Chapter 60: Submerged Signals
The elevator ride up was a capsule of silent tension. Alexis watched the numbers climb, her reflection in the bronze doors a stranger in a black silk slip dress. She’d put on makeup for the first time in weeks. The effort felt both monumental and ridiculous, like playing dress-up in a bombed-out city. Mark stood beside her, handsome in a simple navy button-down, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He’d suggested the rooftop place, a spot they’d loved before, a "we should try to... you know." A normal thing.
The doors slid open, releasing a wave of curated energy—the low thump of a bassline, the clink of glass, the layered murmur of conversation. The hostess, recognizing Mark with a practiced, wide smile, led them to a table by the glass wall. The view was a breathtaking sprawl of the city igniting under a sky streaked with tangerine and violet. It felt like sitting on the edge of a dream.
“This was a good idea,” Alexis said, once they were seated. She meant it as a promise to herself, to him, to the version of them that used to enjoy such things.
“Yeah,” Mark agreed, his eyes scanning the menu without seeing it. “Looks like it.”
A waiter brought water, his patter smooth and unobtrusive. They ordered drinks—a vodka cran for her, an old fashioned for him—and a spread of sushi rolls, familiar favorites chosen by rote memory.
For a while, they tried. They really did.
Alexis pointed at a building in the distance, its windows aflame with the sunset. “Looks like the Titan from Attack on Titan is about to peek over that one,” she said, forcing a playful note into her voice.
Mark chuckled, a dry, short sound. “More like the Colossal. Definitely Colossal energy.”
It was a thread, a frail connection to their old language. They grasped it.
They talked about Ben’s disastrous attempt to cook stir-fry for the group last week, about a new anime trailer that had dropped. The conversation was light, skating across the surface of a deep, black lake. It was a performance, and both were acutely aware of the other’s script. Their knees didn’t touch under the small table. The space between them felt charged, an inch that was also a canyon.
Then Mark’s phone, face-down next to his cutlery, buzzed. A short, sharp vibration against the marble. He ignored it, taking a sip of his drink.
Alexis watched the ice cubes shift in her glass. The buzz came again. And again, thirty seconds later. Not a call. A rapid-fire sequence of notifications.
Mark’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. He flipped the phone over, glanced at the screen, and winced.
“Everything okay?” she asked, her voice carefully neutral.
“Yeah, just… Desmond confirming some edit timelines for the next upload. Brandon needs the thumbnail assets. It’s fine.” He set the phone back down, screen-up this time.
A minute of silence passed. The sushi arrived, beautiful and artful on dark slate. Alexis picked up a piece of spicy tuna roll with her chopsticks. The flavors were perfect, a burst of heat and cool rice, but it tasted like nothing. It was just texture in her mouth.
Mark’s phone lit up. An email banner slid across the top. Then another. The screen kept glowing, a persistent, miniature beacon on the tablecloth.
He picked it up, thumb flying across the screen. “Sorry, one sec. This sponsorship deal… the contract’s got a clause Leland flagged, and they’re being pushy about the turnaround.”
“It’s Friday night,” Alexis said, her tone still light, but a fine wire of strain running through it.
“I know, I know. The agency in London works late. Time zones.” He typed a reply, his brow furrowed in concentration that belonged anywhere but here.
Alexis ate another piece of sushi. She watched the sky deepen to indigo. She listened to the happy chatter from a table nearby, a celebration, glasses clinking. She counted the buzzes of his phone. Six. Seven.
He was murmuring now, half to himself. “No, that’s not what we agreed… gotta push back on that…”
The old familiar feeling rose in her chest, hot and acidic. It wasn’t just jealousy of his attention. It was the stark, brutal reminder of the world outside their grief. A world of contracts, and content, and deadlines. A world that had, indirectly and directly, applied the pressure that had fractured them. A world that was still buzzing, relentlessly, while her own world lay in ruins.
