The Woman He Erased

Uninvited

Damian appears in my office unannounced, which means two things: he's agitated, and he has yet to accept that I no longer work by his schedule.

"You can't just walk in here," I say, setting the contract on the desk between us.

"Your assistant tried to stop me. I didn't listen." He stops behind me, closing the door with a flourish. It's a particular kind of flourish, one that says he respects the protocol enough to follow it before he decides to bend it anyway. "We need to discuss the audit findings."

"The board will release the findings at their own discretion."

"I'm not asking as a shareholder," he says, settling on the opposite side of the desk with an ease that makes my jaw clench. He always had a way with space, a familiarity with places he wasn't invited to occupy. "I'm asking as the man whose mother destroyed your life. I think you owe me an explanation."

"You don't get anything." I finally looked at him, my stomach twisting with something dark and unpleasant. "You had five years to ask questions, Damien. You could have pushed me, dug around in the places I told you to go. Instead, you chose to walk away."

"I wrote you letters," he says quietly. "Dozens. You never answered." You what?"

Something painful flickers across his face, not anger or even sadness this time, but a sort of hollowness that makes my stomach turn. "I sent them to the apartment. Every month, for the first year. I assumed you were avoiding me when you didn't answer them so I stopped."

"I never lived in that apartment," I say slowly. The words make no sense until they do. "Not after the divorce. Your mother saw to that." The woman had taken great pains to ensure that my return to the house was a slow and humiliating process. The eviction hearing, the boxes on the curb, the new address she was so kind as to provide me with — none of these things were things my lawyers would have chosen.

We sit in silence, the weight of old assumptions pressing down on us until it becomes something else entirely, something different.

"She read them," Damien says quietly. "She read them and made sure they never reached you."

"Or you're lying to yourself," I snap. "You don't have a habit of sending letters, Damian. You have a habit of disappearing."

"I have copies," he says harshly, and for the first time in five long years, his frustration is pointed at someone besides me. "I have copies of every single one. I'll send them to you tonight if it will make you understand that I didn't walk away willingly."

I say nothing, because some small, petrified part of me wants those letters more than the goddamn company, wants them more than the vote, wants wants wants. I feel as though I am drowning, and I have no idea if it's because of Marguerite or Damian — the man or the mother — but most certainly it is not because of my own foolish heart.

"Send them," I say at last, my voice completely flat. "I'll read them. They don't change anything."

"I know," he says quietly. "I'm not asking them to change anything." He stands, and for the first time in a long while, he doesn't seem like the impeccably dressed chairperson of the board, but a man who has seen far too many years of grief. "I just needed you to know that I didn't walk away as easily as you think I did."

He leaves before I can stop him, probably because it would have been a very foolish thing to do.

That evening, I get an email. There is no subject line, merely seventeen attached documents.

I open the first one with shaking fingers, a single name scrawled across the top in familiar script.

Elena — I don't know if you'll ever read this, but I need to write it anyway.

I think about that meeting, about what it must have been like for me to let it happen, to let them take you from our home without a fight. I have so many regrets, but this one cuts the deepest — I was a coward, and I allowed people I held in higher esteem than my own wife to dictate the terms of our divorce. I'm sorry it doesn't seem like much, but it's all I have.

I closed the laptop before I could read the second letter, my heart pounding in my chest. Not because I don't want to hear what he has to say, God knows I do — because I want to hear it, and wanting anything from anybody has proven to be a fatal weakness for me in the past.

My phone rings, and I see Priya's name on the display.

"The forensic accountant found something in the audit files," she says. "You need to see this. It's more than just embezzlement."

I stare at the laptop, and the seventeen unread letters behind it, and whatever it is my accountant has found can wait until morning. I open the second letter instead.