Unspoken

by Kelly Rimmer

  “Fuck you, Paul,” she says now.

  I’m about to echo the curse right back at her, but the sound of my phone buzzing on the dining room table distracts me. I know I set the phone on Do Not Disturb mode, so it’s got to be one of my favorite contacts calling or my cell would have automatically silenced the call.

  So that means it’s one of my business partners or Dad or my brother Jake or...Isabel herself, because even though I haven’t called her in five months (well, four months, twenty-five days and around thirty-four minutes), I’ve yet to delete her entry.

  It’s fair to say that embracing change isn’t exactly one of my strengths.

  “Some people would say it’s rude to answer the phone in the middle of a conversation.” Isabel stands.

  I think about that as I cross the room to pick up my phone. What a strange thing for Isabel to say. There are 7.2 billion people in the world, and some of them talk constantly. It stands to reason that some people say just about every permutation of words, each and every day. I’m not at all sure why Isabel felt the need to point that out now.

  I pick the phone up just as the call ends. It was Marcus Ross, my other business partner. I unlock the screen and move to return his call, but I’m distracted when Isabel growls behind me.

  I turn to face her, and she shoots me that look one last time, grabs the handle of her suitcase and storms toward the smaller of the guest rooms—the one on the ground floor, directly below the master I’ve already claimed for myself. She closes the door behind herself, then opens it and closes it again—the second time, managing a much louder and I assume a much more satisfying slam.

  The gentle, sweet woman I was married to never slammed doors or raised her voice. The shrew I’m currently divorcing raises her voice and cries in front of our attorneys when it suits her, so I barely even blink as the sound echoes through the house.

  It seems I’ve managed to get caught up in the world’s most depressing game of chicken, and I’m already starting to regret my bravado. Am I really going to stay here with the new and not-improved version of Isabel lingering in the house?

  Apparently, the answer to that question is yes, because the alternative would be to give Isabel what she wants, and I’ve done way too much of that already since she stormed out of my life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Paul

  WHEN I RETURN his call, Marcus greets me with a booming, “Gollum! Glad to hear you’re still alive.”

  “I told you to stop calling me that, asshole,” I say.

  “Gollum won’t take off the precious,” he rasps, but I can hear the laugh he’s trying to stifle. This is not a new joke; he’s been giving me shit about the wedding ring for months now, and I know he’s trying to cheer me up. I’m well aware that it’s absurd that I’m still wearing the ring, so his strategy actually works most of the time—hell, it probably would have worked ten minutes ago, but it’s not going to work now, not now that Isabel is here. I can all but see the dark clouds of a bad mood gathering around my head. “Where the hell are you, Paul?”

  “Didn’t you check your email today?” That hardly makes sense. Marcus is always on his email.

  “Uh...” There’s a pause, and I can hear his mouse clicking, then he says tentatively, “Nope. Sorry, no emails from you since that one about that API request, and that was just...” He sighs heavily. “Paul. You sent it at 3:00 a.m. That’s late, even for you.”

  I jam the phone between my shoulder and my ear and slide my laptop out of its satchel. The battery is critically low, but there’s enough charge for the screen to flicker to life, so I quickly navigate to my email client.

  I did work crazy-late last night, trying to clear the decks to give my team a fair chance of success with the mountain of work they need to tackle this weekend. At 4:16 a.m., I hadn’t yet reached the “letting everyone know about me disappearing for the weekend” part, but I was so tired I was making careless mistakes, so I decided to stop just to rest my eyes. Perhaps unsurprising, I fell asleep over my keyboard and woke to the sound of the driver mashing the doorbell at 7:01 a.m.

  But I did write that series of emails explaining my absence. Sure, I sent them later than I intended, but I had well and truly finished by the time my colleagues would have been arriving at the office.

  My email client opens now, and the bold 13 beside my outbox jumps right out at me. Did I connect to the hotspot on my phone when I was working in the car? I can’t even remember, and it doesn’t matter now. All that matters is that the emails I wrote this morning went nowhere.

  I watch as the laptop starts to search for an internet connection, then I reach forward violently and flick the computer into airplane mode to stop it belatedly sending the barrage of now irrelevant messages.

  No wonder Vanessa didn’t get the house ready—she didn’t get the email I sent her asking her to do so. The linen and towels in my bedroom haven’t been changed, and it’s clear that Isabel has been here since my last visit. I don’t relish the idea of sleeping in sheets that my ex-wife likely slept naked in recently, but the linen is the least of my worries right now.

  I scan down the outbox, every email is more important than the last. The email to Vanessa. The instructions to my documentation analysts. And the testing manager. And my senior engineer. There are pages of detailed notes for Audrey, my senior developer and the unlucky woman I intended to task with holding the whole team together this weekend.

  “Just an FYI, Paul, Audrey doesn’t look so good. She’s...” I hear Marcus shift, then he whispers into the phone, “She’s watching me through the window of my office, and she’s gnawing on her fingernails.”

