“You didn’t.”
“He wanted to stop, I know he did. He just didn’t give me enough time. We were talking about his wife, how they had gone all the way to this little town in Kerala to get married. That’s the first time he had asked the platform for a ritual, and it had sent him halfway across the world. And he talked about how his wife had said that she felt her soul belonged in India even though she had never left Connecticut. He told me all of that. He talked and talked. But then, when I begged him to come down, when I said, ‘Put the lighter down and you can tell me the rest,’ this other look came over him, as if he was being taken over by something else, and he just turned around and then he was on fire.”
Cyrus is crying now. “I ran toward him, but he had poured the gasoline everywhere and I couldn’t reach him. I couldn’t even get close.” I feel him shake and I tighten my arms around him.
“It’s okay,” I say. I rub his back. I keep talking, soothing, reassuring.
“We were supposed to do good,” he says. “We were supposed to be good.”
“I know.” What I think is, We could have been good. I feel a hollowness spreading through me, and then I can’t bear to be so near him. I get up, move to the armchair across the bed.
“The worst thing is, I ruined us,” Cyrus says to the ceiling.
“It took both of us to do that. You can’t take credit for everything.”
He manages a laugh. “Will you forgive me, Asha?”
“Of course I will. I do.”
He crosses the room, kneels in front of me. “I’m so sorry. I will make it up to you. When I come back, we’ll start over, I promise.”
“Come back? Where are you going?”
“I can’t stay here,” he says. “I need to think. I need to try to figure some things out. How I got to this place. Something happened to me and I need to fix it. There’s an ashram in Mysore.”
I have a sudden image of him flying to India and eating cratefuls of mangoes. “Cyrus, there’s a weird virus out there and we almost blew up our company. You’re really going to leave me here to clean up your mess while you fuck off to the beach?”
“Don’t be angry, Asha.”
The blood rushes to my cheeks. I am angry. I am so, so angry. “Dammit, Cyrus.”
“Let’s not fight, okay? I screwed up. Even though you gave me every chance to not screw up, I still went ahead and did it.”
“I can’t tell if you’re really apologizing or just feeling sorry for yourself.”
“You have to decide that.”
I look Cyrus straight in the eyes and it all comes rushing out of me. “Okay, then, let me tell you: you fucked up. You fucked up in the most profound sense. Not only that, you got everyone around us to believe that I was being paranoid when I was the only one who had my head screwed on straight. Marco is deeply damanged, anyone could see that, but you blew smoke in people’s eyes and they didn’t have the balls to call you on it. Not even Jules.”
“Don’t blame Jules.”
Now that I’ve started, I can’t stop. “Oh, I don’t. I blame you. The only thing that’s not your fault is the way people follow you, the way they believe in you even when you make mistakes. That is not your fault, that’s just the way you were made. But the rest of it—the rest of it belongs to you. And I need to take responsibility for the fact that I just went ahead and let you. I let you take charge, make all the decisions, as if you were the only one whose opinion mattered.”
And there it was. Sure, Cyrus displayed some epically bad judgment. But I gave him that power over me. I gave him all the privilege in the world so he could turn around and mess me up. It wasn’t your fault, Cyrus, it was mine. I bigged you up and smalled me down. I shone the light on you. I carried the water and let you drink. Every injustice was authored by me, every wound nudged by my hand, even if he bore the knife. I opened my shirt and he cut me.
He pauses for a long time, allowing my words to circle around us. “We’re not going to make it, are we?”
Cyrus does not need me to answer. He has always been able to look inside me, and now he can see it on my face, that though I may still love him and that the feeling of him, so close to me now, is enough to make my insides melt, too much has happened for us to be together.
He takes my hand and I let him. “I’ve lost the right to ask you to change your mind. Maybe once I’ve done some hard work, I’ll begin to deserve you. You can decide.”
“What happens to WAI?”
“That’s up to you.”
“When all of this went down last night, my first thought was we’ve worked too hard, we’ve done too much, to let it go. But maybe we have to shut it down, Cy. We killed someone. We can’t just go on.”
“You’ll fix it. You know what to do.”
I say the one thing that is still hovering between us. “Marco and Rory—all that talk about the apocalypse, the end of the world—it’s happening.”
Cyrus nods. “But I was still wrong.”
“I’m scared, Cy.” There, I’ve said it. The truth is, I’m afraid to face the world without Cyrus. But once the words are out of my mouth, they lose some of their power, and Cyrus tells me not to be afraid, because though he wishes desperately for us never to be apart again, I am strong, and I don’t need anyone to see me through this. Not even him.
* * *
The moment I hear the door close, I want to run after him and tell him to come back, tell him it’ll be okay, that I will take care of everything: him, the company, our marriage. The world is no longer a safe place—where will he go? He should be here. I should let him stay. But I give myself the gift of not doing that. Instead, I allow him to make his way downstairs, to walk out of the building and onto the street.
What would happen, I wonder, if we could return to that other time, the time where we drifted without purpose? Making s’mores in a fireplace. Sleeping under a sloping roof, our limbs entwined. Perhaps that time is over forever—not just because of what we have done but also because it was just a moment, and that moment has passed; the world has moved on, and perhaps those kinds of casual pleasures are gone forever. Perhaps, in the aftermath, Cyrus and I will tether ourselves together in a new way, with rules written in light of the ones we’ve already made and broken. Maybe our promises will be different this time.
I linger for a few more beats on the sensation of Cyrus, of holding Cyrus, pressing my face into his neck, his smell like rubbing a leaf against my hand.
And then I turn my attention to the thing we have broken. How I will fix it. Whether there is a way to fix it at all. I think about what will happen when I turn up at the office in a few minutes, whom I will talk to first, whether I will sit behind Cyrus’s desk or remain where I’ve always been, leading from the middle. I wonder if our users will take me seriously, if they will forgive me for what happened to Stephen, or if they’ll turn against the platform and shut us down. And I wonder about Rupert and Craig, whether they will let me run the company and if they will ever listen to what I have to say. More than anything, I wonder if it all will have been worth it. All that time trying to anticipate what people want and how to give it to them, how to answer their collective need for connection, while keeping sight of my own human self. And even if I solve that, will there be any point to it if the world as we know it collapses around us? I think of the question Li Ann asked me from the start, about what we will do when all the things that are familiar are gone, when the scaffolding of our lives comes apart and leaves us with the terrifying opportunity to start over. I would usually turn to Cyrus to answer these big questions, but it’s up to me now. All of this is ahead, in the minutes and hours and days before me. I gather my coat and lace up my shoes, close the door behind me, and move toward a future—uncertain and unknown—and of my own making.