The Truth

This story originally appeared in The Worcester Review in Winter 2020.

“What happened in New York?” is what Jesse kept asking. As if that trip changed everything—as if everything were okay before I went to New York. It was heartbreaking, but it also reinforced my decision: how could I stay married to a man who couldn’t even see I wasn’t in love with him anymore?

He was always repairing things around our condo—he was the one who’d wanted to buy a condo in the first place, long before I was ready to commit to a neighborhood. Showerheads, banisters, drafty windows. He would have been a tinkerer if he’d lived a century ago. Or maybe two centuries, at this point. We got a good deal on the place, which delighted him no end. The day we closed, he actually skipped down the sidewalk.

I realize this is coming off as disdainful—that’s not at all how I feel about him, how I felt. Mostly, I was relieved by him (though maybe that was a bad sign to begin with): with him around to worry about our personal lives, I could focus on what really mattered, which was work. From the beginning, I loved work. I loved going in and bouncing ideas off of Cliff and the team until we figured out how to get traffic up, how to boost conversion rates. Loved that my efforts translated to higher revenue for the company. And I didn’t realize it then, but everything I did at InShare became part of the foundation for Tungsten, which now has ten fulltime employees and is going to keep growing.

Jesse wanted kids.

Not that I didn’t; I did. But the timing never felt right with Jesse and then in New York I realized it wasn’t the timing that was wrong, it was Jesse. That was the most shocked I’ve ever felt, still, to this day, realizing that. I have always thought of myself as self-aware. Hard to say exactly what brought on the epiphany, but I was sitting at dinner across from Cliff, discussing all the ways we could streamline content production if we got the new software, and it just hit me.

Of course, that’s not the only thing we talked about. We were in town for the conference, sure, but Cliff and I had been working together for years at that point, since the early days. We were like family. Some weeks, I ate more meals with Cliff than I did with Jesse. Part of that was because we were at a startup and long hours were de rigueur and part of it was because our CEO was kind of a madman, always making things harder than they needed to be. Later it came out that he’d been embezzling, and Cliff gave me a look that would have sent me into hysterics if it had been a bit earlier, if we’d been in a slightly different place, because for years he’d suspected something and had repeated, à la The X-Files, “The truth is out there.” (That I’d never watched The X-Files boggled his mind, but I argued there were too many seasons—who had that kind of time?)

His wife was trying to get pregnant around then, if I remember right. Not that we ever talked about our sex lives; it wasn’t that kind of a relationship. But there were little things—when he ordered a beer, he did one of those “Ah” noises on the first sip and I teased him about it and he said they hadn’t been drinking much lately. “They” meaning him and Marcy, of course. She was the kind of woman who stopped drinking when she was trying to get pregnant and made her husband stop, too.

I don’t want Jesse to come off as a bad guy here. He’s actually a great guy—he recently remarried, someone a little younger. I can tell from the pictures she wants kids. I have to say it’s unsettling to see someone you used to be married to marrying someone else. Not that I actually saw it, of course, but with social media these days you can’t avoid it. Our breakup was very amicable. He kept the condo.

It’s not that seeing their wedding pictures made me sad. They got married on a beach. She had six bridesmaids. Not really my style. And anyway, I only happened to notice because we were stuck on the runway for an hour for some nonsense about rain in Raleigh. How on earth does rain in Raleigh affect my ability to get to JFK from O’Hare? But it does. It always does. Really, I wish them the best. I had my assistant send a bottle of wine to the condo—it’s not like I don’t know the address. Jesse likes wine and it will be good for her to start drinking some of the dryer reds. (Kidding! She’s not that young.)

***

It was a mild summer in Chicago that year, the year of the conference, and then when fall hit, the temperature dawdled in cooling off. Far more good weather than we were used to, and I think everyone was suspicious. We flew to New York at the end of July, Cliff and I, and it was hot there. Real summer, he kept saying.

It’s so funny looking back—I was so young still, but I didn’t feel it. I had that early-thirties feeling of really settling in, of hunkering down. The way you get after maybe the second mile of a long run, seeing how much is before you, how much work you have to do before you’ll have a chance to rest.

We got to the hotel and we were melting; the air conditioning in the cab wasn’t working right. And then inside, it was a refrigerator.

“Figures,” said Cliff.

We dropped our bags and met in the lobby to go out for a quick drink. These days, I’d go right to bed, getting in at that hour, but back then we were so sleep deprived all the time it seemed normal. And it would have been absurd to waste a summer night in New York City sleeping.

We ordered beers and he made that lip-smacking “Ah” sound and I laughed and he said how it had been a while and I said, “Don’t overdo it.”

“You going to run tomorrow?” he said.

I shrugged. Of course I was. I always ran.

“I’d say come and get me, but I know I’ll just tell you to buzz off.”

I almost spit my beer out. “‘Buzz off.’”

He kept a straight face. “I mean it,” he said. “I can be a real grump in the morning.”

I laughed. He was doing his Jimmy Stewart.

“Now, say, what’s funny?” he said, mock hurt.

