Chapter 14: Jim and Susan begin their New Life
The quiet in Susan’s loft was a different creature than the silence in the Malibu house. Here, it was a living thing, padded by the distant hum of city traffic fourteen floors down, punctuated by the soft clink of a mug, the rustle of fabric. Jim awoke on the sofa, disoriented, the previous day crashing back into him not as a shock, but as a heavy, familiar weight. He was a man in a foreign country, and the language was regret spoken in a dialect he was only beginning to understand.
Sunlight streamed in, sharp and accusing. He sat up, the muscles in his back protesting. A blanket had been draped over him at some point in the night. He smelled coffee.
Susan was at the kitchen counter, already dressed in black slacks and a cream-colored sweater, her hair damp from a shower. She looked crisp, assembled, a stark contrast to his rumpled dissolution. Two screens glowed in front of her—a tablet showing financial charts, her phone lit up with a stream of messages.
“There’s coffee,” she said without looking up. “And ibuprofen. In the cabinet above the machine. You’ll need it.”
He shuffled over, his body feeling ten years older. The coffee was strong, bitter. He swallowed two pills dry, wincing. He leaned against the counter, watching her work. “You’re up early.”
“Damage control isn’t a nine-to-five job,” she replied, her fingers flying across the tablet. “Your inbox is a war zone. David’s office has flagged seventy-three emails that require your direct attention. The board is scheduling an emergency call for Monday. Your personal assistant has resigned.”
Each fact landed like a small, precise slap. “Lydia resigned?”
“She cited ‘moral discomfort.’” Susan finally looked at him, her expression neutral. “Smart woman. Saves you a severance package.”
Jim absorbed this. Lydia had been with him for fifteen years. She knew his calendar, his dry cleaning preferences, his daughter’s birthday. Her defection felt more personal than the legal documents. It was an erosion of the world he’d built, one loyal brick at a time.
“David also confirmed the wire to Brenda cleared,” Susan continued, turning the tablet towards him. A transaction log showed the staggering deduction. “The Malibu property is officially solely yours. You should think about listing it. The tax burden alone on that empty monument is ridiculous.”
He stared at the number. Five hundred thousand. It looked so small, so pathetic against the columns of his other assets. A price for thirty years. A fleabite.
“I’m not selling it,” he heard himself say. The words came out harder than he intended.
Susan’s eyebrow arched. “Sentiment? Or strategy?”
“Neither.” He sipped the scalding coffee. “I just… I’m not ready to let it go.” What he meant was: It’s all I have left that proves any of it was real.
She studied him for a moment, then nodded, as if filing the information away. “Fine. Then we should at least go back. Assess. Maybe… repurpose it.” A faint, speculative smile touched her lips. “A party house. A gallery. A dedicated space for your… pursuits.” She let the last word hang, ripe with implication.
The pills began to dull the throb in his temples. The fog of the previous day’s oxy was gone, replaced by a gritty, clear-eyed hangover of the soul. “My pursuits,” he repeated.
“Mm.” She put the tablet down and picked up her phone, scrolling. “I’ve been thinking about our arrangement. The… curation. It’s best to be deliberate. Thoughtful. Not a random party trick.” She looked up, her gaze direct. “I have someone in mind. For you to meet. A kind of… introductory conversation.”
His heart did a slow, heavy roll in his chest. It was happening. The abstraction from yesterday was now a calendar invite. “Who?”
“Her name is Anya. She’s a photographer. European, very discrete, very sophisticated. She understands mutually beneficial dynamics. No drama.” Susan spoke like she was recommending a tailor. “She’s free for a drink tonight. At the Chateau. Quiet corner. Low stakes.”
“Tonight?” The word croaked out of him.
“Why wait?” Susan shrugged. “You’re a single man. You have no appointments. Your schedule is, frankly, wide open.” She softened, just a fraction. “Jim. This is what you wanted. The freedom to explore. To taste. Consider it a first step. You don’t have to do anything. You just have to sit across from an interesting woman and have a conversation without your wedding ring on.”