He chuckled dryly at something on his phone, a professional, transactional sound.
The wire snapped.
“Who are you talking to right now?”
Her voice was low, but it cut through the ambient noise like a blade. Mark looked up, startled.
“What?”
“Who,” she repeated, enunciating each word with cold clarity, “are you talking to right now? Because it’s not me. You’re at a dinner table. With me. Supposedly.”
“Lex, it’s just work. It’ll take two seconds.”
“It’s been taking seconds for the last twenty minutes.” She put her chopsticks down precisely on the slate. The click was final. “You can’t even turn it off for one dinner? For our first time out of that apartment, where we just sat and stared at walls? You have to be ‘Mark Phillips’ of RDC right now?”
He flushed, a mix of embarrassment and defensiveness. “It’s not like that. This is my job. Our jobs. This is what pays for this.” He gestured vaguely at the view, the food.
“I don’t care what pays for the sushi, Mark!” Her voice rose, drawing a flicker of attention from the next table. She didn’t care. “I care that you’re here, but you’re not here. You’re in your inbox. You’re managing the brand. After everything. Is that the narrative now? Business as usual?”
The word ‘narrative’ hung in the air between them, toxic and heavy. It recalled the other woman, the speculation, the public story they’d had to brutally correct.
Mark’s face darkened. He set his phone down, screen still glowing. “Don’t do that. Don’t bring that into this. This is just logistics.”
“It’s all logistics to you!” The tears were there now, hot and furious, but her voice remained steady, a dangerous calm. “Your daughter dies and you schedule a grief stream. Your girlfriend is trying to remember how to breathe across from you and you’re negotiating thumbnail assets. When does it stop being content, Mark? When do you get to be just a person? When do I get to be just a person you’re with, and not a… a problem you’re managing between emails?”
The table fell deathly silent. The accusation, so precise and so brutal, seemed to suck the sound from the air around them. The neon from the bar cast a sickly blue light across his shocked face.
He stared at her, his eyes wide. He opened his mouth, then closed it. The buzz of his phone vibrated against the marble, loud as a shout in the stillness.
He looked at the phone. Then back at her devastated, furious face. The conflict in his eyes was a physical thing—the pull of the urgent, solvable problem on the screen versus the vast, unsolable ocean of her pain in front of him.
He chose.
He stood up so abruptly his chair legs screeched against the floor. He tossed his napkin onto his half-eaten plate. His movements were stiff, robotic. “I can’t do this right now,” he muttered, the words barely audible, thick with an emotion he couldn’t name.
Then he turned and walked away, weaving through the tables towards the elevator bank, leaving her alone with the stunning, empty view, the beautiful, untouched food, and the glowing, buzzing phone on the table.
Alexis didn’t move. She watched him disappear into the elevator, the doors closing without him looking back. A waiter hovered nervously, then retreated.
She looked out at the city, a galaxy of indifferent lights. The first date night since the loss. The attempt at normalcy. It lay shattered around her, worse than the silence of their apartment because it was a silence filled with the ghost of what was supposed to happen. She picked up her vodka cranberry and finished it in one long, bitter swallow. The ice cubes clattered against her teeth.
Then, slowly, she picked up his still-buzzing phone. She watched the emails from London, the texts from Desmond, the notifications flood in. With a steady hand, she pressed the side button and held it until the screen went black. She placed the silent, dark rectangle back on the tablecloth.
She signaled for the check. She would pay. She would go home. And the canyon between them, she realized, staring into the night, had just grown miles wide.
The hum of the city sixty stories below felt like static in her ears. Alexis signed the check with a hand that didn’t tremble, her signature a messy slash of ink. She stood, the silk of her dress whispering against the chair, and walked out without a backward glance at the table, at his dark phone left behind like a piece of discarded tech. The elevator descent was a smooth, silent fall.