It was nice to be silly with him. So much of the workday lately, we’d had to be serious, official. Our CMO had been poached that spring and we were left to steer the ship. “Rudderless,” is what Cliff called it. But I secretly liked it. One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I like things to be a little hard. Staying up late and getting up early to run and figuring out how to stitch myself together with coffee. When things get too easy, I lose interest. My mother used to tell me this and I thought she was crazy, but she was right. Why should I have doubted her? She’s known me longer than I have.

When we were getting to the bottom of our beers, Cliff set his glass down definitively.

“I’m going to say something a little controversial here,” he said.

“Say it, Sister Margareta,” I said, and he said, right on cue, “Maria. Makes me. Laugh!” Which made me laugh, of course. I was a little tipsy, I’ll admit. We hadn’t eaten much for dinner. One night when we’d first started at InShare, back before he’d met Marcy and I hadn’t met Jesse, I’d made some reference to The Sound of Music and he’d admitted he’d never seen it and I had been indignant, truly appalled, and had ordered it up on Netflix and we’d watched it right then and there. Ordered takeout Chinese and sat side by side in front of my computer, which we lowered from its standing-desk height. He kept saying he was going to leave and then saying he was going to get booze and making these incredulous comments (“From curtains?! Did she even have a sewing machine?”) but since then he’s made it a point to make references.

Anyway, his controversial proposal that night in New York was ordering tater tots and another round, which I gladly agreed to, refusing to look at the time.

***

“Nothing happened in New York,” I kept repeating to Jesse, during that all-night breakup conversation we had three weeks after my return.

“When you left for New York, we were happily married,” he said.

And I had to take in a deep breath and let it out, weighing whether to say what I wanted to say. And then I did: “No,” I said. “When I left for New York, you were happily married.”

And the look on his face was the kind of thing you never want to be responsible for, just anguish, torture—pain all the way down, and what makes me a monster is not that I said those words to my own husband but that, when I said them, I noticed the time—eleven-forty-three—and wondered if we’d be able to wrap this up in time for me to get a few hours of sleep in before the next morning’s run.

***

In retrospect, of course, I’m able to see that I’d been unhappy for years. That even though Jesse was the kind of man—is the kind of man, I’m sure—who was always waiting in the cell phone lot when your plane landed, a cold seltzer and a bag of pretzels in the car, he was not the kind of man who understood how exciting it could be to figure out how to double conversion rates for a given group of website visitors or—in the case of Tungsten—to sign a new client by convincing them you know how to solve a really intractable problem. He saw his job as something he had to do so he could live in his world of domestic repairs and homemade bread, and I loved everything about work. Love it. It energizes me.

When Cliff and I had finished our second beers, we stepped into the humid night and made our way back to the hotel. I gulped three glasses of water before bed, laid out my running clothes, called Jesse. See? Nothing happened.

***

One thing that kept making us giggle on that trip was people’s confusion about our relationship. We were close, remember, had worked together for years.

“So are you two married?” someone would inevitably ask, and we’d say yes, because we both were. Just not to each other.

“A real Scully and Mulder vibe,” was how an old friend of Cliff’s summed it up, which of course delighted Cliff. A high school friend—they weren’t in close touch, but we ran into him the first day, got dinner with him after. Cliff was explaining how twice that day, people had inquired about our marital status.

“Like, why?” I said. “Are a lot of married couples going to software conferences together?”

“Actually,” said Cliff. “I can see it.”

We looked at him.

“Like, oh, you think your spouse is boring? Try sitting through a marketing conference.”

I laughed.

“You’ll be begging to get back to your routine.” He dunked a chip in salsa.

And then we discussed how this might actually take off as a kind of relationship reboot—putting yourselves in an unfamiliar situation together, so that you’re relieved every time you see each other’s faces. So that you form a whole new kind of alliance—the two of you against the brainwashed software disciples.

But these are the kinds of in-jokes that might have happened on any business trip—if Cliff had been a woman, no one would have questioned our closeness. It’s like people’s brains only have this very basic Pyrex set of relationship containers and they’re totally baffled when something won’t fit neatly—what do you mean, three and a half cups of leftover sauce? It just doesn’t compute.

(And that’s one thing about Jesse I absolutely adored, one thing that I still miss, how amazing he was at maintaining our fridge—he had a sixth sense for where to put leftovers so we didn’t forget about them, had a knack for cobbling together delicious leftover meals, days after I’d forgotten they existed. Now, it seems, the entire back half of my refrigerator is containers of foods I meant to finish, all in different stages of rot. I ought to invite some researchers over, see if I’ve accidentally grown the next penicillin.)

***

That night, the night we broke up, Jesse and I stayed up until my alarm went off. Not fighting—there was nothing to fight about. I wanted out. He did not. It was the worst night of my life, and possibly his, too. Such heavy sadness—for both of us, his knotted with bewilderment, mine with exhaustion. The thought of all we’d have to do to untangle ourselves from each other, the piles of paperwork and apartment hunting and recalibrating of routines. I realized that my dread of all that was why I hadn’t done something sooner.

“I don’t understand,” he kept saying, and I had no explanation for him.