He looked at his left hand. The pale band of skin was still there, a phantom limb. He’d taken the ring off in the car last night, shoved it in the glove box. It felt like a hundred years ago.
“And what do you get out of this?” he asked, the executive in him instinctively seeking the terms of the deal.
“I get to watch,” she said simply. “I get to shape the narrative. And,” she added, picking up her coffee mug, “I have a date tomorrow night with a sculptor from Silver Lake. It’s only fair.” Her smile was genuine this time, alive with a mischief that was both thrilling and terrifying.
The world had not just changed; it had inverted. The rules were being written in real-time, and Susan held the pen. He felt a spike of something—jealousy? Possessiveness?—but it was immediately smothered by a stronger, more compelling curiosity. The hollow space inside him yawned wide, eager to be filled with new experiences, new sensations, new proofs that he was still alive.
“Okay,” he said. “The Chateau. Tonight.”
“Good.” Susan stood and walked to the expansive window, looking down at the city. “Now, we should go to your office. Clean out your desk before they change the locks.”
His corporate headquarters was a glass tower in Century City, a monument to a different kind of order. Walking through the lobby with Susan felt like a perp walk. Every click of her heels on the marble echoed. Employees—his employees—did double-takes, then quickly looked away, pretending to be engrossed in their phones. The whispers were almost audible, a hissing undercurrent beneath the Muzak.
His corner office, with its view of the Hollywood Hills, felt like a museum diorama: The Successful CEO, Circa Last Week. The sleek desk, the leather chair, the framed accolades. It was all a costume he didn’t know how to wear anymore.
Lydia’s desk outside was empty, stripped bare. A single, lonely potted orchid remained. He stood in the doorway of his office, paralyzed.
Susan moved past him, efficient and unemotional. She found a cardboard bankers box in a storage closet and placed it on his desk. “Start with the personal items. Photos. Mementos. Leave the corporate files. They belong to the shareholders.”
He moved mechanically. A picture of Brenda and the kids from a decade ago, smiling on a sailboat in Catalina. He tossed it in the box. The small jade paperweight his daughter had brought him from a school trip to China. In the box. A silver pen set from the board, engraved with his name and a date. He left it.
He was filling the box when a tall, grey-haired figure appeared in the doorway. Richard Vale, the Chairman of the Board. His face was a mask of practiced concern.
“Jim,” Richard said, his voice low. “I was hoping to catch you.” His eyes flicked to Susan, who was calmly examining a bookshelf, then back to Jim. “We need to talk. Privately.”
“Anything you have to say can be said in front of Susan,” Jim said, his voice quieter than he intended.
Richard’s jaw tightened. “Very well. The emergency call is confirmed for Monday at ten AM. The agenda is your leadership, given the… personal circumstances. The optics are… challenging.” He chose his words like he was defusing a bomb. “A messy divorce, Jim? And so public. The other side’s PR team is already spinning it. The narrative of the stalwart executive is… fraying.”
Jim felt a cold anger stir. “My personal life is my concern.”
“Not when it impacts shareholder value,” Richard shot back, his patience thinning. “Not when it’s splashed across Page Six. We have a fiduciary duty. The board will be discussing a leave of absence. For stability. Until this… situation… is resolved.”
A leave of absence. A polite exile. A prelude to being gently, irrevocably pushed out.
Susan turned from the bookshelf. “Richard,” she said, her tone smooth as polished stone. “Jim will be on the call. And he’ll be presenting a new strategic initiative. A pivot towards the Asian luxury market. He’s been cultivating key partnerships for months. The timing is fortuitous, given the… distractions.”
Jim stared at her. He had done no such thing.
Richard looked skeptical. “What partnerships?”
“The details are confidential until Monday,” Susan said, waving a hand dismissively. “Suffice to say, it will demonstrate Jim’s forward vision and indispensable value. Far more than any salacious gossip about his divorce.” She met Richard’s gaze evenly. “The board will be impressed. And reassured.”
