She exploded. “Your partner? Is that what we are? Business associates? Is that all this is?”

“No, Peyton—”

“Then what are we?”

“What do you want from me?”

“You know exactly what I want.”

He did know. It wasn’t stock options or any written agreement. It was three words he couldn’t seem to say. After a few months she had stopped saying them, but he could tell when she wanted to. That hurt him too.

“Will you please sign them?” he said.

“Get out.”

“Peyton.”

“You heard me. And take all your… legal documents with you.”

Peyton didn’t return his calls or emails for two weeks. They were the longest weeks of Desmond’s life.

He also had problems at work. SciNet was nearly out of money. They arrived at a seemingly counterintuitive solution: go public. The IPO, if successful, would raise over fifty million dollars for the company. It would also make Desmond rich.

He watched in wonder as the finance department dressed up the books. Management asked him for endless reports, cutting and shuffling the data for the road show. There were all sorts of disclosures and disclaimers in the prospectus, verbiage about the risks to their business and things outside their control. But those dense sections weren’t what investors saw. They stared at the graphs on the projection screen that showed rapid growth and read the parts that described a company with massive profit potential.

SciNet entered its quiet period and waited. Every person in the company was on edge. To Desmond it felt like being trapped in a submarine at war, knowing there were mines floating everywhere in the water around them, the entire crew holding its breath, waiting to see if they would hit one and sink or if they would make it out, to freedom, as heroes.

Every day, Desmond wrote another email to Peyton.

When she didn’t reply, he camped out at her front door. He was nervous that the neighbors would call the police, but they must have had some sense of what was going on. They looked at him with sympathy as they passed. One guy said, “Good luck, buddy.”

When Peyton opened the door that morning, she tried to slam it in his face, but he held it open.

“Please, just talk to me.”

“You talk, I’ll listen.”

She stood in the living room, hands on her hips.

“I want you to try to imagine things from my perspective.”

She was a statue.

“There is something broken inside me. Deep down inside. In a place I never knew existed before I met you. I never needed it before, because anyone who ever loved me was ripped out of my life before I could love them back.