“It’s not you, Jesse,” I kept saying, the least helpful sentence in all of relationship history, but it was true—it was blatantly true. My love for him had stopped like a dead-end highway and there was nothing I could do. I didn’t know why, but I could see that trying to continue over the dust and rocks and scrub ahead would be pointless. It would be agony for both of us. He deserved better than that—better than being married to me, who found excuses to stay late at the office when he would do anything to get home early.

***

The last day of the conference, the keynote was supposed to be at one-thirty, right after lunch, and I realized, at my lunch-and-learn on unpaid promotion strategies, that I absolutely could not sit through it. It was the day after my epiphany about Jesse, about how I was not in love with him and could not bear the thought of having children with him, but I had shoved it down and told myself I was just worn out, exhausted from the late nights and the intensity of interacting with so many strangers. I went to bed early and got up early and ran in Central Park to clear my mind, but instead of feeling reassured that I would go home and be happy to see my husband, I saw my life more clearly than ever and I knew that I could not stay married to him.

And then I showered and went to my morning sessions and by noon I felt like I was going to rip at the seams.

“I’m ditching the keynote,” I texted Cliff, and I badly wanted to text, after that, “Meet me at the main entrance?” or maybe “Meet me at the main entrance,” no question mark, wanted to convey the weight of what I was feeling, that I had no plan for the afternoon but wanted him to be with me for it, but before I could risk it, he texted back, “Ice cream?”

I almost cried, I was so relieved.

We left the chilly conference hall and stepped into a glorious summer day—hot but not sticky, bright but not brassy.

“You okay?” he said, a few blocks away, striding beside me up the kind of gentle hill that seems large to a Chicagoan because we have none at all.

“I just hit my limit,” I said.

He nodded, looked at me. “Feel like gelato?”

And he led us to a place he’d heard about somehow—a friend or a podcast or one of the many articles he read—he was such a curious person—is such a curious person, I’m sure—that seemed miles away. We walked and walked and I was grateful, would have followed him anywhere. We got our gelato and kept walking, chatting in a rambling way first about the sessions we’d been to and how excited we were to bring ideas back to InShare and then about whether InShare would make it much longer (we didn’t think so), about what we’d do after, found ourselves in Central Park, by some pond, and sat on a bench. Our gelato was long gone and I’d drunk most of my water and we’d hatched a plan to open a marketing agency together—we’d joked about it before, how good we could be if we weren’t dealing with the kind of high-ego nonsense our CEO was always throwing out—and I remember feeling that I never wanted to get up from that bench. I felt so safe, so secure, tucked away from my life. Away from my life and looking forward down a path that actually seemed to fit. Working alongside Cliff. It just made sense. Our plan was to start consulting, each of us, build up some clients, and then see where we stood. I took a deep, steadying breath, to tell him the other thing, that I’d decided to leave Jesse.

***

And before you judge me, before you think I’m some kind of monster for saying a thing like that to Cliff before I’d told Jesse himself, there’s something you need to know about Cliff—about Cliff and me. We were partners. We understood each other. The Scully and Mulder comment wasn’t too far off, really, because we loved our work as much as they did and our spouses never understood that. And I’ll admit, it’s not as charming to love marketing as it is to love solving supernatural crimes, but it was what we had. What we have, really, because I understand he’s still doing that kind of work too. It’s problem solving: you’re given what seems like an impossible problem—making clothes for seven kids with a few pairs of curtains and a needle—and you figure it out piece by piece. There’s nothing like it—nothing that satisfying and nothing that irresistible and nothing that fun.

Or maybe there is. In fact, there almost certainly is. But like I said, it’s what we had.

And when Cliff and I worked together to solve the various maybe silly-sounding problems we worked to solve, we created something beautiful. We knew how to push back on each other’s ideas until we’d whittled away the weak parts; we could speak via eye contact in meetings. We tag-teamed. I knew that he’d never half-ass his analysis and he knew I’d never shortchange a revision. Penny stakes, maybe. Maybe.

***

We were sitting on the bench in Central Park, watching a vendor hawk palm frond creatures, and I took my deep steadying breath and turned to Cliff just in time to see him pull his phone from his pocket, check his notification.

“Shit,” he said, or maybe “Holy shit.” His voice was soft, and I watched him swipe and open the message and blink at it and put his hand over his mouth.

“You okay?” I asked, after a beat.

He turned his phone to me—he was in shock, I know now, there’s no way he would have done that otherwise.

***

And if you asked me today, I think I’d still say yes: a pregnancy test has changed my life. I was very sure of that at the time, anyway. But would I really have told Cliff? Would I really have said to him, out there in the open among all those people, that I’d decided to leave my husband? Because if I’m honest with myself, I had a certain expectation of how he would react. It was not realistic, perhaps. But remember: I was deeply unhappy. I was not necessarily seeing things as they were.

