Later, when the room had emptied, Walter remained in his chair and watched the lake. Tom Okafor lingered at the door. “Well?” he asked. The old man did not turn. “Well,” he said, “I think Eleanor would have liked her. She would have asked her to dinner, and made her do the dishes, and been right about her within a week.”

The Garage

Ryan did not remember walking to the parking garage. He remembered only that he was suddenly there, in the concrete half-dark on level P2, standing beside the black sedan with his key in his hand and no memory of how the last forty minutes had passed.

The garage smelled of oil and cold stone. Somewhere above him a car alarm chirped and went quiet. Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead, and one of them flickered, throwing a stuttering light across the roof of his car. He unlocked it, got in, and shut the door.

The silence inside was total.

He placed both hands on the steering wheel and looked at them. They were good hands, manicured and strong, the hands of a man who had signed contracts and shaken hundreds of other hands and never once, in his adult life, carried anything heavier than a briefcase. They were shaking.

He drew a breath, and the breath turned into something else, a sound he had not made since he was a boy, ragged and raw. He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth, but it came anyway. He had not cried at his grandmother’s funeral. He had not cried when his father retired from the bus line with a plaque and a cake. He had told himself for years that he was simply built differently.

He cried now for a long time, with his forehead against the wheel and his shoulders heaving. And when it was over, he was not lighter. He was only emptier, and very tired.

The dashboard clock read 11:52. He had been inside the Brightwater tower for three hours. It felt like three years.

He lifted his head and caught his own face in the rearview mirror. His eyes were red. His tie had come loose. A sheen of sweat clung to his forehead. There was nothing about him, anymore, that said the best candidate they will see this year.

“Okay,” he said hoarsely. “Okay.”

He did not know what he meant by it. It was just a word, a thing to put in the silence.

He started the engine. The dashboard lit up, and with it came a small chime and a message on the screen: Lease payment due in 5 days.

He laughed. It was a short, ugly laugh, and it bounced off the concrete. He had borrowed against his savings to make the down payment on this car, because a man who arrived for interviews in a ten-year-old hatchback was not, in his mind, a man who got hired. He had lived for three years on the principle that appearance preceded reality, and that if he looked like a vice president, the universe would eventually produce the title to match.

The universe, it seemed, had other plans.

His phone buzzed in the cup holder. He glanced at it. A text from Kyle Brennan, his oldest friend, a man he had known since middle school and who now worked in private equity downtown.

How’d it go?? Dinner tonight to celebrate? Drinks on me when you get the offer.

Ryan stared at the message for a long time. His thumb hovered over the screen.

He typed: Didn’t go well.

He deleted it.

He typed: It’s complicated.

He deleted that too.

In the end he typed nothing at all. He put the phone face-down on the passenger seat, shifted into drive, and rolled slowly out of the garage into the cold bright noon.

Kyle

They met at a bar on Wabash that evening, a dim, expensive place with a copper ceiling and a bartender who knew Kyle’s name. Ryan had changed out of the suit, into jeans and a gray sweater that no longer fit the way it used to, and he arrived late on purpose, because he was not sure he could do this.

Kyle was already at a corner table, with a whiskey in front of him and a second one waiting. He stood, grinning, and pulled Ryan into a back-slapping hug. “There he is. The future VP.”

“Kyle.”

“Tell me everything. Did you crush it? You crushed it. I can see it on your face.”

“I didn’t get it,” Ryan said.

The grin stayed for another half-second, the way a face does when the news hasn’t yet reached it. Then it collapsed. “What? No. Come on. They told you that?”

“Not in so many words. But I won’t be getting it.”

“That’s insane,” Kyle said, sitting down heavily. “Your numbers were off the charts. Who’d they pick, some corporate lifer?”

“I don’t know. Someone named Leah Santos, probably.”