. The way she'd said I love you with perfect consistency for two years, through two Christmas seasons and my father's illness and the merger that almost broke me, said it and meant it the way you mean a performance. The way I'd found out, not dramatically, not with a scene, but quietly and completely. A conversation I wasn't meant to hear. She'd been talking to her friend. She'd used the word leverage. I'd stood in the hallway of my own home for about ninety seconds before I understood what I was hearing and then I went back into the study and I sat down and I finished the document I'd been working on. Because that was the kind of man I was by then. The kind that finishes the document.

I didn't want Holly to know that story. Not yet. Maybe not ever. It made me sound like a man who couldn't trust, and that had never been the most attractive quality.

It was Friday evening when she sent the message that changed the quality of things.

Can I ask you something weird?

You can ask me anything, I typed, which was more honest than I'd intended.

Do you ever think about what it would be like to meet? Or is this one of those things that only works because we never will?

I put the phone down and stood up and walked to the window. My apartment was on the thirty seventh floor. The city spread out below me in its ordinary nighttime configuration, lit up and moving, indifferent to whether or not Marcel Bouska had feelings about a woman he'd never seen.

I thought about the question seriously. The way I thought about everything, methodically, from multiple angles. Meeting her would change things. We'd have faces and body language and the weight of expectations. Right now we were just voices. Clean and unencumbered. There was something I valued about that, and I recognized that the reason I valued it was the same reason I'd built my walls as high as I had, and that recognizing that didn't make the walls come down.

But I also thought about a woman at midnight in what I imagined was a small kitchen, looking at overdue bills and still finding a way to be funny about her kid's opinions on toast.

I think about it, I typed finally. I haven't decided what I think about it.

That's the most honest non answer I've ever received, she replied.

I'm working on it, I wrote.

Take your time, she said. I'm not going anywhere.

Which was exactly the right thing to say and exactly the wrong thing for her to say because now I was standing at my window thirty seven floors above the city thinking about a stranger and the strange geography of her and whether "not going anywhere" was a promise or just a phrase and what the difference was.

I went back to my desk. I had three documents to review before morning. I reviewed none of them.