And I guess that’s my hesitation now, seeing that Cliff’s agency—Wolfram—has been written up for its Black Friday special—innovation in marketing, is how the reporter has framed it. Ad Age, too. The big time. At first I thought I’d send something over—one of those fruit bouquets, maybe—something for the whole team. It seemed like the perfect opportunity: long ago at InShare, we’d ordered furniture on Black Friday, had insanely gone into the office and been the only two there, had realized we were maniacs and left at lunch and wound up at a downtown dive bar with live music, where we proceeded to get preposterously drunk on the Black Friday special, which was Wild Turkey and cranberry juice. The thing is, I’m not exactly sure how the night ended. I woke up alone in my bed the next morning and promptly texted Cliff to ask what on earth we’d been thinking—I had a real rager of a hangover—and anyway we were more or less back to normal by Monday.

But before I actually sent anything, the doubt crept in—doubt I never felt when we saw each other every day, mind you. Would he get the wrong idea, is what I worry. Would he think I was trying to start something. (To restart something?) It shocked me, how many people thought that, when they found out I was leaving Jesse.

“What happened in New York?” he asked me, so many times, certain it was something damning—certain, I guess, that I had slept with Cliff. But no. A few drinks. A long walk with ice cream. Two rooms that didn’t adjoin.

That was the real reason Jesse and I weren’t meant to be together: he was the kind of person who needed concrete proof that something had happened, that added up to a reason why something was happening. He needed all the evidence to be tangible, to point together to the same solution, tidily. Like on TV—like on The X Files, which I actually did watch a few years ago, and which I enjoyed quite a lot. More than I expected to. I thought of sending Cliff a note about it, but the doubt got me then, too. Anyway, Jesse needed that kind of wrapped-up-in-sixty-minutes sureness. Not me. Cliff and I barely spoke after we left InShare, actually—his life got busy around then, what with having a kid and all—but that doesn’t mean what we had wasn’t important, wasn’t significant to both of us, no matter where we ended up. It doesn’t. That’s what I want to believe.

Fluorescent Hours

This story was first published by Printers Row in September 2017.

We all knew Lisa and Cliff were in love, even though they were both married. That doesn’t always mean as much as you think. Such fancy names, they would joke, because they were really Elisa and Clifford but none of us ever called them anything but Lisa and Cliff. When Bruce, the CEO, introduced them, she’d always say to call her Lisa, and then Cliff would say,

“And call me Cliff,” and she’d add, “As a jumping-off point,” so fast half the people didn’t get it, but he’d always smile.

This was around the time when standing desks were popular. They both had one—we’d catch them meeting eyes sometimes over our heads. When someone new was in the office and asked about the desks (and they always asked), Lisa would be half embarrassed and half evangelical, like she knew it was a fad as much as anything,

“But I just have more energy at the end of the day.”

And the investor or the reporter (later, though we didn’t always know they were reporters) would look at Cliff and say, “You too?” and Cliff would say, deadpan, “She ordered it on Black Friday. They were two for one,” which would always make Lisa kind of half-laugh, smile in a way that you knew there was more to the story. One of their private jokes. They’d both been here since the foggy early days of the company when desks and chairs were still being ordered and staying late was normal and even a little cozy.

On Mondays, she’d buy bagels. The Einstein’s downstairs had a deal, thirteen for six dollars, and she’d wave away our thanks because,

“How couldn’t I?” she’d say. “Six dollars?!” Like it would be insulting to have bagels available at that price and not buy them, and we’d attack them like seagulls, the way people attack food in an office, no matter what it is. But she’d always manage to set aside an onion for Cliff because his wife was doing paleo back then the way you pretty much had to and he missed bread.

Right up until the end she brought them and we ate them. I’d always wind up splitting a second one with Katie before noon, even though we were both doing paleo too, or trying to, and we’d feel guilty and bloated and eat salads for lunch to make up for it. I never thought of those as heady days, but looking back, knowing what came later, they were. Oh, how they were.

I guess the time I really think of when I imagine us all was that summer, right before Dave Schwartzman left, which is how we knew things maybe weren’t one-hundred-percent on the up-and-up because he was the CFO and very proper and diligent. I remember when I was setting up my 401(k), he sat with me for a good hour because I had so many questions and he wanted to make sure I balanced my investments right and got the full match, which was four-point-five percent—pretty competitive, according to Dave. So when he walked out of the office with a cardboard box of his stuff—just like in the movies, so we almost thought it was a joke—one Wednesday in September and word got around that he was walking out for good, I remember Lisa looking at Cliff with this expression on her face like she’d just heard her dad died and he seemed to say “What?” with his eyebrows and she nodded to her screen and he clicked something and then they left and came back thirty minutes later with coffee.

She looked flat when they got back, the way she did days his wife came to get him for lunch. I’m sure she never thought we noticed—she and Marcy were friendly, they’d chat together about this show they all watched while Cliff finished something up on one of his spreadsheets—but when they walked out, she’d turn to her computer and then stare out the window for a while, not doing anything. That’s what really gave it away, the stillness. Usually, Lisa was nonstop, typing fast and talking fast and walking fast to the kitchen to refill her water. I even saw her refill it from the sink sometimes, because the cooler was so slow. It was hard to see her still like that. None of us liked it.

