Just the number, no message. He'd saved it under her first name because saving it under anything else felt either too formal or too presumptuous. He typed Saturday 7:00. There's a place called Rudy's on Clement. It's a burger place.
Nothing impressive. He hit send before he could write something more careful. Her reply came 4 minutes later. Perfect. See you there.
He set the phone down on the counter, looked at it for a second. Then he opened the refrigerator, stared at it for a moment, closed it, and ordered a pizza instead. Because cooking dinner for himself on the night he just agreed to dinner with his CEO felt somehow both too much and not enough. He ate the pizza, watched nothing in particular on television, went to bed at 10:15. He did not sleep particularly well, but he didn't stare at the ceiling either, which was different.
Saturday arrived the way Saturdays did when Ryan didn't have plans too slowly with too many small reminders of what a weekend was supposed to look like when someone else lived in the house. He cleaned things that didn't need cleaning. He changed the weather stripping on the back door, which had been fine. He stood in the garage for 20 minutes inventorying tools. At 6:15, he showered, put on the dark jeans and the gray Henley he'd bought 8 months ago and never worn and drove to Clement Street.
He arrived at Rudy's at 6:52 and stood outside for 3 minutes because going in early would mean sitting alone waiting, and he'd already had 7 months of sitting alone waiting. At 659, a cab pulled up. Victoria stepped out wearing jeans, a simple dark coat, and no visible evidence of the $800 million net worth. Her hair was loose. She wasn't carrying a laptop.
She looked for a disorienting second like someone he might have gone to school with. She walked up, looked at the front of the restaurant and said, "Good choice. I used to come here before I was married when I lived on the other side of the city." " Nostalgic, familiar," he corrected. " There's a difference."
She looked at him. " Yes," she said. " There is." They went inside. Rudy's was exactly what it was.
Vinyl booths, paper menus, a jukebox that hadn't worked since 2019, but that people still fed quarters into out of habit. A smell of grilled onions and old wood that Ryan had always found unreasonably comforting. The hostess seated them in a booth near the back without ceremony, handed them menus, and moved on. Victoria picked up her menu and actually read it. That was the first thing that surprised him.
He'd half expected her to order sparkling water and look at the menu. The way people look at menus when they're not actually going to eat like a polite performance. Instead, she studied with the focused attention she'd applied to the cascade shutdown data. What's good? The double bacon cheeseburger, the sweet potato fries.
Done. She set the menu down. See? Easy. He ordered the same.
A beer. She got one, too. The server left and then it was just the two of them across a laminate table with the faint sound of other people's conversations around them and Ryan realized he hadn't thought about what they were going to actually say once the food was ordered. Victoria leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table. Tell me something about yourself that has nothing to do with Northbridge.
That's a broad request. Take your time. I thought about it. Really thought not the reflexive social inventory of safe personal facts that people share at company events. He tried to think of something true.
I used to rebuild engines, he said finally. When I was in my 20s, bought broken motorcycles off Craigslist, fixed them up, sold them. Didn't make much money at it. That wasn't really the point. What was the point?
Understanding how things worked. You take apart something that's broken and you have to figure out what it was supposed to do before you can fix it. He paused. I haven't done it in years. Lauren, my ex, she didn't like the noise or the grease.
He stopped. Sorry, I didn't mean to bring her up. Don't apologize for that. Victoria was direct, not unkind. She was your life for how long?
11 years together, eight married. Then she's going to come up. That's not a problem. She picked up her beer. What was she like?
Ryan looked at her. It was a strange question to be asked on what was he supposed to first date. Most people avoided asking about the ex. It was one of the unspoken rules. She was organized, he said.
Competent. She cared very much about doing things correctly. She had high standards. He paused. For a long time, I thought those things were the same as love.
Someone who held you to high standards, who ran the household efficiently, who had a plan for everything. He turned his beer in his hands. I think we were good partners for a long time before we stopped being people to each other. What changed? I don't know.
And then, because that wasn't true, I stopped asking. She stopped telling me things. We were very busy being a functioning unit and not particularly busy being honest about whether either of us was okay. He set the beer down. She met someone who asked about her day and actually listened to the answer.
That's not a satisfying explanation for the end of a marriage, but I think it might be the real one. Victoria was quiet for a moment. Do you blame her? Ryan thought about it honestly. Some days he said it without drama.
Not for leaving, for not saying something sooner before it got to the point where there was someone else. He paused. But I didn't make it easy to say things. I was I'm good at keeping everything running. I'm good at solving problems.