Page 231 of Boardroom Sins

We sit there as gray clouds swallow the pale winter sun. The cold gets colder. The wind blows harder. We’re on the edge of a grave that isn’t a grave anymore. Now, it’s just a hole in the ground, emptied by forensic teams who bagged and tagged and carted away whatever the earth hadn’t already reclaimed.

Kir’s breathing evens out beside me, and his legs stop swinging. After a while, his hands unclench against the frozen mud and lie flat, palms down.

When he finally talks, he says, “I’ve been carrying this for so long. Watching you at her funeral. Watching you go back to work like nothing happened. Watching you become this… thisthingthat everyone fears. Me included.” He shakes his head in weary amazement. “And the whole time, I thought I was the only one who knew what you really were.”

I close my eyes. “I’m sorry, son.”

It’s pathetic to expect those meek words to convey the enormity of what each of us is feeling, but they’re all I have.

So I say them again.

“I’m sorry, Kirill.”

He doesn’t accept the apology or tell me to go fuck myself, though either one would be justified. Kir’s head simply drops against my shoulder.

His temple rests there, and I feel a shudder that runs through him, the full-body tremor of a man releasing something he’s been clenching since he was twelve years old.

I wrap my arm around my son, and we sit there and stare into the shadows in the cavernous hole.

As we do, I think about empty spaces. There’s a pit beneath us where my wife once was. There are pits on my back where I carved out pieces of myself to try to save her. There’s a pit in Kir’s heart where acidic hate has lived for a long, long time now.

It’s what we do as a species. We tear ourselves apart trying to fill what’s missing in the people we love. We hollow out our backs, our hearts, our graves, and say,Here, take this.

It never works. The pieces never quite fit. The donor tissue gets rejected. The rage doesn’t heal. The dead stay dead.

But we keep digging anyway.

It’s so human to try.

83

RAE

MEDIA MONITORING: LAZAREV GLOBAL

12/20: "BILLIONAIRE MURDERER ARRESTED" — NY Post

12/21: "LAZAREV CONFESSES TO KILLING WIFE" — CNN

12/21: "A Husband's Impossible Choice" — Washington Post

12/22: "THE LAZAREV LETTERS: Inside One Woman's Final Wish" — NYT

12/22: "FREE LAZAREV: Online Petition Reaches 500K Signatures" — NBC

12/23: "The Girl in the Red Dress: A Love Story Nobody Expected" — Vanity Fair

I pace the brownstone kitchen, one lap after the next. Every time I come near the counter, I side-eye the whiskey glass Lukas left on the counter. It has a faint lip print on the rim where he drank from it, and in my emotions-going-haywire state, I’m half-considering pressing my lips to that exact spot, just to feel a little bit more connected to him.

My phone sits on the counter. I haven’t dared to text him yet, because I don’t want to interrupt, but every second that goesby without his name lighting up my screen kills me that much more.

As I finish Lap #80 or whatever, I decide I have to dosomethingproactive or I’ll go insane. So I pick up the phone. My thumb goes to Jillian’s name in my contacts.

There, I pause.

Her profile picture is a photo from last summer of the two of us crammed into a photo booth at Coney Island. My face is half-obscured by her enormous sunhat, but you can see our smiles, both of us mid-cackle. We look like toothy hyenas who love each other more than life itself. Pretty accurate description, all things considered.

I want so badly to call her. If I could just hear her voice tell me this is all going to be fine, that the world isn’t ending and pigs aren’t flying, that she’s sorry and I’m sorry and we’re both idiots who love each other too much to stay mad… Well, that would go a long way toward soothing me.