When Marcy came, Katie and I would sometimes ask Lisa to eat with us, and sometimes she would and she’d listen to us talk about the stupid men we were dating who were incapable of making plans (“They’re not men, they’re boys!” Katie would always say), or she’d tell us about her husband Jesse’s project of repairing lampshades and how it baffled her that he’d spend three hours on something when they could have gotten a new one for twelve dollars. She was usually better after these lunches, though she always returned to her desk before we did (and before Cliff)—she was always working so hard, doing so much. We were busy that summer. Our head writer had moved to Boston and just before they were about to hire a replacement, Lisa came out of a meeting with Dave with her jaw set and nobody new ever started. (“I don’t understand,” I overheard her say to Cliff in front of the elevators, when I was going to use the bathroom. “He said we had the budget.”)

But it was a happy kind of busy.

Normal days—or normal days that summer—they ran the marketing team in tandem. Our CMO had left that April when he got hired (or “poached,” as Cliff said) to lead some other startup nearby and they hadn’t replaced him. I guess that should have clued us in that something was going on—me and Katie, I mean—all those people leaving and not being replaced, but at the time we just assumed it was a long recruitment process.

I usually got in by eight-thirty and Lisa was always deep into her work by then. She was a small woman, a runner, and gave the impression of extreme efficiency in both form and function. She dressed simply, with little jewelry. She wore her hair short, just long enough to tuck behind her ears. She drank black coffee and seemed capable of an intensity of focus that would have bored through her screen, if we were in a cartoon.

I made that joke one morning when she was especially dialed-in.

“Lisa,” I said, and she looked up, startled, like she’d forgotten we were there. “You have laser-beam eyes right now.”

She turned to her screen and back to me and laughed.

“Uh-oh,” said Cliff, across the spine of desks. “That puts me in the danger zone.”

I said the thing about the cartoons, and Cliff said, “If focus were a weapon, Lisa would have destroyed us all a long time ago.” He cut his eyes to her as he said it, so that she could see he was giving her a compliment.

“Not all of you,” said Lisa, mostly to him. “I’d keep Maddy around to help with emails.” She winked at me.

“What about me?” said Katie, who sat beside Cliff.

“How many emails does a bloodthirsty warlord really need to send?” said Cliff, reasoning. “I think we’d both be toast.”

“Unless you could make yourselves useful,” said Lisa. “For example, I could foresee us needing someone to decorate the bunker and then measure the success of our raids.”

“So a graphic designer and an analytics guy?” said Cliff.

“Phew,” said Katie.

We settled back into our work but I saw Lisa click an email right after and laugh to herself, then glance up at Cliff, who was smiling at her.

They went into the smaller conference room together at nine-fifteen every morning for half an hour. That started when Mark left, the CMO. When they realized they were running the show. They’d go in with their mugs and notebooks and sit side by side, pointing to their notes, which we knew because the conference rooms had glass walls, and you could tell from looking at them that it was their favorite part of the day. One morning Katie emailed me, “What do you think they do in there?” and I looked up and she was making a face that said she thought the same thing I did and at lunch that day we agreed that they were probably in love and it was one of those heart-rending tragic stories that is kind of beautiful in its sadness, like violin music. And Cliff and his wife were trying to get pregnant, we knew, even though he never said anything. You can just tell sometimes. Anyway, I think it was mostly her who wanted it.

They were not old, of course, but they seemed old at the time. She was thirty-three and he was thirty-four—he made a big fuss during the two months they were the “same age,” though she was always quick to ask whether he’d made restaurant reservations for his birthday yet, because it was just around the corner. I was two years out of college at that point and Katie was maybe three. A world away. We were happy to be part of their doomed romance, to witness it, I think because it seemed redemptive somehow, that two people could be part of a tragic love affair even in a fluorescent-lit office dedicated to selling insurance for the sharing economy. We needed that right out of college, the promise that there might be more to life than nine-to-five work that left us so tired all we wanted to do was drink and watch stupid TV. Katie had been a design major and I’d studied English. It’s disheartening, going from a world where all you do is think about art to an office. Of course, now I’m embarrassed to remember that attitude, to think their situation was anything other than deeply sad.

One afternoon in June, Bruce came over to Cliff and asked about that week’s SEM report, how the bids were, how much we were paying for applications. It wasn’t exactly unusual for him to come over—it was a small company, no more than forty of us—but it wasn’t common, either, if there were no investors to show around. Cliff answered Bruce’s questions, pointing to his screen and explaining things like CPA and ACPA, acronyms whose meanings I was never one-hundred-percent clear on, and then Bruce asked Cliff to bring his laptop into his office, and while he was bent down detaching it, Bruce asked Lisa how the content was doing.

“Barreling forward,” she said, in the polite neutral voice she used to talk to him.

“How many words we going to write this week?”

“Ten thousand,” she said, which is what she said any time he asked, even though it wasn’t really true, especially now that we were down a writer and anyway content success wasn’t really about number of words anymore.

“Atta girl,” said Bruce, and saw that Cliff had his computer. They walked away.

She kept her eyes on her screen but didn’t resume typing for at least a minute.

Katie and I went to lunch and when we came back, Lisa was standing beside Cliff at his desk, their backs to us. They were talking softly.

“Why would he want them before you send them to Dave?” she was saying.