There was a long silence. Richard looked from Susan’s confident face to Jim’s stunned one. He must have seen something—a residual authority, or perhaps just the sheer audacity of the bluff—that gave him pause. “Monday, then,” he said finally, turning to leave. He stopped at the door. “For your sake, Jim, I hope she’s right.”
When he was gone, Jim sank into his chair. The leather sighed beneath him. “What the hell was that? Asian luxury market?”
“A stall tactic,” Susan said, unfazed. “It gives you a week to come up with something, or to broker a soft landing. It’s chess, not checkers. Now,” she pointed to the half-full box, “finish up. You have a date to get ready for.”
The drive to the Chateau Marmont felt like heading to his own execution. Susan dropped him off at the entrance. “Remember,” she said, leaning across the console. “This is just a conversation. You’re just a man having a drink with a fascinating woman. There are no rules unless you choose to make them.” She kissed him, a quick, dry press of the lips that felt more like a seal on a contract than affection. “Text me when you’re done.”
He stood under the hotel’s iconic sign, feeling like an imposter. The lush, shadowy garden of the patio seemed to swallow him. He gave a name—Anya—to the hostess, who nodded knowingly and led him to a secluded corner table shrouded in ferns and twinkling lights.
She was already there.
Anya was not what he had expected. She was older, perhaps in her late forties, with a sharp, intelligent face and slate-grey hair cut in a severe, elegant bob. She wore a simple black dress, no jewelry except for a large, complicated watch on her slender wrist. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful in the way Susan was; hers was a beauty of precision, of assessment. She looked up as he approached, and her eyes were the color of flint.
“Jim,” she said, her accent faintly Eastern European. She did not stand, but offered her hand. Her grip was cool and firm. “Susan said you would be punctual. Please, sit.”
He ordered a scotch, neat. She had a glass of mineral water with a twist of lime. She studied him openly, no pretense of shyness. “So. You are recently… unburdened.”
“You could say that,” he said, taking a too-large sip of his drink.
“It is a strange time. A time of ghosts and possibilities.” She spoke in a measured, considered way. “Susan tells me you are a collector. Of experiences.”
“I was a collector of other things. Art. Companies.” He shrugged. “Not so much anymore.”
“Experience is the only art that truly matters,” Anya said. “It is the only thing we own.” She took a sip of her water. “I photograph ruins. Not ancient ones. Modern ones. Shopping malls, theaters, factories. Places where life has left. There is a melancholy beauty in the emptiness. A story told by absence.”
He listened, intrigued despite himself. She wasn’t flirting. She was… lecturing. It was disarming. “And what story does my absence tell?” he asked, surprising himself.
She smiled, a small, knowing thing. “That is for you to discover. I am merely a documentarian.” She leaned forward slightly. “Susan thought our… sensibilities might align. I appreciate people who understand transition. Who are not afraid of the empty space between what was and what will be.”
The conversation flowed like that for an hour—art, travel, the loneliness of airports, the peculiar light in Los Angeles just before sunset. She never touched him. She never asked a personal question about Brenda, or the divorce. She existed entirely in a present tense of ideas. It was stimulating, and utterly strange.
When the check came, she placed a hand on it before he could reach. “My treat,” she said. “Consider it a welcome gift to your new life.” She handed him a simple white business card. Just her name and a number. No title. “If you would like to continue the conversation in a more private setting, you know how to reach me. No expectations.” She stood, graceful as a heron. “Thank you for the company, Jim.”
And then she was gone, weaving through the tables and disappearing into the lobby.
He sat there for another ten minutes, finishing his scotch, the card feeling heavy in his fingers. He felt… assessed. And found… interesting? He wasn’t sure. The predatory thrill he’d half-expected, the charged sexuality, hadn’t materialized. Instead, he felt a quiet, intellectual curiosity. A desire to know what she saw when she looked at him.
He texted Susan a single word: Finished.
Her reply was immediate: Come home.
He paid the bill—Anya had paid only for her water—and walked out into the balmy night. Home. The word resonated wrongly. Susan’s loft wasn’t home. The Malibu house was a sarcophagus. His office was a crime scene.
