Get some sleep. A pause. Then, "You're remarkably calm about things." He almost smiled. Had a lot of practice.
Another pause. Longer. Malcolm, can we talk tomorrow? Really talk? He looked out at the water, at the dark shapes of the waves, at the stars beginning to appear in clusters above the horizon.
His wife used to say that the ocean was proof that something could be overwhelming and beautiful at the same time. That the two things weren't opposites, that you could be afraid of something and drawn to it simultaneously, and that the fear didn't cancel out the pull. It just meant the thing mattered. He typed. Yeah, tomorrow.
Good night, Vivien. He set the phone down and stayed on the balcony for a long time. The waves kept coming in. He kept watching. And for the first time in 6 years, Malcolm Carter fell asleep thinking about something other than everything he'd already lost.
Malcolm didn't sleep well. That wasn't unusual. Sleep had been a complicated negotiation for him since Denise died. Some nights he won, some nights he didn't. And he'd made his peace with that a long time ago.
But this particular sleeplessness was different. It wasn't grief sitting on his chest. It wasn't the low hum of financial anxiety that sometimes followed him into the dark. It was something he hadn't felt in so long he almost didn't recognize it. Restlessness.
The specific electric kind that doesn't come from worry. The kind that comes from something being unresolved. Something that your brain keeps circling back to because it hasn't figured out what to do with it yet. He was up before 6:00. He made coffee with the little in room machine that produced something technically qualifying as coffee.
Stood at the window watching the water change color as the sun came up and he thought about Viven, not the CEO version, not the woman who sat across polished conference tables and asked sharp questions about loadbearing walls and permitting timelines. The version from last night. The one who had sat in his lap with her composure intact, but something behind her eyes that wasn't intact at all. The one who had texted him at 10:30 at night to apologize. The one who had asked quietly and without pretense if they could really talk.
He told himself he was thinking about it too much. Then he poured his coffee and kept thinking about it. Jerome knocked on the adjoining door at 7. Malcolm opened it. Jerome looked at his face and immediately said, "You didn't sleep.
I slept. You slept for maybe 90 minutes and you know it. You've got that look. What look? The look you get when something's rattling around in that head of yours that you haven't decided what to do about yet.
Malcolm handed him a cup of coffee. Jerome took it without another word. That was the good thing about 20 years of friendship. Sometimes the other person knew when to stop pushing. And Jerome, for all his loud shirts and loudmouth tendencies, knew exactly where that line was.