He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

We weren’t sneaking. Katie settled into her seat, which I’m sure they saw.

“Anyway, I think every six weeks is enough,” said Lisa, in her regular voice, and Cliff said he agreed and Lisa strode back around the spine to her desk, asking us what the outside world was like, making fun of herself for being glued to her screen.

In July, there was a conference in New York. Cliff had been invited by a software vendor who was courting us and had offered free admission. He told us during our weekly marketing meeting, which we had on Mondays at three.

“You think it’ll be useful?” said Lisa, looking up from her notebook. She took notes in legal pads and had a whole stack of them in her filing cabinet. I always thought it was kind of excessive until she was able to find two-year-old notes (signed by Cliff) documenting that, if we were still fighting for a new blog platform in two years, he’d buy the entire team dinner. Of course, the team back then had just been the two of them (“I was kind of hoping we’d be bigger by the time he had to pay up,” she said, passing me the bread basket at the Italian restaurant she’d chosen).

“We’ve been thinking of switching over,” said Cliff, about the new software. “They’ve got a lot of great content management features Brightedge doesn’t have.”

“Ooh,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “Tell me more.”

“Actually,” he said, “I’m thinking it only makes sense if we both go. I wouldn’t really know how to evaluate the content stuff.”

She nodded, flipping back a few pages in her pad. “I don’t know,” she said. “Think Dave would green light it?”

He tapped his pencil on the table. “I bet they’d comp us another ticket, and then it would just be airfare and a hotel.”

She looked up. “Can’t hurt to ask. When is it?”

He said it was at the end of the month and she asked me, teasing, if I thought I’d be okay without her in the office for two days, if I’d be able to get four thousand words written, and I met eyes with Katie and I could tell she was as impressed as I was.

“Right out in the open,” Katie said, biting into her chicken salad lettuce wrap the next day. We were sitting on the edge of the fountain in Daley Plaza. “He’s so bold.”

“He’s smart,” I said. “This way, there’s nothing improper about it.”

“I wish someone would figure out how to get me to a conference in New York for two days,” said Katie, wiping mayonnaise from the edge of her lip. “Can you imagine?”

I shook my head and sipped my LaCroix. The guys I’d managed to date in the last two years were barely capable of remembering to charge their phones. I was lucky if I got a text before eight p.m. about plans for the night.

“Do you think anything will happen?” she said.

A pair of men in business suits passed, checking us out.

I smiled.

“Why don’t they ever say anything?” I said, when they were out of sight. “The real adults.”

“They were married,” said Katie, and I asked her how she knew, and she said I had to get better about checking for rings. I think that’s something that happens right around twenty-four, checking the left hand, but that summer it hadn’t hit me yet.

Anyway, my best guess is that something did happen while they were in New York. I can’t say what, but they were definitely changed when they got back that Friday. The last day of the month. Lisa was at her desk when I got in, same as ever, but there was a kind of mania about her. She jumped when I greeted her and then laughed at herself.

“Lord,” she said. “I need to cool it on the caffeine.” She took another sip of coffee. She knocked the cup of pens from her desk later, reaching for her water. When Katie asked her if she’d left her coordination in New York, teasing, she laughed hard even though it wasn’t that funny. She’d always been fast, upbeat. But now she seemed propelled by her energy, no longer in control of it. She was downright jumpy.

I think Cliff was concerned. I caught him watching her sometimes, when she was on a call or listening to music, dead focused on a piece of writing. When there was no danger she would notice. He was pretty tall, above six feet, so he could raise his eyes just slightly from his screen to watch her, and he did, all through August. A few times she’d look at her phone and pick it up and hurry off, murmuring, “Hey,” before disappearing into the hall. She never used to do that. And one day when I thought she was meeting with Dave about the new software, I went into the bathroom and heard crying and I’m almost positive it was her but I didn’t check. Serious crying, like waves bashing rocks. I didn’t want to know. At the time, I told myself she’d want her privacy, though now, looking back, I wish I’d done something.

During our first August marketing meeting, Lisa announced that the conference had been great and they were going to ask for budget for the software. Cliff mentioned that it wasn’t cheap, though, so we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

“They still owe me a writer,” she said, twirling her pen around her fourth finger. “This would be less than half as much.”

They exchanged a look I couldn’t read. He started walking us through the weekly report when Bruce knocked on the glass wall. He pointed to Cliff, who glanced at Lisa before leaving, laptop in hand. He wasn’t back before we finished, and didn’t return to his desk until nearly five. Almost as soon as he’d settled in, Dave appeared. I had given up working for the day, was just reading news articles, trying to convince myself I was doing research for the blog post I was supposed to be writing. Cliff and Dave went into the conference room and shut the door but didn’t sit.

An email from Katie popped up: “What’s going on?”

“No idea,” I typed. “Doesn’t look good.”

They emerged at five, just as I was shutting down. Dave walked straight toward his office without saying hi to us, which was unusual because he was pretty friendly. Always made a point of asking about my parents, who somehow knew his parents, which we’d discovered when he was helping me with my onboarding paperwork.

