Will shifts. He’s obviously uncomfortable talking about this, but I appreciate that he didn’t hesitate getting into it when I first asked. “The professor was known for never re-creating a test, and there was a test bank at one of the fraternities. I knew someone in it, and I paid him to give me a copy.”
“I’m not asking about this because I’m judging you,” I hurry to explain. “Obviously, cheating is wrong. I know that, and I knowyouknow that. I just… want to understand more about your five worst things.”
He hums. “I think I expected to come out on the other side of that test feeling the same way everyone around me felt at having the upper hand all the time. My classmates, the people at the company I interviewed with. Even some of the professors. Most of them had this sense of confidence, like every move they made was the right one, no matter how morally sideways it put them. And I just never got that feeling.”
“What happened next?” I ask. “Tell me about your life.”
Will clears his throat. “I was a fish out of water in my first job in investment banking. Cheating hadn’t numbed me to the point that I was comfortable taking advantage of the system. If anything, I regressed into more of a stickler for the rules than I’d been before. I couldn’t last that way in that industry. The way it’s built to operate. I got a new job at the Carlisle Group, which was better for a while. And Zoe was in the city, so we had each other as a support system.”
“I saw Zoe’s a book critic forThe New York Times,” I say. “That suits her.”
“It does suit her,” Will agrees. “So does New York. I think she might never leave.”
I hesitate to ask the natural next question: “Do you thinkyou’llleave?”
Will breathes deeply, his chest expanding and collapsing beneathme. “I never used to think I would. I fucking love New York. I think I always will. But the piece of that city I belonged to warped into something I wasn’t proud of.”
“What do you mean?”
It’s quiet for a moment aside from the rainforest noises. I find it comical we’re holding a conversation between croaking frogs and rustling leaves.
“You remember Kyle, the lead consultant you were going to hire before me?”
I nod, thinking back to the sleazy Manhattanite I’d cut loose the day Will asked me to.
“He was my boss for one year. Socializing after work was a requirement to get ahead with Kyle. He’d make us all go out together—two, sometimes three nights a week. It was only a couple of months into the formation of our new team that he started cheating on his wife openly, right in front of the rest of us. At clubs, in Ubers. Work trips were the worst, but he’d even do it in the same neighborhood where he and his wife lived.”
It’s not exactly surprising behavior to hear told from a perspective like Will’s. Though I still hate it when people live all the way down to their reputations.
“I had an especially negative reaction to Kyle’s behavior because of my father,” Will explains. “I couldn’t believe I was in that situation again—of needing to keep a cheater’s secret—especially with my actual career on the line. One day, I was out at dinner with Zoe, who read me like a book, all my misery right there, bare for her to see. She basically ordered me to find a new job, and I promised her I would.”
His voice is even-keeled and smooth. There’s no hesitancy. Hewantsto tell me all of this. The story is tumbling out of him.
“Kyle’s was the other marriage you ended?” I ask gently.
“Yes,” Will answers, voice low. “At a holiday party in mid-December, a few days before I was supposed to leave the company.I wanted to end my time there on good terms, but Kyle had other ideas.”
“Of course Kyle had other ideas,” I mumble, and Will laughs.
I am addicted to making him laugh.
“As usual, Kyle’d had too much to drink by the time the party was nearing its end. He came after me when I tried to leave and started shouting accusations about how I had no loyalty. His wife followed us out to the street. She was standing behind him, looking bewildered, and I couldn’t stop thinking of my mom, of how much I regretted all those months I spentnot telling her the truth.I snapped,” Will says, his voice going gruff and nearly pained. “I pointed to her and said,Talk to your wife about loyalty, she could use some from you.It was clear from the expression on her face she knew exactly what I was talking about.” After a few seconds of quiet, Will adds, “I’ve never hated myself more, for doing that to her. The way I did it.”
I try to put myself in the wife’s shoes. In Will’s. It would have been embarrassing. But maybe she’d needed someone to just comeout with itto give herself the courage to walk away.
“She left him?” I ask.
“They were divorced two months later.”
More silence.
“Kyle is the one who destroyed that marriage, Will. Not you. You know that, right?”
“Maybe,” Will agrees, voice tortured. “I still wish I hadn’t hurt her.”
“Because even though you keep finding yourself in lose-lose situations, you are a good man, at your core, who knows right from wrong.”
“Yeah, well, so are you,” he replies, in a tone that suggests we’re trading insults instead of compliments. “You’re not just good. You’re… very good.”
