What Theo Builds

Theo spent the three weeks of his silence the way he had spent the worst months after the indictment: working, though this time the working had a different shape to it, less about survival and more, he found, about figuring out what kind of man he wanted to be on the other side of a decision he hadn't yet made.

He drove to Columbus on a Tuesday, alone, without telling Maren, and sat across from Rachel Feld in the small office of her consulting practice, and told her, plainly, what he understood about the pattern that had killed her father, the eleven-day sequences, the engineered doubt, the machinery of it, because he had spent three years learning it well enough to explain it to someone who deserved to understand exactly what had been done and how.

"You're the founder," Rachel said, when he'd finished. "Kashner. The one whose company got hit the same way."

"Yes."

"And you're with her. Vass." It wasn't quite a question.

"I don't know what I am right now," Theo said, honestly. "I came here because I thought understanding what happened to your father might help me understand something about my own anger that I haven't been able to reach on my own. I'm not sure it worked. But I wanted you to hear the mechanics from someone who's lived them, not just read them in a filing."

Rachel Feld looked at him for a long time. "Do you love her."

Theo sat with the question longer than he'd expected to need. "I think so. I think I love a version of her I watched build itself, slowly, over three months, out of a woman who was capable of what was done to your father and mine. I don't know how to hold both of those facts at once. I've been driving around the country trying to figure it out, apparently, since here I am, in Columbus, talking to a stranger about my feelings instead of talking to her."

"That's not entirely fair to yourself," Rachel said, and something in her voice had gentled, slightly, the first softness she'd shown him. "You're talking to someone who has a reason to be honest with you that she doesn't. I imagine that's worth something." She stood, signaling the end of the conversation. "I don't know what to tell you about love, Mr. Kashner. I've spent three years discovering my whole life was built on a story that wasn't true. I don't have much faith left in my ability to know what's real. But I'll tell you this. She drove me to the plaza to think about it for two weeks before I decided to testify. She didn't call me once in between. I checked my phone every day, half expecting her to, the way people like her usually do. She never did. I think that might mean something, if you're looking for a sign."

Theo drove back to New York that night, six hours through the dark, and somewhere around Pennsylvania, he understood, without deciding it in any dramatic way, that he was ready to see her again. Not because the anger was gone. Because he had finally let himself feel the whole of it, on his own terms, in his own time, and found, underneath it, that the other thing was still there too, patient, unmanaged, waiting.