Cliff looked worried. He connected his laptop and I saw Lisa click an email almost at once. They didn’t move, though, didn’t talk. I imagine they waited until we left.

The next day, they were both in the office when I got there, which was odd because Cliff usually came in closer to nine. They were in the conference room, talking, and didn’t emerge until ten.

Lisa put her head in her hands, which I saw out of the corner of my eye. Only for a minute, though. Pretty soon, she was back in her flow.

In the last week of August, Dave came over to us. He seemed distracted. He stood beside Lisa. I wasn’t eavesdropping, but it was an open-plan office, so you could hear everything. He asked her if he had the address right and showed her some paper.

She nodded, then pointed.

“Wait,” she said. “That’s my old zip.” And she wrote something.

“Thanks,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

She nodded. “Thanks, Dave,” she said, and then said that she’d be fine, really, and she raised her coffee mug to her lips and I got an email from Katie that said only “Ring.”

I looked across the desks at her and she made a face and tilted her head toward Lisa and I looked and saw that she was no longer wearing any rings on her left hand.

“NO,” I typed. “What happened?”

“Should we say something?” typed Katie.

“OMG, do you think it has anything to do with NY?”

“I can’t even right now,” she typed. “Coffee?”

So we went downstairs to the Starbucks and I asked if she thought Jesse had found out and had kicked her out and Katie said she doubted it, her bet was that Lisa had just made the decision, had decided that she couldn’t stay married to him when she was in love with Cliff.

“But what about Marcy?” I said, sipping my latte.

Katie shook her head, then widened her eyes. “What if she’d pregnant.”

She had no reason to say it, I don’t think. Just trying to be dramatic. But she was right, even though we didn’t know it until a year later, when we met for dinner and stopped to do the math.

I guess I haven’t done such a good job of showing the heady days I mentioned earlier, but it’s funny how when you look back everything seems to lead to everything else. At the time, when we were doing bagel Mondays and drinks on Fridays and teasing Lisa days she drank too much coffee (“And what?” she’d laugh to us, giddy and wired, “Got too much done?!”) and sending group emails making fun of each other (though always with Cliff and Lisa leading the charge, Cliff finding a screenshot from the Simpsons of someone wearing the same outfit as Lisa, for example, or Lisa sending us the Belle & Sebastian song “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying” when Cliff told a story that went on too long), when all that was happening, we were a unit in a way I haven’t experienced since. When we found out Mark was leaving, Cliff had joked that we were home alone, and Lisa had said, “Ice cream for dinner!” and Katie and I had laughed because to us they were real adults already and purely joking about not knowing how to be in charge. And because that was my first office job, my first “real” job, I didn’t know things could be different, didn’t realize that the marketing department under Lisa and Cliff was a sort of magical world, a sort of happy nine-to-five family—of course it couldn’t have lasted. They both worked hard, they were both good at their jobs. That was clear—Cliff’s charts made it clear. Our numbers kept going up. The producers never had a shortage of applications to work on. And even when Bruce started interfering, in July, when he insisted that Cliff’s weekly reports go through him before going to Dave, we still managed to do well. Lisa was in charge of organic traffic, which didn’t require bidding on keywords, which Cliff now had less money to do because of changes Bruce had decided to make.

I think my twenty-four-year-old self would have liked this story to end with Lisa leaving Jesse and then Cliff leaving Marcy the next day and them announcing to us that they were getting married—not even dating, just getting married, because that seemed back then the only way things were ever settled, even though I knew as well as anyone how divorce worked—that divorce, was, in fact, built into that particular fantasy of happily-ever-after. But now I realize it was more complicated, it was always more complicated. In my early thirties, I dated a guy I’d met at work and it was one of the most disappointing experiences of my life. He was so well dressed and cheerful and well liked at the office, but after we’d been going out a couple of months, all he ever wore were basketball shorts and t-shirts. He never bothered doing his dishes and never wanted to make plans. Always the same thing: let’s watch the game at the Dark Horse. Boring. And the deal breaker: he never stopped pressuring me to try anal—it was an obsession for him, like he was mainly interested in me as a source of potential anal sex. People are on their best behavior at work, is what I’m saying. You can build up a whole fantasy about them, about how they’re better than the people you live with, but usually it’s only that—fantasy.

At the time, Katie and I assumed Lisa and Jesse split up because of her and Cliff, but now I wonder. I’m married now, is part of it, and I see how it is: you still have crushes. You still fantasize. But it would have to be pretty serious to actually end the marriage. I would never actually leave Steven—crushes are just a necessary distraction to get you through the fluorescent hours (which is a phrase Lisa would definitely have edited out, “fluorescent hours,” something she would have said was a little too Creative Writing 101 for marketing content) you’re forced to spend away from the people you really care about.

When Lisa and Cliff got back with coffee that Wednesday in September after Dave walked out, they called us into the conference room. We sat around the table and I noticed how tired Lisa looked, dark circles under her eyes. Stretched out. Thinner, possibly—she’d always been thin but before it had always looked healthy, lean. That day, she looked almost bony, the way people look when they’re stressed out and sad.

“Dave Schwartzman has resigned,” said Lisa, setting her coffee cup on the table.

