He didn’t answer her. He was looking at Alexander Reed with the expression of a man doing math he does not want to finish, because he already knows the sum.
No investors.
No underwriter confidence.
No IPO.
The company he had spent six years building, the company that was supposed to go public next month and make him the kind of man who no longer had to explain himself to anyone—it was constructed on a scaffolding he had not known was scaffolding. He had thought it was architecture. He had thought it was entirely his.
Emily had been watching all of this. She stood quietly in the room that had been the site of her humiliation twenty minutes ago, and she looked at the man she had been married to for two years, and she felt a grief that had nothing to do with love lost—that had already passed—but something stranger and more complicated. The grief of seeing a person you once believed in reveal themselves as someone who had never quite existed. The sorrow of watching a version of someone you cared about disintegrate under pressure, not because of the pressure but because the foundation was never solid.
She thought of the kitchen table and the business plan. She thought of the three in the morning and the projections they rewrote together, his voice going from desperation to excitement as the numbers began to work. She thought of her savings account.
She thought: I hope he figures out who he actually is, someday. Not for my sake. Just for his.
But she didn’t say any of this.
“Dad,” she said instead, quietly, and Alexander turned to her with that immediate, uncomplicated attention that he had always given her—the kind of attention that sees you fully and asks nothing of you. “I think we’re done here.”
He looked at her for a moment with an expression she recognized from childhood, from the difficult years of it, from the times when her father had watched her navigate something painful and wanted to make it disappear and instead held his hands at his sides because she had asked him to let her handle it. He had always been, despite everything, a man who respected what she asked of him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you wanted to handle this alone.”
She shook her head. “You were right to come.”