They stayed in the office until the sky outside went from gold to orange to the deep blue that comes just before full dark. At some point she made tea. At some point he took off his jacket and draped it over her office chair and rolled his sleeves up, which was such a small thing and hit her so hard that she had to spend thirty seconds looking at a spreadsheet for no reason.
They weren't talking about the company anymore. They were talking the way people talk when the professional scaffolding has come down and what's underneath is just two people who have been circling something for a very long time.
"Tell me about the night you got my email," he said. It was not what she had expected him to say.
"Why?"
"Because I need to know. I've been carrying my version of that night for eighteen months and I need you to tell me yours."
She wrapped both hands around her tea mug. Looked at the dark window. "I was at the office. It was almost midnight — I was still working on the product roadmap for post-Series B because I was already thinking past the close. I had a flight to Delhi the next day to meet a potential enterprise customer." She paused. "My phone pinged. Your assistant's email address. I read it standing at my desk."
He was very still.
"I read it three times," she said. "Because the first two times I thought I was misreading it. The third time I sat down on the floor. Not dramatically — there just wasn't anywhere else to go. My legs did what they wanted to do." A pause. "And then I called Priya and I didn't say anything for about two minutes and she didn't say anything either and that was — that was actually the thing that kept me from losing it completely. That she knew something bad had happened without my having to say it."
"Zara," he said. Very quiet.
"Then I called the other investors. All of them that night. They were polite and evasive. Within the week I had the full picture." She looked at him. "You know the rest."
"Tell me anyway."
"Eleven days, Aryan. The company folded in eleven days. The team of fourteen people — some of them had left other jobs to be there, some of them had moved cities. I wrote the same email to each of them personally and then sat alone in the office for an afternoon after everyone left and then I locked the door and handed the keys to the landlord."
He looked at her. His face was doing the thing it had done on the terrace at the gala — the thing that happened when the control gave way to what was underneath.
"I knew what the closure would look like," he said. "I had modelled it. I knew the team, I knew the timeline, I knew approximately what you would feel. I made myself know it and then I made the decision anyway because the alternative — the alternative was worse. And I have lived with the knowledge of what I did to you every day since."
"Is that supposed to comfort me?"
"No," he said. "It's supposed to be the truth."
She set down her mug. Looked at him across the small space of the office.
"I want to ask you something," she said. "And I want you to answer it honestly even if the honest answer is difficult."