He hailed a cab. As it slid through the Sunset Strip, he pulled the small, pale blue pill from his pocket—the one Susan had given him that morning “for the edge.” He dry-swallowed it, chasing it with the last warm dregs of scotch from the flask he now carried.
By the time he reached the loft, the Xanax had spread its soft, forgiving blanket over the sharp corners of the evening. Susan was waiting, curled on the sofa with a laptop. She looked up as he entered.
“Well?”
“She was… interesting,” Jim said, dropping onto the cushion beside her. He handed Anya’s card to Susan, who looked at it and nodded, as if confirming a hypothesis.
“Good. Interesting is sustainable. Drama is not.” She put the laptop aside. “And?”
“And nothing. We talked. She left.”
Susan watched him for a long moment. “You’re disappointed.”
“No,” he said quickly, then reconsidered. “I don’t know. I guess I thought…”
“You thought it would feel like conquest. Like victory.” She said it without judgment. “It doesn’t. Not at first. It feels like… practice. Like learning a new language. The fluency comes later.” She moved closer, her scent enveloping him. “Did you want her?”
He thought of Anya’s cool hands, her analytical eyes. “I wanted… the idea of her,” he admitted.
Susan smiled, tracing a line down his cheek with her finger. “That’s the perfect place to start.” She leaned in, her voice a whisper against his ear. “The idea is always more powerful than the thing itself. Remember that.”
Later, in the dark, as Susan slept beside him, he took out his phone. The screen cast a pale blue glow on his face. He opened a real estate app and navigated to listings for Malibu. He typed in his address. He clicked Edit Listing.
For a long time, he just stared at the fields waiting to be filled: Price. Description. Remarks.
His thumb hovered over the screen. He could list it. Sell the ghost. Take the money and let the ocean have the memories.
He stared at the glowing screen until his eyes burned. Then he thumbed the phone dark, tossing it onto the nightstand where it landed with a soft thud on Susan’s pristine linen. The ocean could keep its memories a little longer. He rolled over, facing the expanse of her sleeping back, and closed his eyes against the lingering chemical haze and the sharper, more persistent ache behind them.
The morning arrived not as a new beginning, but as a blunt-force trauma. Light pierced the thin slit in the curtains like a laser, drilling directly into his brain. He groaned, the sound dry and ragged in his throat. Every part of him felt separately poisoned. His tongue was a piece of cured leather stuck to the roof of his mouth. A vile, sour taste coated his teeth. His skull pulsed with a thick, rhythmic agony that made thinking impossible. This wasn’t a headache. This was a punitive invoice.
Next to him, Susan slept on, her breathing even and undisturbed. The inequity of it felt like a personal insult. He managed to sit up, the room tilting dangerously. The memories of the previous day flooded back in nauseating fragments: the stark office, Richard Vale’s disappointed face, Anya’s evaluating eyes, the pills, the scotch. It all curdled together in his gut.
He shuffled to the bathroom, moving like a man navigating a ship in a storm. He avoided the mirror at first, focusing on the practical task of cupping cold water into his mouth, swallowing, repeating. The water tasted of minerals and regret. Finally, he looked up.
The man looking back was a stranger. Puffy, bloodshot eyes set in a greyish face. Deep lines etched from nose to mouth that hadn’t been there a year ago. The distinguished grey hair was a wild, slept-on mess. This was the face of a man in freefall. He saw a flicker of something in that reflection—a deep, rot-rooted shame—and quickly looked away.
His phone buzzed on the counter, vibrating against the marble with an insectile urgency. He flinched. It was his daughter, Chloe. The sight of her name sent a jolt of pure, undiluted panic through him that cut through the hangover fog. He hadn’t spoken to her since The Call with Brenda.
He answered, his voice a graveled whisper. “Chloe?”
“Dad.” Her tone was flat, a neutral territory that was worse than anger. “Are you alive?”
“Barely.”
“Yeah. Mom’s not.” The words were clean, surgical. “She’s at Aunt Linda’s. She’s a mess. She won’t stop crying.”