  “She does that when she’s stressed.” I’m familiar with the habit, even if I didn’t think to ask why she does such a thing until a few months ago. “If it bothers you, send someone out to get her some Twizzlers and give her those to chew on instead.”

  Six months ago, we announced that a new version of our browser would be released in May, which is now next month. The new version has a whole new interface. That’s done, and it’s awesome if I do say so myself. The problem is we also announced some exceedingly complex internet security capability and Marcus’s team has been selling it hard. The whole industry is excited about the new features, so there’s been heavy media coverage, and our corporate subscription clients are chomping at the bit for it but...

  It doesn’t actually work yet. At least, not reliably, and reliability is pretty fucking important when it comes to corporate software. There are a handful of catastrophic bugs lingering in the current code that we need to fix before we can move to testing, and it needs weeks of QA before we can even think about moving toward release. Hence the emergency “retreat” this weekend.

  We call this kind of work session a retreat because everyone stays at the office until the work is done, but it’s an ironic term, because there’s no yoga or day spa treatments or rest at all. This kind of retreat represents a last-ditch effort to meet a deadline. It’s an immersive marathon of work that only ends when the plan changes or the work finishes. The carrot on the end of the development team’s stick is the big, fat bonuses they will all get if we find a way out of the mess we’re in right now.

  Audrey really needed to know before now that she was responsible for handling this weekend. That’s why I sent her a very long, very detailed explanation of where I was going and everything she needed to do in my absence, starting with an announcement and quasi-motivational-speech to everyone else right on 9:00 a.m. this morning, before the team had time to panic about my absence.

  “Why didn’t someone call me when I didn’t show up for work?” I’ve never so much as taken a personal day, let alone disappeared without an explanation.

  “Well...I’m calling you now,” Marcus points out, then he hesitates. “And how do I say this diplomatically...”

  “If you’re asking me for advice on how to s
ay something diplomatically, you’re screwed.”

  “Paul, you’re not playing your A-game at the moment. Ever since you and Izzy agreed on that settlement, you’ve been...off,” Marcus says, very gently. I appreciate that gentle tone, but it doesn’t stop the words from hitting me with the force of a sledgehammer. “Just look at today. As far as I can tell, you’ve been coding since before you learned to talk, and suddenly you can’t even figure out how to send an email?”

  I know he’s right and I’m embarrassed as hell about it. I hate acknowledging even to myself that my heart isn’t in it anymore. It takes an awful lot of motivation to work the way I used to work. I’m not that guy anymore, but that’s not even the real problem here. The issue is that I’ve yet to figure out who I am now.

  “I’m sorry.” I sigh. “I know. I’m trying to get my head back in the game but...you’re right. Things are shit. That’s why I needed—and that’s why I’m taking—some space.”

  “Totally fine, Paul. Jess and I talked about it first thing and we just figured with everything on your plate this week, you were just resting up before the retreat and we thought it would do you a world of good. But...well, it’s lunchtime now, and I was worried. Are you okay? Where are you?”

  I pause, thinking back to Jess’s determined insistence two days ago that I absolutely needed to be at the retreat this weekend.

  I know your divorce is finalized next week. I realize it might be tempting to slink off somewhere to lick your wounds this weekend—were you planning on going to the house out at Greenport one last time? Well, don’t even fucking think about it. I need you at this retreat—your team has to get back on top of this release. Got it?

  Even at the time, the conversation struck me as odd. Not because Jess had caught me out on my plans to skip out on the most important weekend of my team’s working year...quite the opposite, in fact. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could or should want to take this weekend off, not until that very conversation. And Jess can be a tough taskmaster, but even so, she’d never spoken to me like that before.

  Her little speech grated me, and things that grate on me tend to stick in my mind. I’ve known Jess since my second year of college. Hell, I lived with her for two years, in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment that she, Marcus and I used as both home and office until we had the first version of our browser finished and we’d secured enough capital to start paying ourselves salaries.

  Jess knows me better than almost anyone. She knows how to push my buttons and she’s not afraid to play people like pieces on a chessboard when she wants something. Jess knew that if she irritated me with that autocratic speech about staying at the office this weekend, I’d do exactly the opposite and leave.

  By the time I left the office last night, taking the weekend off no longer sounded like a crazy idea at all. I have been underperforming lately, but I still have a terrible habit of micromanaging, and that managerial flaw only intensifies when I’m under pressure. I eventually concluded that the team will actually be better off tackling the mountain of work ahead of them without me there.

  I don’t think I’m ready to admit this aloud just yet, but I’m starting to suspect that the reason my team is running seriously late for the first time ever is that I can’t get my head in the game.

  “I’m at Greenport,” I tell Marcus. “I’m not coming in for the retreat this weekend.”

  “What?” Marcus shrieks like a panicked kid, then clears his throat and deepens his voice as he says carefully, “Uh...Paul...”

  “Audrey is ready for this,” I say, with complete confidence, but then I hesitate. “At least, she will be once she actually knows she’s running things, anyway. I’ll call her when we hang up.”

  “Maybe you didn’t understand when I said she was chewing on her fingernails. I mean, she’s really going to town on them. Frankly, it’s disgusting.”

