Chapter 61

Why’d you have to do that? thought Kyle Williams, his heart burning as if he had just downed a pot of scalding water. It was twilight and he sat in his car on the shoulder of I-95 North. He had been nearing Max and Kirby’s home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut when his phone toned. He glanced at it in his cup holder, not one to read a text behind the wheel, but he saw the C in a circle at the top of the screen for “Corey” and nearly swerved off the road. He got to a stretch of 95 where there was a wide enough shoulder to glide to a halt and picked up the phone.

Now he sat there stunned, a lump in his throat. It just wasn’t fair.

You just can’t do that to someone.

Especially now.

It took him months, but he had finally put myself back together again.

Twenty-five years ago, he had had a powerful crush on Corey Lyondell, on her voice and her lyrics and her comely look peering out of posters and CD booklets, with an intensity that only a young man, lonely and adrift at sea, could. So meeting her, falling in love with her, being a couple…it was like hitting the lottery.

Then giving it all back.

With Max, he knew there were problems. Deep down, even if he didn’t acknowledge them, they were there. It was a slow moving car crash, a long slide on the ice. He pretended otherwise for a while, but he could see it coming. It was inevitable.

Corey’s breakup was like being T-boned in his driveway.

He hadn’t been that dumbstruck since that day on NORTHWOOD. Walking off the flight deck in shock, flecks of blood in his hair, moving through the corridor without ordering his legs to do so, and shutting himself in his stateroom. Eventually, the medics found him and treated him, the captain debriefed him, and the Communications Officer offered to make a radio patch to land to let him talk to someone. But Max was out to sea on her own ship, unreachable. So he was sent back to his stateroom.

With no other options, no loved ones to talk to, no land to escape to, he reached for his sleeve of compact discs. He put Damsel Underdressed in the portable stereo he had lashed to the bulkhead. There was a slight squeal as the disc began to spin, then suddenly the cramped stateroom flooded with the guitar buzz of Limelight. He hit Forward until he found the closing song, Decelerate. It’s endless outro, with her looping coo, was hypnotic. A lullaby. Kyle lolled his head to the side and pressed his ear against the speaker itself, letting the sounds, her voice, wash straight into his head like a balm. 

He had deserved a face-to-face exchange, like an adult, damn it. He deserved a better explanation. He deserved a chance to plead his case. But despite all of that, Corey had, in her way, been with him on the worst day of his life. In the end, he supposed, she owed him nothing. He said as much the first night they met and she fluttered her eyelids and coyly asked, “However will I repay you?”

You already have.

 He’d never told her about that day. Now he never would, but the scales were balanced.

After the reunion, he scrubbed her burgundy footprints, leading down the hallway to his bedroom, each fading in color and size until they disappeared, from his carpet.

Then he rebuilt his life.

He started with the RISC. He and Charlie cancelled all road commitments to finally buckle down on their Resilient Infrastructure and Safety Calculator. When they were on the road, they had to pass their schema back and forth, but now they were side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, perfecting their formulas and crunching the numbers and navigating the risk flowcharts, page after page of branching possibilities, which became even more detailed, more comprehensive than before. He was determined to anticipate every threat known to man, and to have a contingency for it.

“It’s inspired,” said Charlie, looking at the sheaf of flowcharts. “Paranoid but inspired. You’re the van Gogh of accepted risk.”

“I don’t accept risk anymore,” said Kyle. “Get coding.”

They were a week away from launching Paratus 2.0, with its RISC product suite—a free app with basic scenarios, more advanced and scalable versions depending on the size of the business, and a newly designed executive-level seminar—when something unexpected happened.

A large insurance company called. Then another. They both wanted to buy the RISC. Not just the RISC, but Paratus Risk Solutions itself. A full buy-out. Their lawyer was looking at the offers, but conservatively—Kyle ignored everything other than the most conservative estimates—should they take one, he would never have to work another day in his life.

He used to lie awake late at night when they first conceived of the RISC years ago, his brain firing with possibilities, and fantasize about large posters and billboards, the kinds found in airports or on the sides of buses. Kyle imagined with a businessman carrying a briefcase, running hurdles, but each hurdle was a threat, and along the bottom their slogan:

Run the RISC.   