Jim closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against the cool mirror. The cold felt good. “Chloe… I…”
“Don’t,” she cut in, her voice cracking for the first time. “Just don’t, okay? I don’t want your explanations. I called to tell you that I know. And that I need… I need some time. I don’t want to talk to you right now.”
He heard her struggling to breathe evenly, to maintain that terrifying control. “Okay,” he managed to say, the word utterly inadequate.
“Is she there?” Chloe asked, the ‘she’ dripping with a venom so potent it transcended the phone line.
He didn’t lie. “Yes.”
A sharp, inhaled breath.“Okay. Bye, Dad.”
The line went dead. He stood there, phone pressed to his ear, listening to the silence. The hollow space inside him, the one Susan’s presence had momentarily filled, yawned wider and deeper than ever before. It wasn’t empty. It was filling with a cold, black slurry of consequence.
“Bad news?” Susan’s voice came from the doorway. She leaned against the frame, wrapped in a silk robe, holding a large glass of green juice. She looked refreshed, vibrant. The sight was obscene.
“My daughter,” Jim said, letting the phone drop to the counter.
“Ah.” Susan took a slow sip, her eyes on him.Assessing. “That was inevitable. She’ll come around. Or she won’t. You can’t control the fallout, Jim. You can only control your response to it.”
“My response,” he echoed, turning the tap on again to splash more water on his face. “Is to feel like I’m dying.”
“That’s the hangover. And the guilt. Guilt is just nostalgia for the person you used to pretend to be.” She set her juice down and walked over, placing her cool hands on his bare shoulders. Her touch was clinical. “You need electrolytes. And protein. And a shower. You have that board call to prepare for today.”
The board call. The fictional Asian partnerships. The reality of his collapsing professional life slammed into the reality of his obliterated personal life. The pressure built behind his eyes, a tsunami contained by the thin bone of his skull. He bent over the sink, dry heaves wracking his body. Nothing came up but acid and a strangled sound of pure distress.
Susan watched, waiting for the spasms to pass. “All of that poison needs to get out,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. “It’s better out than in.” She handed him a towel. “The story you’re selling the board is one of bold, uncontested vision. You cannot present yourself like this.”
“I am this,” he rasped, gesturing at his ravaged reflection.
“No,” she corrected, her voice hardening. “You are Jim Harding. You are a force. This—” she waved a hand at his sickly posture, “—is just the temporary cost of metamorphosis. Now shower. I’ll make eggs.”
The eggs, when he finally made it to the kitchen, smelled of butter and chives. He forced a few bites down, each mouthful a difficult conquest. Susan scrolled through news feeds on her tablet, narrating the market’s opening numbers like a soliloquy. The normalcy of it was surreal.
“We should go to Malibu tomorrow,” she said, not looking up. “After the board call.Assess the space. See its potential.”
“Its potential,” Jim repeated, pushing the eggs around his plate.
“For your new life,” she said, finally meeting his gaze. “It’s a stunning venue. Wasted on one nuclear family. Imagine it filled with interesting people. With energy. With possibility.” Her eyes glittered with a proprietary light. “It’s not a memorial, Jim. It’s a resource.”
He thought of Chloe’s shattered voice, of Brenda’s unimaginable tears in his sister-in-law’s guest room. He thought of the empty, sun-drenched rooms where their family photographs used to hang. A resource. The hangover intensified, a moral nausea now layered perfectly atop the physical one.
He stood abruptly, his chair scraping loudly on the concrete floor. “I need air.”
“Don’t wander far,” Susan said, her attention already returned to her screen. “We need to craft your talking points by noon.”
He stumbled out onto her small balcony, fourteen stories above the humming city. The sunlight was assaultive. The traffic noise felt like it was inside his head. He gripped the railing, the metal still cool from the night, and tried to remember how to breathe.
The man in the mirror was here, too. This man, clinging to a balcony railing, his empire of lies and curated pleasures crumbling around him before it was even fully built. The hangover wasn’t just from the pills and the booze. It was from the life itself, ingested in large, reckless doses, and now his soul was rejecting the transplant.