Page 61 of State of Ruin

I make a noise that’s somewhere between a giggle and a sob. “No shit.” Like I told him, he did warn me.

“Maybe they’re all sociopaths—cold-blooded narcissists with really great hair.”

“He does have good hair,” I agree.

“You have to admit, the aesthetic genes are great. World class. It’s just the personality ones that are… I dunno, inbred, probably.”

“They’re like those pedigree dogs that look gorgeous but they’re one false move away from biting off a kid’s hand.”

“Now you’re getting it. Seriously, all this sounds like you dodged the world’s most lethal bullet.”

“He had a very fine casing, though.”

“Two words. Ted and Bundy.”

“I really don’t think he was a psycho.” I let my mind drift back to those two perfect nights at Fairwater. He slept in my arms. Somewhere in there is a good man; I’d swear it. I frown in the darkness as I try to work through the weird, most disappointing—most puzzling—puzzle of my lifetime. “I think… I think he honestly thought it was okay, you know? Like he’s so insanely entitled that he thought making these calls in my life was totally his right. He genuinely seemed freaked out by my freaking out. Does that make sense?”

“Hon,” Sylvie says with a big sigh, like I’m Fleur on one of her less savvy days, “the fact that he so full-on drank his own Kool-Aid is by far the creepiest part of the whole, entire thing.”

CHAPTER 32

Sinclair

My day has been a blur, my work a write-off. I skipped the K Klub at lunch—couldn’t face running into Felix or Kieran—and instead bailed early, taking my sorry ass off home and stopping just short of killing myself on a ninety-minute Peloton endurance ride.

Hours later, I lie spent on my couch and stare, unseeing, at my ceiling. It’s gotten dark by now, but I can’t find the energy to get up and switch any lamps on, so the only light comes from the ever-present ambient glow of Manhattan through my windows.

I’m fucking drained: physically and emotionally. It turns out, indignation is a seriously effective tool when you’re pushing through your Functional Threshold Power on the bike.

Elyse ambushed me this morning.

Worse, she ambushed me fresh from a bullshit debrief from a former employee who was at peak pissed-ness. Who the hell could have foreseen that Vanessa would act so fucking quickly to undermine me?

And worst of all, Elyse wouldn’t even let me finish. How the hell was I supposed to defend myself when she wouldn’t hear me out? If only she had listened.

But the indignation—a time-worn tool of the Voss family that tends to look a lot like Don’t you know who I am?—is fading as quickly as the post-ride endorphins are, leaving an empty, helpless kind of vacuum. Because, for the first time in a long time, I have no next move.

I have no fucking clue what to do.

And helplessness is not a sensation I ever entertain.

As I close my eyes against the lights of New York playing across my ceiling, I understand unequivocally that the universe has a diabolical sense of humor. Elyse’s beautiful face, so elusive to me on all those nights when I lay in my bed and pushed and pushed to conjure it up, is now tattooed on my mind’s eye with what feels right now like permanent ink. But rather than seeing her as I long to see her, I’m seeing her for how she looked today.

I’m seeing the way her face full-on collapsed when I made the move of referring to our dates here, in my home, as sessions—a turn of phrase, but a stupid one. Her flushed cheeks when she stood and accused me of playing God with her career.

And something about that last flash of memory gives me pause. I keep my eyes closed, and I ball my hands into fists, and I force myself to lie here and really see what my mind’s eye is showing me—to watch it. I have thoughts about how I behaved that day in the pitch meeting; I have residual guilt. But I’d largely made peace with it before Elyse showed up today, and I would have made peace with it more fully had she unknowingly allowed me to compensate her for what I took from her.

Still, forcing myself to replay this morning’s events in all their brutal, shocking detail is making one thing supremely clear: no matter how indignant I’ve been over what felt like a stealth attack, Elyse has her own narrative in her head, one she’s bought into wholesale, and it in no way fits what I’ve been telling myself. In Elyse’s world, I’ve done something despicable. I’ve betrayed her by being, in her eyes, careless and dismissive and unilateral. And, much as it frustrates me that I can’t simply make the hard calls from time to time and not have them bite me in the ass, I’d do well to extend her the courtesy of considering things from her perspective.

After all, I’ve been falling in love with her these past few weeks. I have fallen in love with her, that much is clear, and the sight of her huge, wet eyes and harrowed face emblazoned across my mind’s eye is a real jolt; I won’t lie.

So I lie here and lie here, and I attempt to mentally untangle my version of events from hers as if they’re different colored yarns impossibly entwined. I could cheerfully wring Vanessa’s neck, that much is clear, but what’s also clear is that Elyse truly believes I’ve done her a great wrong, and that epiphany has shaken her to her core. I replay and replay this morning’s events so exhaustively that everything starts to feel surreal, as if I’m on some sort of trip. I know my first, panicked instinct was to lie my way out of trouble today… but I still can’t discern whether the thing I lied about was a wrongdoing. The longer I stew, the more I fail to achieve clarity on much, except for one, damning thing:

I can no longer trust my own account of anything—not this morning, not my behavior in the pitch meeting—and that is fucking terrifying. I feel like I’m being tossed about at sea. I can’t tell which way is up. The one detail that sears me with its unflinching pain is the memory of Elyse recounting, with brutal fidelity, the awful, unforgivable lies I told Vanessa by way of axing the proposed campaign.

Unmemorable. Meh. Not worth the money.

If I felt guilty that night at dinner when Elyse extolled her own shortcomings to explain away her lack of breakout success to date, now I feel sick to my stomach.