Page 232 of Boardroom Sins

But even with a friendship like ours, fixing it might not be so simple. What would I even say?Thanks for blowing up my life; also, your article might have saved it?

I set the phone back down without doing anything.

The brownstone creaks around me. Pipes settling, wood expanding, a grumpy old house doing grumpy old house things. I pull Lukas’s abandoned suit jacket off the chair and drape it around my shoulders, just to bathe myself in the smell of him.

That, of all things, does the trick. Sea salt, mint, the ghost of cigarette smoke—it’s like honey on my fried nerves.

I drop onto a stool and wait.

But after three minutes of Zen meditation—a new personal record—I pick up my phone again and start browsing for news.

I guess I’m looking for something along the lines ofTHE GRUESOME LAZAREV SAGA CONTINUES—SON MURDERS FATHER IN BLOODY REVENGE KILLING.Fortunately, it’s nothing quite that grisly, but the internet is definitely losing its collective mind over everything that’s happened today.

Every outlet is looping the same clip ad nauseam—Lukas at the podium, silver hair catching the light, looking like a wild mountain man in a suit as he explains how he crushed barbiturates into his dying wife’s applesauce.

CNN’s chyron readsBILLIONAIRE CONFESSES TO KILLING WIFE IN MERCY ACT.

Fox hasLAZAREV: “I KILLED MY WIFE.”

The New York Post, ever classy, went withKILL BILL-IONAIRE. I’d laugh if I weren’t so nauseated.

The comment sections are a war zone. Half the internet thinks Lukas a monster who should rot and/or hang; the other half is calling him a tragically misunderstood hero. Someone on Twitter has already started a petition to free him. Someone else has started one to execute him. Both have thousands of signatures.

I close the browser before I can find what they’re saying aboutme.

I put the kettle on instead. That seems like a vaguely normal-ish thing to do for a person in my situation, right? They’d make tea. They’d drink it. They’d carry on.

Once the kettle boils, I pour the water and drop in a bag of chamomile without daring to check how long it’s been in Lukas’s cupboard. I then proceed to not drink it.

Truthfully, I just can’t stomach it. If Internet comments are a war zone, my intestinal tract is freaking Chernobyl. I wrap both hands around the mug and hold on for dear life, watching steam curl toward the ceiling while the brownstone keeps creaking and groaning over my head.

The door opens just after sunset.

When I turn, I see Lukas standing in the front doorway. It’s like some sicko Frankenstein retelling, as if a mad scientist reached inside his chest cavity and scooped out everything that was keeping him upright, then shoved him back through the door to see if he could still stand on his own.

He’s older than I’ve ever seen him. Not in years, but inmileage. His suit is caked with mud from the knees down, his silver hair flattened on one side. He looks at me from across the kitchen, and whatever’s left of his composure dissolves. He looks a heartbeat away from collapse.

I don’t ask questions. I don’t ask if Kir is okay, or what happened, or what was said. I just leap off the stool and run across the cold tile in my bare feet and his borrowed jacket, close the distance between us, wrap my arms around his waist, press my face into his dirty shirt, and hold on.

He holds on back.

After a long, long, very long time, Lukas starts murmuring into my hair. “He’s not okay. But he’s going to be.” He breathes, sighs, softens. “He asked me to leave. Said he needed some timeto work through things. But he didn’t stab me, so that’s more than I expected.”

I pull back to look at him. There are so many signs that he’s been beaten up ten ways to Sunday. Mud on his jaw. Salt tracks on his cheeks, wind burn on his forehead. Eyes like pouring rain.

“What do we do now?” I ask.

Lukas kisses one temple, then the other. “Tonight, we sleep.” He bends down and touches his lips to mine. They’re cold from being outside for hours, but the gesture is so warm it makes me feel giddy and flushed. “And tomorrow,” he says against my mouth, “we figure out how to build something from the pieces.”

The pieces.That’s a very understated way to explain what has become of our respective lives.

We’re a disaster. Objectively, categorically, by every measurable metric known to science and common sense. He’s facing a criminal trial. I’m unemployed and internationally scandalized. His son might never speak to him again. The entire world has an opinion about us, and at least half of those opinions involve liberal use of the wordguillotine.

But standing here in this dusty kitchen, wearing Lukas’s jacket and drinking in the smell of him, I believe—for the first time, stupidly, recklessly, with my whole battered heart—that we’re going to make it.

I think he believes it, too.

84