  “She’s nervous, Marcus. Have a little sensitivity.”

  He laughs, because we both know I’m the last person in the world to lecture anyone about sensitivity, let alone Marcus, the most emotionally intelligent guy I know. At our office, it’s always been me making the social faux pas. I’m the guy who congratulates the woman on what’s inevitably not a baby bump, or asks after someone who recently died, or who dismisses someone’s legitimate concerns too swiftly or even misses their concern altogether because I’ve got my head stuck in a fucking reference guide and I’m not actually listening while they beg me for help.

  I’ve almost made a career out of stomping on other people’s feelings, not because I don’t care, but because I often don’t even realize I’ve done it. That’s why I’m not offended that Marcus is laughing at me right now. This is the pot calling the kettle black, and it’s another moment that would be funny under just about any other circumstances.

  “Why don’t I conference Jess in?” Marcus suggests.

  “I really need to cool down before I speak to her.” I’m pissed at Jess, but she’s still my business partner, and as CEO, technically my boss. What she’s done here is messy and manipulative and I’m furious with her that she messed around in my personal life, but particularly because she did it via a conversation at work. Even so, I can’t let my frustrations with her spill right back over into our business life. Things are complicated enough for me there already.

  “Cool down?” Marcus repeats blankly.

  “She tricked me into coming here and now that Izzy has turned up, too, I’d say Jess has some kind of master plan underway. Jess Cohen is like some fucking puppet master, manipulating people like...like...” I’m momentarily lost for words, and it’s frustrating as fuck. “Like puppets!”

  “Paul,” Marcus says, cautioning me, then he draws in a breath. “Seriously, man. I’m worried about you.”

  “I’ll call Audrey and apologize, then I’ll run her through everything she needs to know for the weekend. Then I’m going to go right back to avoiding Isabel.”

  “Izzy’s actually there. At the house.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re there, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “In that tiny house.”

  “Tiny? It’s 2,200 square feet, Marcus.” It’s a humble house, built in the 1940s and in need of some remodeling, but it’s nothing like tiny—not by the Manhattan standards Marcus and I are accustomed to.

  “That’s tiny if you two are going to be there for the whole weekend, especially without some kind of referee or alligator-infested moat to separate you. Are you seriously both going to stay?”

  “I guess you could say we’re both too stubborn to leave.” My gaze drops back down to the laptop, and the grayscale icon that shows the Wi-Fi is still deactivated. I prop my phone next to my ear against my shoulder, an idea surfacing as I plug the laptop into the power.

  I know exactly what Isabel is doing in that guest room. She’ll unpack her clothing and toiletries first, because that’s always the first thing she does when she goes anywhere. Next, she’ll crank up the AC in the room, and she’ll do that because her next move will be to pull the duvet right up to her chin even though it’s unseasonably warm today. When Isabel is flustered, she always retreats under blankets to binge-watch canned-laughter sitcoms.

  And to get to one of those shows, she’s going to want Netflix.

  Once upon a time, Isabel would barely have reacted to something like nonfunctional Wi-Fi, but this year, her anger has somehow become permanently set on a hair trigger. I have a feeling that if I cut her comfort-binge off at the source, she’s going to overreact. Maybe she won’t be pissed enough to leave, but she’ll definitely be pissed enough to get flustered and to come seeking another argument. She’ll yell at me, because although we were never really the type of couple to argue, all that changed the day she walked out. It’s like her temper was dormant for thirty-three years and then our marriage ended and a sleeping beast within her awakened.


  I ponder this for a moment as the laptop screen brightens again as the current flows into it. A prank like this won’t win me the war. The truth is, I lost that, probably some time ago. But a simple thing like switching out a Wi-Fi password might just get me another shot at this final battle between us: the battle for the last weekend at our vacation home.

  “I have to go,” I say abruptly.

  “You’ll call Audrey?”

  “As soon as I hang up.”

  “And Jess?”

  I snort. “When I get around to it.”

  “Fine.” Marcus sighs. “I’ll fill Jess in. You should probably answer if she calls you, though.”

  “She won’t call me.” I’m certain of this. Jess has set the game in motion. Now she’ll just sit back and wait for it to play out. What I’m not yet certain of is her end goal. Does Jess seriously think that Isabel and I could ever get back together?

  No, that’s not it. Jess has been right at the sidelines this past year. She knows that whatever Isabel and I shared is long dead. And cremated. And then scattered on the wind.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to just come back to the city?” Marcus asks quietly. “Before... I don’t know. Before things get any worse.”

  “Trust me,” I say. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Good luck, Paul.”

  “I don’t need luck.”

  “You definitely need something,” he laughs weakly.

  I hang up the phone, log into the router, and get to work. It takes no time at all to change the password on the Wi-Fi network—and by the time I finish my handiwork, I’ve also finished the beer, so I wander back to the fridge for another.

  But there’s a spring in my step and a smile on my lips, because there’s something surprisingly satisfying about knowing that for the first time in an entire year, I’m one step ahead of Isabel Winton.