Page 18 of The Circle

It takes me a moment before I respond with, “For what?”

She doesn’t answer right away either. Just keeps looking at me for a tick. And then she simply repeats herself. Even more earnestly. “I’m sorry.”

Ding.

The elevator stops and the doors open. We both step off; she heads one way to her suite, I head the other way to mine. At the door, I reach for the handle, stop, and look back to see her stopped by her own door. Head resting against the wall.

“Eliza?” I say. She turns to see me. There are a dozen things I could say to her. Maybe even more that I want to say. And maybe someday we’ll have the time. But today is not that day. So I just say, “I’m sorry too.”

She gets a slight grin, nods almost imperceptibly, and then unlocks the door to her room and heads inside.

Our entire personal history sprints through my brain in a matter of nanoseconds. Everything. Meeting her and her brothers when I was still just a teenager. How cool I thought she was. How I kind of looked up to her. How I felt betrayed by her love affair with Alec. How I felt especially betrayed when she and Alec had the baby he and I should have had together. All of it a tumbling, rumbling somersault of recollections crashing past my mind’s eye. And the feeling I come away with is…

Nothing.

Nothing at all. No resentment or wistfulness or bitterness. Nothing.

Fact is, what happened then is no more real than a dream I had once upon a time. And what might be in the future is just imagination. It’s play pretend.

The only thing real is now. And right now, Eliza is suffering in a real and incomparable way, pretty much alone. So, if there is such a thing as karma, it’s doing its work at this moment. The past is past. The future is fiction. Right now is what matters. Right now. Today.

And when this day is over and all is said and done, there are going to be dead bodies marking the occasion.

Whose bodies? Well, that’s anyone’s guess.

I’d like to have that talk with Eliza someday, I think. I’d like to be able to know her again. Or not. But it would be nice to walk away from this period of my life knowing that I did everything I could to make things right and clean up a mess that, even though I didn’t make it, I definitely didn’t do much to stop it from spreading.

Yeah. I think that would feel nice.

“Christine?” Alec says. I didn’t even see him and Danny coming up on me, so I spin, ready to fucking fight.

“Whoa,” Danny says, “all good. It’s just us. You okay?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Alec answers, “Because you’re standing here staring down the hall at nothing.”

“Yeah, no, I’m fine. What are we doing?” They both look at me like you look at a person who is clearly lying. “What?” I ask, with wide-eyed emphasis.

There’s a good, long beat that absorbs the moment. Finally, Danny says, “Nothing. Just… nothing. Let’s get our shit together.”

He reaches past me for the door handle and turns it, opens the door and, as he’s walking by… he strokes my cheek and winks. It’s not at all a weird thing to do, and yet super fucking weird at the same time.

I don’t know why. It just is.

But I like it. When he winks at me. It makes me feel something funny deep in the pit of my stomach. I get a tiny chill through my body.

I think maybe it’s possible I’m feeling a little vulnerable right now.

He enters the room, holding the door open for us to follow him. Alec is still staring at me.

“What?” I repeat. “Stop looking at me all… the way you’re looking at me.”

Alec cocks his head to the side, slides his eyes to Danny and then back to me.

“What?” I say for a third time.

And, finally, Alec answers with… well. I just… I wasn’t expecting it, I guess.

“I love you both. Very much,” he says.

It hangs there for a moment. I start to respond. Start to say something like, “Okay.” Or, “What the fuck is going on right now?” Or, “You guys wanna just blow this whole thing off and go get sandwiches?” Or… I don’t know what. But it doesn’t matter because before I get anything out, Alec says…

“All right, then.” And walks past me, past Danny, and heads to the back of the suite, stripping off his overcoat as he goes.

I don’t move for a second, finding suddenly that my breathing is oddly harder to control than I’d like. After two or three shallow gulps of air I turn to see Danny still holding the door open, waiting for me to come in.

“Does something feel weird to you?” I blurt out.

Danny shakes his head, then says, “Compared to what?”

And then, despite myself, I laugh a tiny laugh. I nod my head up and down, up and down, and say, “This is real life, huh?”

Danny stops shaking his head and his look turns into something more like sympathy as he responds, “I dunno. But it’s our life.”

I take one, final, much deeper breath. Centering myself. I glance over my shoulder back down the hall toward Eliza’s door, then turn back toward the place where Alec and Danny are waiting for me to enter and say, “Yeah. Okay. Let’s go kill some people.”

As I walk past him, I rub his arm, squeezing it with a little more force than is necessary, and he closes the door to the suite, shutting out everyone in the world who isn’t the three of us.