The sun moved across the floor.
We stood there for a long time.
EPILOGUE
SUTTON
The conference room emptied out slowly.
Partners filed out shaking hands. The head of strategy came over to thank Joss in person. Two junior PMs from the platform team caught her at the door and asked if she’d grab coffee with them sometime, and I watched her say yes. She’d said yes to a hundred things in the five years since she’d walked out of my office on a Friday in June carrying nothing but her notebook and the start of an idea.
She’d built the idea into a company.
She was small still. Eight employees. A clean little consultancy that helped enterprise tech companies think about consumer engagement at the feature level, founded on the spine of the same argument she’d made to me five years ago. Her clients included three of the top fifteen names in the industry. One of them was Myrror.
She’d taken that contract on her own merits. She’d taken it after a competitive pitch process I’d recused myself from before it had even been scheduled, and after the head of product had brought the recommendation to my desk with the words, “Thisis the right firm, and I want you to know I would’ve picked them even if you’d never met her.”
I’d signed the contract without comment.
Mira left for another opportunity just before all that happened. She’d come to dinner at our apartment the week before her last day at Myrror and held our daughter on her lap for an hour. She’d told Joss, when she’d thought I wasn’t listening, that watching her build her own thing had been the proudest professional moment of her career.
I’d been listening.
The conference room was empty now except for Joss at the head of the table, gathering her things. She was in the blue suit she always wore for these. Hair back in the same low knot. The notebook on top of her laptop, the way it always was.
She caught me watching her from the doorway. “You’re staring.”
“I am.”
“You always stare during these.”
“I do.”
She smiled. She zipped her bag. She crossed the room to where I was standing, and I held out my hand, and she took it.
“My mother has Elyssia until five,” she said. “We have an hour and a half.”
“I know.”
“We should pick her up early.”
“We could.”
She tilted her head up to look at me. There was something in her face I recognized from a long list of mornings and a longer list of nights, and I felt my pulse change the way it had been changing in her presence for five years.
“Or…” she started.
“Or.”
“We could take the long way.”
I’d already texted my driver before she finished the sentence.
The car was waiting at the curb when we came out of the Myrror lobby—the same lobby I’d met her in on a Monday morning five years ago with a coffee from Bitstream in my hand. Eric held the door for us both, the way he had for the last few years, and he didn’t look twice at the way my wife slid into the back seat with a small private smile she’d only ever shown me.
I got in after her.
I closed the door.
