“Sure.” I sigh. “We can try that.”
“Sorry to break up the party, but we need to talk about finances,” Gaby says. “We’ve had some unforeseen expenditures, which means we now have six months of runway, not eight.”
“I thought we had ten,” Cyrus says.
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s what I thought.”
“You guys don’t read a single thing I send you, do you?” Gaby says.
I pretend not to hear him.
“Our overheads are higher than we forecasted,” Jules explains. “And we have to spend on customer acquisition right off the bat—ads are getting more expensive.”
Cyrus turns to me. “How long till you can get a beta out, Asha?”
I do some calculations in my head. “I could squeeze something out in three months.”
We look through the glass at the twelve people all plugged into their headphones. “I’ll do my best,” I say. “Oh, and by the way, Destiny is our new head of marketing.” I say a number. “Gaby, you have to pay her. She can’t make her rent this month.”
* * *
After that, Ren and I work around the clock. We hire two other designers and a front-end developer. Ren drives them all hard, using little other than his own example and the occasional sidelong glance. We’re mainlining the ginseng-doused cold brew that Rory has cooked up in his lab, and I’m up so many hours that I don’t even notice the jitters. I crawl into bed (a mattress on the floor which is lucky if it sees a pillowcase), spooning myself around a sleeping Cyrus, waking up around noon, and rolling up to the office with a Ziploc of Cheerios and a single-serve pack of peanut butter.
The summer passes in a blaze of sweaty nights, dawn breaking over the Hudson and sun slanting into my eyeline; Frappuccinos, slushies, soft serve, bubble tea, the weeks bending and crashing into each other. Cyrus never asks to spend time with me, never says the word “weekend.” He curates a blood baptism using Jell-O mix for a vampire couple, goes back to Cambridge for a yoga funeral, and for three weeks in July is away on a Vipassana retreat, and when he comes back, I swear his voice has dropped an octave and he is at least three times sexier.
On our two-year anniversary, we return to the Book Mill. We stay at Sam and Sam’s again, in the room with the sloping ceiling. I am more in love with him than ever. We seem to have accidentally fallen into a happy rhythm, imposing almost nothing on each other, yet maintaining a deep kind of intimacy, a secret place full of longing, scraps of tenderness we nurture and feed, a little bonsai of love. I’m going to write a marriage guide, I think. I’ll call it The Startup Wife: How to Succeed in Business and Marriage at the Same Time. I’ll tell everyone how great it is to mix everything together—work, love, ambition, sex. Anyone who says business and pleasure don’t mix is an idiot. I can see it in Barnes & Noble, propped up on a table between How to Stay Married and Startups for Dummies.
* * *
Jules’s parents, the Cabots, like to flit around the world—London, Savannah, Hong Kong—but they always spend the last few weeks of the summer in the Hamptons. Jules insists we go for a weekend in August. “You can’t send me into that shark tank by myself,” he tells Cyrus. “You owe me.” We rent a car and drive out late on Friday after the traffic has thinned, Jules driving, Cyrus beside him, and me sprawled in the backseat. They’re playing their favorite car game, where they make up stories about the people in other cars. “Divorcing,” Jules says about the couple in front of us. We can vaguely make them out ahead, a woman behind the wheel with a mass of curly hair, a man in the passenger seat with wide shoulders and a thick neck. “Married for six years and they’re cooked.”
“I don’t know,” Cyrus counters. “I’m thinking brother and sister.”
I sit up, peer between the seats. “They’re having an affair.”
“The brother and sister?”
“No, you sicko, just a regular affair. Her actual husband is nerdy and into Pokémon Go. Either way she doesn’t have kids.”
“How do you know that?” Jules asks.
“On the highway at midnight on a Friday? Where would she leave them?”
“That’s what I said, just plain old divorce, which is what my parents should’ve done twenty years ago.”
It takes three hours to get to Sagaponack, where the Cabots have a family home they call the Farmhouse. We go up a long driveway. Even in the dark, I can tell the house extends in all directions and that there is nothing farmlike about it. Jules hands his car keys to a man who takes our bags and gives us directions to our room. Two flights up a wood-paneled staircase, down a hallway with tiny brass lamps illuminating our way, we find a sparsely furnished room wallpapered in tiny pink flowers. There is a bookshelf crammed with paperbacks, and a window seat overlooking the garden, which leads directly to the beach. Crickets and the circular hum of the sea are audible in the background.
I flop onto the bed. “Air-conditioning!”
There’s a soft knock on the door, and Jules comes in with a tray, puts it down on the window seat, and silently shuts the door behind him. Under a white napkin there are oatmeal raisin cookies and two glasses of pink lemonade. I take a sip of lemonade, thinking this is a place where Jules might have been happy, where he might have spent summers in shorts, learning to swim, catching the eye of a cute guy in the house next door. I sense the possibility of happiness, and I feel sad for Jules that this possibility has never materialized.
* * *
In the morning, we sit down at a long rectangular table and eat breakfast with Jules, his parents, his brother and sister, and their husbands and wives and kids. They are all beautiful in a leggy pink kind of way. I try to remember to chew with my mouth closed, and after every bite I run my tongue carefully over my teeth to make sure I don’t have a wedge of brioche stuck somewhere. I make polite conversation with Jules’s sister, Brittany, whose twin daughters, Paige and Peggy, are in matching jumpsuits and pigtails, silently spooning oatmeal into their mouths.
Jules’s father leans forward in his seat and calls down to us from the head of the table: “How’s business, son?”
“Great, Dad,” Jules replies, nudging his scrambled eggs.
“Jules is keeping the ship afloat,” Cyrus volunteers.
“That’s weird, because he couldn’t even keep his pants up in high school,” his brother, a total asshole, barks.
“He got us our funding,” Cyrus says. “We’re launching in three months because of him.”
“That’s wonderful, dear,” his mother murmurs.
“What is it again?” his brother asks. “Facebook for people who want to go to church?”
“Yeah, Don, something like that,” Jules says, pushing his chair back.
“Mommy says you spend your allowance on hanging on,” one of the twins says. Her mother shushes her.
“Hangers-on,” the other twin says. “Peggy always gets it wrong.”
All the blood rushes to my face. It occurs to me that for most of my life, I have shared this island with the Cabots. Merrick is only an hour away, yet it never would have occurred to my parents to drive over to East Hampton, park their car, and unload their Bengali picnic on the beach. The summers of my childhood were spent in the homes of friends in Hunters Point or Astoria; someone might stray into the backyard for a chicken kebab barbecue, but mostly they stayed inside and sang Tagore songs, recited poetry, and talked about how terrible yet still wonderful things were back home. Summers were not for sunbathing, they were for singing and homework and waitressing at the nearest IHOP.
I’m ashamed of taking money from Jules, which is, in fact, money from his dad. There’s a detailed internal monologue in my head about how I’m just another immigrant leech, another drain on the system, the system in this case being the Cabot family trust fund.
“Do you want to leave, Jules?” Cyrus says, whispering but loud enough for everyone to hear.