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Then she stood and looked at the three of us like we were dirt. She walked, and on the way out, she didn't give me one single thing to work with. No tears I could use to measure her thoughts. No screaming fury I could yell back at. No question I could answer or reason with. Nothing.

She closed me, and that’s what blows my mind. For the first time in my life, somebody knew exactly what I wanted and told me to go fuck myself.

Afterward, I just went cold. Told myself it was finished, the game was over, we did what we could. I made my peace and promptly forgot about it.

That lasted about a day and a half.

Sitting with a drink I never bothered touching, something finally occurred to me. This was never a deal, because a deal requires two sides to agree on something.

Everything’s not a goddamned deal, asshole.

So. New problem. The kind I genuinely cannot buy, close, or talk my way out of, which makes this the first real problem I've had in a long time.

This, I can't fix with money. Money is what let me treat her like something I could buy in the first place. If I throw more of it at her now, all that’ll do is prove I still think she's for sale. I can't fix things with charm either, because charm is something I hid behind when I lied to her.

I can't outmaneuver a woman who outmaneuvered all three of us on her way out the door.

I called this thing a game because a game I can win, and I win everything. But there's no winner this time. No angle, no leverage, no version where anyone comes out ahead. Agnes is just the thing I want more than the win. Whatever that makes this, it's the one table I can’t seem to run.

In every deal I've ever made, I've kept one thing for myself: control. The upper hand. And it's the one thing I've never once been willing to surrender, which is exactly why it's the only thing she'd want. Not my money. Not my name. Just the sight of me handing it over.

I have no idea what a man like me does when the only move on the board is to hand over the one thing I’ve never handed anybody.

But I'm going to find out. I'll tear down whatever it takes, the arrangement, the firm's good name, my own, and I'll stand in front of her with empty hands and no angle in my pocket, which is freaking me the fuck out, but I’m gonna do it anyway.

It’s a risk, there’s no denying it, and it’s going to keep me up all night. I could burn all of this down, every last dollar and every last play, in an effort to make things right, and she could still look at me the way she looked at me in that hallway, and walk.

For the first time in my life, I don't get a vote.

This might be the best thing that has ever happened to me.

Nobody's laid eyes on Elias since Friday.

For most men, that's a bender, or a woman, or a beach somewhere with no cell signal. For Elias Thorne, it's a five-alarm fire, because Elias does not miss. He doesn't take days. He's the most reliable man I have ever known. You could set your watch by him, your calendar, the tides, and he has not answered a call, an email, or a knock since Agnes walked out of that hallway and out of our lives.

So I go find him. That's something I do. When something's broken, I go handle it. Even when the broken thing is a person. Even when I'm the one who broke it.

My supposed gift, that of reading anybody and knowing what a person wants before they do, has never once worked on Elias. I always told myself it was because he was smarter than me, or colder, or just born different from the rest of us.

Turns out, it was none of that. Turns out, I couldn't read him because there was never anything on the surface to read. Elias doesn't hide what he feels. He just refuses to feel it anywhere it can be seen.

I let myself into his place with a key he handed me a decade ago. I find him in the dark, in a big chair by the window, in a suit that's got three days on it. He doesn't look up when I come in. There's a laptop shut on the table in front of him and a drink beside it he hasn't touched. Of course he hasn't touched it. We're all just carrying drinks around like props now, and Elias Thorne is suddenly easy to read.

He's a mess. It's written all over him. His stillness isn't control anymore. It's a man who stopped, completely, because the thing that kept him moving is gone.

"You look terrible," I tell him.

"I found her first." He says it to the window, flat and precise. "For the past year, she sat at that front desk and I made a point of not looking, because the one time I did, I heard that laugh, and I knew if I looked twice, I was finished.”

I sit down across from him. I don't say anything. For once in my life, I've got nothing to say.

"And then I found her on that website, and I looked all I wanted, because I told myself it wasn't really her. Just a woman with her face I'd never have to see in the daylight. And then I brought it to you. That's the part I can't get past. I had one thing that was mine, that hurt nobody on earth, and I couldn't hold it, so I handed it to the one man alive who'd fuck it all up for me. I did that. Me. I'm the reason she had to walk out."

And there it is. The thing I could never read on Elias, finally plain on his face. It's the worst thing I've ever seen a friend carry, that he found the one good thing in his life and fed it into the grinder with his own hands, and knows it.

I want to tell him it was me. That the arrangement was mine, that if we're handing out blame, I'll take the whole bill. But that's not what he needs, and it isn't true anyway. The ugly fact is, all three of us did it. Three grown men, and not one of us said stop.

"Elias." I wait until he looks at me, which takes a minute. "Get up. Shower. Put on a clean suit."