In the back of the ride-share, she watched neighborhoods blur past. Her own reflection in the window was a pale smudge against the light-polluted night. She felt hollowed out, scraped clean by the fight. The driver’s radio played a generic pop song about love, and she had to suppress a sudden, wild laugh that felt like a sob.
The apartment was dark and still. She stepped inside, toeing off her heels by the door. They lay there, elegant and forsaken. She didn’t turn on the lights. She moved through the familiar space by memory, past the paused game screen still frozen on those glowing butterflies, a relic from a different, barely younger grief.
She changed into one of his old Howard sweatshirts, the fabric swallowing her. The scent of him on it was a fresh, physical ache. She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, listening to the silence. It was different now. It was an angry silence, a waiting one, filled with the echo of his chair scraping back and his muttered exit.
An hour later, the key turned in the lock. The door opened and closed softly. She heard the rustle of his jacket, the quiet thud of his shoes being removed. He didn’t come down the hall. Light from the kitchen spilled in a yellow wedge across the living room floor, then was extinguished.
She heard him settle on the couch. The faint creak of leather, a sigh. Then nothing.
They didn’t speak to each other.
The night stretched, a vast, cold tundra between the bedroom and the living room. She lay stiffly atop the covers, her eyes open, tracing the shadows on the ceiling. From the couch, no sound of sleep came. Just the occasional shift of weight, the low digital chime of a phone being checked, then silenced. The distance of twenty feet felt interstellar.
Morning came gray and slow. She rose first, padding quietly to the kitchen. She made coffee, the grinder’s roar shockingly loud. She poured one mug. She did not pour a second.
He appeared as she was rinsing her cup, looking rumpled and older in yesterday’s clothes. He hovered in the doorway, his eyes bloodshot. She met his gaze for a fractured second, a transfer of pure, unspoken fatigue, then looked away, placing her clean mug in the drainer.
They moved around each other with a choreographed, painful caution. He got his own coffee. The refrigerator door opened and closed. A spoon clinked against ceramic. The silence was a thick, third presence in the room, absorbing all sound. It wasn’t peaceful. It was aggressive in its completeness.
He finally cleared his throat, a rough sound. “I left my phone.”
“It’s on the counter,” she said, her voice neutral, addressing the window over the sink. She did not say she’d powered it off. He collected it, his thumb pressing the button to bring it back to life. A storm of notifications undoubtedly lit up the screen.He said nothing.
The day unfolded in separate orbits. He took a shower. She scrolled through her semester’s syllabi on her laptop in the bedroom, seeing the words but not comprehending them. He retreated to the studio room, closing the door. The low murmur of a one-sided conversation reached her once—likely a call with Desmond or Leland. His voice was professional, subdued.
She made herself a sandwich for lunch. He emerged later, rooting in the pantry for chips. They passed in the hallway, shoulders almost brushing. Both flinched backward, creating a wider berth. No words were exchanged. The air between them crackled with everything unspoken: the accusations on the rooftop, the abandonment, the paralyzing fear that this freeze was permanent.
By late afternoon, the silence had become a kind of madness. It was a vacuum where their shared history should have been. She remembered the touch of her hand on his shoulder during that stream, the lifeline it had been. That connection felt like something from an archaeological dig, a fragile artifact from a buried civilization.
He came out of the studio as dusk was painting the room in long, blue shadows. He stood awkwardly by the television, looking at the frozen game screen. His hands were in his pockets.
“I’m gonna order some food,” he said, not looking at her. His voice was hoarse from disuse. “You want anything?”
It was a practical question. A tiny, logistical olive branch. It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t a discussion. It was a request for data.
She looked up from her laptop, her face carefully blank. Her stomach was a knot. The thought of food was repellent.
“No,” she said. “I’m good.”
He nodded, once. He pulled out his phone, his thumbs tapping. He didn’t ask what kind she might want later. He didn’t suggest a place they used to love. He just stood there, ordering a solitary meal for one in the apartment they shared. The chasm was now in the details, in the silence where their shared rituals used to live.