“Oh, no, I understand that completely,” he says. “Isn’t that how it always is? We do all of the work, but they take the credit.”
“They?” I ask. Whenever John is friendly, it feels like I’m watching a cat pretending to be a dog.
“The big bosses. The trust fund kids,” he says. “They always think they’re entitled to everything. But I wanted to tell you directly that I thought your idea was great. Hopefully, the company will see it someday.”
“Mark and I both came up with the idea,” I say. “He came up with the general idea and I helped fill in the details.”
He forces a smile. “Of course. But still. You have a great mind. I knew it when I hired you. Keep working hard like this and you’ll ascend to the top in no time.”
He claps me on my shoulder before walking away. He passes right by Mark, entering his office. His congratulation doesn’t feel right. I deserve less than half the credit. I certainly don’t deserve all of it.
I walk over to Mark. He opens his mouth, his face creased with regret.
“Stop,” I cut him off. “I only want to ask you about John. Do you two not like each other? Are there some office politics I need to know about?”
“Your supervisor, John?” he asks. I nod. “No. He and I get along fine.”
I’m tempted to ask if he has an issue with any other John in the company, but I let it go.
“Why does he seem to be determined to give me the credit for this idea then? Did you steal an idea from him at some point?” I ask. “I tried to tell him that you and I did it together, but he seemed convinced that it was only me.”
“I can deal with you believing I’d steal an idea,” he says. “But do you honestly see John coming up with an idea worth stealing?”
I incline my head. “That’s a fair point.”
“It’s a common mentality around here,” he says, shrugging. “Everyone here thinks I’m only the head of this company because my parents are rich, and they gave me a small loan to start the company. They don’t believe I could have done anything on my own. It’s not a big deal. I’m not doing all of this to get praise. And you deserve a lot of the credit. He’s right to congratulate you. You took a decent idea and turned it into a great one.” He starts to walk away from me.
I grab onto his arm. “You still deserve the praise,” I say.
He turns around, looking down at my hand on his arm. I let him go. I can’t explain to him how I can’t trust myself with him after six years ago. It sounds juvenile. I should have gotten over him within a month after he disappeared considering how little time we had together, but I didn’t, and I still haven’t. It makes me sound desperate and dull.
He opens his palms. It’s impossible to forget how those palms made me feel.
“Some things are the way they are, Zandra,” he says. My name feels more powerful coming off his tongue. “If we can’t change them, we have to learn to accept them. I’ve accepted people are always going to see me as privileged to the point of being inconsequential. That’s not what’s important to me. What’s important is the app and the employees.”
I nod. “It’s admirable, your worldview.”
He gives me a small smile. “It would be more admirable if I was willing to accept more things that I can’t change.”
His fingertips brush against the inside of my wrist. It’s the smallest movement—it might have been an accident, a clumsy motion as he tried to take something from me. But there was nothing to take from my hands. All he took from me was my certainty about what I was willing to learn to accept, and what I could change.
******
6 years ago
In Paris, all my dreams centered around tiny cracks. They were difficult to see until I was standing right over them, but they appeared three nights in a row.
The first night, it was in my dream about Parisian thieves. I’d felt drawn toward them, but I ignored them because I needed to catch the thief. The second night, the cracks appeared while Mark and I were eating in a ritzy restaurant. I pointed them out to him, but he couldn’t see them. To prove that they were there, I walked over to the cracks and touched them with the tip of my stilettos. The crack extended through the whole restaurant, creating thousands of more cracks. They stretched up the walls, the ceilings, and the tables, but as I turned, frightened, to Mark, he hadn’t even noticed. Then, a sound of shattering filled my ears, the whole area turned into broken shards and I fell through into darkness.
The next night, while I was dreaming about spending a day with Mark in Central Park—warm daylight pouring down on us and thousand soft colors turning everything picturesque—I was wary of the numerous cracks I saw as we walked. I wasn’t anxious during the day—I was stupidly blissful—but in my dreams, I needed to be aware of stepping in the wrong place.
I woke up from a dream of the Tuileries Garden slowly transforming into a Monet painting as I walked through it, uncertain what was a crack or a paint stroke. At first, I thought I’d woken up from the sound of a British traveler’s snoring, but as I felt a warm handclasp around mine, I saw Mark staring straight at me, his teeth glinting in the darkness as he smiled.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be creepy, but I’ve been trying to wake you up for the last five minutes.”
I rubbed my eyes, the anxiety over the cracks still dominating my mind.
“Did something happen?” I mumbled. “What time is it?”