Now, instead of a poster, he could get a pay-out beyond his wildest dreams. Charlie was out of his mind with excitement and wanted to take it. The idea of paying for college for three kids with a single check was making him salivate. Kyle wasn’t sure yet. They built Paratus out of the ashes of his divorce. It had been something else to focus on. And now, they had finished the RISC in the wake of Corey. It was stupid, but he still daydreamed about that billboard. That maybe Corey might pass through an airport one day, flying between cities on a world tour, and see it. That for once she might pass by something he put into the world and think of him rather than the other way around.

Besides, what the hell would he do with himself if he sold his company?

Corey reaching out only proved his point. With nothing more than a text, she undid him. He had finally gotten his head straight and was trying to make a decision that would dramatically alter both his and Charlie’s families, and she just jammed her thumb onto the scale. Even if he had been leaning toward the buy-out and its windfall, now the thought terrified him. All of those feelings came rushing back: the heartbreak, the nausea, and suddenly the last thing in the world he needed was ample free time to feel his feelings more keenly.    

He put the BMW back into Drive.

When he arrived in Old Saybrook ten minutes later, Max answered the door. They hugged and she led him into their kitchen, where Bob was pretending to assemble tacos, but was watching a soccer match over his shoulder.

“Hey bud, you made it! Beer?”

Kyle took a seat at the kitchen island. “Please…”

Kirby pounded down the stairs and gave him a hug.

“Have you and Uncle Charlie made up your minds yet?” she asked.

“The lawyers are still figuring some stuff out.”

“You should do it. You could follow me around from con to con full time. I’ll let you be my assistant and rent the tables. It’ll be great!”

“The assistant pays for the tables?”

Kirby patted her Dad’s cheek. “Dad, I’m offering you a chance to get in on the ground floor of this revolutionary new business model.”

“We’ve created a monster,” Kyle said to Max.

“Who’s this ‘we?’” said Max. She turned to Kirby. “Dinner in five.” Kirby padded away to another room.

Bob put a lager down on the island in front of Kyle. Max returned to preparing the deliciously aromatic meal for which he had no appetite.

“I say this with all the love in my heart,” said Max, “but you look like shit. You need to eat, you need to sleep, and you need to shave. Not necessarily in that order, but they’re all mandatory.”

Kyle rubbed his cheek. “You don’t like the beard?”

She made a face.

“I have a lot on my mind,” he said.

“It’s all good though, brother,” said Bobby. “Sell, don’t sell…either way is gravy.”

Kyle gave Bobby a pained smile. Bob patted him on the back and drifted over to the other end of the family room where the match played on the flatscreen.  

Max was rebounding back and forth between the kitchen and the island, managing prep and the burners. When Max cooked, the food would be good, even great sometimes, but the mess was always out of proportion to the quality of the meal and tonight, the state of the kitchen was enough to give him a mild panic attack. It looked like a tornado blew through, scattering utensils and splattering salsa and refried beans against the backsplash. When they were married, those messes always fell to him to clean. Suddenly his eyes felt as if they were too heavy to keep level, and they drifted down to stare at an unblemished region of the island. In his peripheral, he noticed her stop, then felt her gaze on him.

“What’s really going on?” she asked.

He didn’t want to talk about it. At the same time, he was tired of not talking about it.

“Corey texted me.”

“When?”

“Just now.”

“What did she say?”

He was going explain it, but it felt like too much work. He slid his phone across the island.

Max read it, slid the phone the back.

“Well, you’re a fucking idiot.”

“Yes dear,” said Bobby.

“Not you. Him.”

“Ah, a night off. What did the other idiot do?”

“Corey texted him.”

“Of course she did,” said Bobby.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Kyle.

“Because she loves you,” said Bobby. “Duh.”

“No, she doesn’t,” said Kyle evenly. He steepled his fingers and took a deep breath. It took the little energy he had left to maintain his patience. “Or we would be together, wouldn’t we?”

“You know better than anyone else things can be complicated,” said Max.

“Whose side are you on?”

“Yours, which is why I’m making you a taco for the road. You’re going.”

“The hell I am.”

“Don’t wait for your ship to come in, man,” said Bobby. “Swim out to it.”

“A lot of good people drown every year following that advice. As a Coast Guard officer, you really should know better. Always wait for your ship to moor safely before embarking. That’s just good nautical sense.”

“Stop deflecting,” said Max.

“You’re deflecting,” said Kyle.

“Kyle Williams,” she said. “Outside. Now.”