“We decided it’s best to let you guys know what we know,” said Cliff.

“Which isn’t much,” said Lisa. “But at this point….”

There were some accounting irregularities, Cliff said. Bruce was demanding things that Dave didn’t like, and his guess was that Dave had decided he’d had enough.

“What do you mean, ‘irregularities?’” said Katie and I gave her a grateful look because I certainly wanted to know but didn’t have the guts to ask.

Lisa sighed. “Guys, don’t repeat anything we say, okay?” she said. “We’re just making a guess, putting together what we’ve been able to figure out.”

We nodded.

She looked at Cliff.

“It seems like someone is using company money for non-company expenses,” he said.

“Someone?” said Katie, and I gave her a look.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to,” said Lisa, short.

Katie’s eyes widened. It was the first time we’d heard anything close to snapping.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Cliff. “They might bring in a new CFO next week.” But, he said, it was not a good sign that Dave had left. They’d decided—he and Lisa had—that it was best if we knew that things were up in the air right now, that it was possible the company would have to close.

“What?” I said. It was not what I’d expected. I had four hundred dollars in my savings account and had not paid the month’s phone or Internet bills yet.

“Again, nothing’s definite,” said Lisa. But she recommended we spend the rest of the day updating our résumés and LinkedIn profiles.

“We’re both happy to serve as references,” said Cliff.

They wanted us to be prepared for anything, said Lisa.

Katie looked like she was in shock, and I guess I probably did too.

“Okay,” said Lisa, after nobody had said anything for a while. “That’s it.”

“Are you two going to leave?” said Katie.

They looked at each other and I swear to god it was the most agony I’ve ever seen in a single look, or it was at that time in my life. Lisa looked down first and she must have known then about Marcy, must have known that Cliff would leave if he could find something more secure, that this might be the end of their working together, of their seeing each other every day. Of their seeing each other at all.

“I’m keeping my ears open,” said Cliff. And I don’t know if Katie picked up on that, but it really killed me, the “I,” when everything else up to then had been “we.”

We went back to our desks and it was the quietest afternoon I remember at that job—bright, sunny, but it felt like someone had died. It felt like the end of something.

If I’m honest with myself, I guess I would have to admit that, day to day, the job didn’t really feel “heady,” even in the summer with no real boss. It felt like an office job. Interminable. Great stretches of being hungry and bloated from having too much salt with lunch and tired and not knowing how I would make it to five p.m. And then those startling periods when I’d be hit out of nowhere with this death-march worry that my life was passing me by while I sat in front of a computer, that I would never meet anyone and would end up alone, that I was completely unable to control anything that mattered and that consequently nothing would ever work out.

But all that tends to disappear in memory.

Now, of course, when I mention that I worked at InShare, people always want to hear what it was like. Not on the scale of Enron, of course, but locally it made a bit of a splash. Bruce had started and sold a couple businesses that went on to be local powerhouses, and he had a presence on the charity circuits, from what I understand. His father had been a state senator. So when it came out that he was using investor money to fund an affair with a much younger woman (someone he’d hired as his executive assistant at InShare, in fact), the local media was all over it. It was a nice change of pace, too, in a winter that was otherwise an endless stream of protests and shootings. Something we could all be outraged about in unison.

The company was dissolved in November, by which point Katie had already taken a job with Groupon. I was still searching, but Lisa fought to get me a little severance, so I ended up being okay. It was scary at the time, but not so bad looking back on it—I didn’t have a mortgage or kids or anything, and because they’d warned us, I managed to save up a little cushion in those last few months. Lisa and Cliff stayed until the end, too, though I know they’d both started consulting on the side. Those last few weeks, all we did was talk to the board, who were really nice people, grateful for the help we were able to offer them. I was glad not to be in their shoes because I had no idea what I would do if I had to close down a business I’d lost millions of dollars on.

It’s funny how much it’s all faded over the years—at the time, it seemed like such an unimaginably big scandal. To me, anyway. But when I got the mail this afternoon, the new Chicago magazine was in there and Lisa was on the cover, lean with bright-gray hair—she must have never dyed it, which didn’t surprise me—looking sharp as ever. She was posing with two other women in front of the tiger cage at the Lincoln Park Zoo and the headline read “Prairie Tigers.” The piece was about the companies each of them had started, which were three of the most successful in the city, getting lots of attention for being women-owned. I flipped through the pages and there was another picture of her inside, sitting on a desk in a small, cheerful office full of primary colors, a pair of running shoes on the floor beside her. She was smiling and holding a mug of coffee, her left hand still bare. Would you believe that the first thing I felt was pity, that she’d never married again? My daughter would really let me have it if I told her, remind me how old-fashioned and sexist I am sometimes. And she’s right. But I like to think I wasn’t sad for Lisa about being single generally, more sad that she hadn’t ended up with Cliff. I guess I wanted some validation that this grand romance I remember actually meant something, that I hadn’t just been young and naïve, reading meaning and weight into relationships where there was none. Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe I’m just like everyone else and I want every story with a female protagonist to be a love story. Lisa would have hated that, though I think she would have been pleased with me, at least, for recognizing it.