My head is spinning. I start talking without really hearing myself. “I don’t want to—break us apart. If it comes to that, I’ll quit.”
“Oh, hell no,” Gaby says. “The entire management team will leave. Jules and I will be out of here in five minutes, and you’ll be left with an empty office and a CEO with a broken heart.”
I throw Gaby a grateful look, but through all the noise in my head, I know he’s bluffing. Jules wouldn’t leave Cyrus, and Gaby won’t leave Jules. There are murmurs around the table, people trying to step in to see if they can broker a truce. Rupert is talking to Jules, who is whispering something to Gaby. I stare and stare at Cyrus to check if he’s trying to tell me something, to see if his hand is reaching out across the table to hold mine. Last night, after we played cribbage and he won for the thousandth time, I felt the weight of his arm across my shoulders and realized we hadn’t argued about anything in weeks. We had both imagined that I had capitulated. That I had agreed to let him be the boss, to make the rules, and that I would be a good solider who follows orders and shuts up when she needs to.
“I’m not suggesting we fire her,” Craig says.
“I’m sitting right here,” I say. “Why don’t you address yourself to me?”
“Because you’re not being a team player, Asha.”
“Me? I built this team.”
“Craig, we should take this off-line,” Cyrus says.
Craig exhales loudly. “You’re right, I’m sorry. The red-eye messed up my circadian rhythms, and I’m all over the place. Asha, I apologize. Let’s discuss this later when things are less heated.”
Somehow the idea of accepting an apology from Crazy Craig is the thing that lights me up. “Fuck you, Crazy Craig,” I say. “And fuck you, Cyrus, and fuck you, Jules and Rupert and all you other dicks. I quit.”
* * *
I go home and spend so long in the bath that my feet come out looking fifty years older than the rest of me. I hear Cyrus turning the lock and I pad to the door in my bathrobe and the first thing he does is hug me for a really long time. For hours I’ve been imagining how our conversation will play out. He’ll say I shouldn’t have told everyone to fuck off and I will agree and say sorry and then we’ll quickly switch to strategizing a way to get out from under Craig. Maybe we’ll even make some jokes about being older and WAIser. Am I still me? he’ll ask me, and I’ll tell him, Yes, of course. You’re still you. We’ll make up and take the weekend off. I believe with all my heart that this is what is about to happen.
But of course it doesn’t.
* * *
“When we started WAI,” Cyrus says, “you told me I had to think of it as a universe with its own rules, its own systems, and that sometimes it would take on a life of its own and I had to accept that.”
We are in our kitchen. Cyrus is leaning against the island, and I am sitting on a barstool in my bathrobe and trying to push down the flicker of panic that is crawling up my legs and bursting into flames around my chest.
“I do remember saying that.”
He pulls out a drawer from the freezer and removes a box of mochi ice cream. He arranges the half-dozen spheres on a plate and puts the plate between us. “We are going to finish this conversation by the time these things melt,” he says. Cyrus and I have always been obsessed with these little Japanese treats. We are supposed to wait five minutes, but neither of us has ever been able to resist biting into them when the ice cream is still hard. I am encouraged by the inside joke, but my stomach is churning.
“Craig is right,” Cyrus says. “I am contractually obligated to remain CEO of WAI unless I tender my resignation, and when I do, I have to give the board twelve months’ notice.”
“I can’t do it with Craig. I won’t.”
“Jules and I looked into it, and there’s no way to remove Craig unless someone buys out his shares, and we can’t force him to sell.”
I can see little beads of sweat forming on the surface of the mochi.
“Asha, please don’t resign from the board. Please. I need you.”
“There must be a way for things to go back to being the way they were.”
“It’s too late for that. You know that as well as I do.”
I have an idea which cheers me up. “Let’s just start over,” I say. “We can come up with another idea, something new, and this time we’ll know exactly how to play it.”
“Look, if you want, I’ll resign, and so will Jules and Gaby, and we’ll blow the whole thing up. But we built WAI, and if it’s going to survive, we need to stick together even when it’s not pretty.”
“You and me first, that’s what we said, Cyrus.”
“That is absolutely what we said. But it would be heartbreaking—for both of us—if we lost the company.”
He’s right, of course. I don’t want to abandon WAI any more than he does. “I will consider staying on the board. Even with Craig. But you have to get rid of Marco.”
Cyrus pushes back against the counter. “Dammit, Asha, you’re like a dog with a bone.”
I want to say, So now I’m your fucking dog? But I know he didn’t mean it that way. “Then I’m done.”
He sighs, a deep, resigned sigh. “You’re wrong about Marco. You’re wrong and you’re going to regret it.” He shakes his head. “I just can’t agree with you, Asha. I could patronize you and say yes, maybe you’re right, but in this case you just aren’t.”
He pushes the plate of mochi toward me and we each take one. “You will always be a founder of this company. No one can take that away from you,” he says, as if I’m about to die and need to be reminded of my legacy.
“I’m not quitting, I’m just not going to be on the board.” As soon as the words come out of my mouth, I regret them. I’m about to tell Cyrus that, but he’s biting into his mochi and I can see from the set of his mouth that even though he begged me not to quit, he’s relieved now that it’s done. He relaxes, lets out a little sigh of pleasure as he swallows. I bite into mine. The creamy green-tea flavor floods my mouth. “Oh my God,” I say. “Why didn’t we always wait? It tastes so much better this way.”
* * *
I resign from the board. In my place, Cyrus appoints Yvonne Caplan, an ethics professor from Harvard. Apparently, she’s a rising star among philosophers. Once a month, I bore holes into the glass walls of the boardroom and see her sitting in my seat, a petite woman with cropped brown hair, her hands folded on her lap. Occasionally, she nods. I could reprogram the camera in that room to live-feed into my computer, but I don’t—I know they will hardly give her time to speak, that Craig is panting down the line, that Cyrus is telling everyone how utterly perfect everything is because two hundred and fifty thousand people get married using WAI rituals every week, and now, because of Marco, we can do even more to shepherd humans through their short time on the planet, providing them with community, spirituality, a place to turn when life begins to feel devoid of meaning, and who is little Yvonne Caplan to dispute any of that?