Emily had been watching all of this. She stood quietly in the room that had been the site of her humiliation twenty minutes ago, and she looked at the man she had been married to for two years, and she felt a grief that had nothing to do with love lost—that had already passed—but something stranger and more complicated. The grief of seeing a person you once believed in reveal themselves as someone who had never quite existed. The sorrow of watching a version of someone you cared about disintegrate under pressure, not because of the pressure but because the foundation was never solid.
She thought of the kitchen table and the business plan. She thought of the three in the morning and the projections they rewrote together, his voice going from desperation to excitement as the numbers began to work. She thought of her savings account.
She thought: I hope he figures out who he actually is, someday. Not for my sake. Just for his.
But she didn’t say any of this.
“Dad,” she said instead, quietly, and Alexander turned to her with that immediate, uncomplicated attention that he had always given her—the kind of attention that sees you fully and asks nothing of you. “I think we’re done here.”