2. JACK

Leaving the office, the familiar streets of SoHo were bustling as I walked from Spring Street back to the apartment the company leased on West Houston Street for when I, or anyone else from Chicago, had to stay.

The cobblestone streets of SoHo and its iconic architecture gave way to a more urban feeling further north up Manhattan, but the district, bleeding into Greenwich Village, still ached with coolness. New York’s kaleidoscope – voices, languages, colors, scents, traffic, people – danced around me, blurring as I walked, but I was deep in thought.

As I strolled past boutique shops and trendy cafes, my mind wandered to the upcoming trip. I had a lot going on now, and going to London was a distraction in both the good and bad ways.

It had been a long-held hope of mine to open the office there, as important as opening the New York office had been, back in the days when people hardly knew what artificial intelligence was.

The world was changing fast, and I needed the company to be ahead of the game. AI was changing the world, and I wanted us to be the best.

I thought about work too much. I knew it. I was one of those guys who pretended not to be like that, but I knew I was.

My wife always used to say it about me: that she knew I loved her, but she did not know if I loved work more. She meant it as a joke, but the fact she said it made me sad.

And now, we were breaking up. I was distracting myself from the end of my marriage, really.

Arriving at the apartment building on Houston Street, I entered its sleek lobby, with its familiar scent of the old wood floor, polished to a sheen, and the crystalline sharpness of its colorless LED lighting.

The company was also going to lease an apartment in London eventually, although for now, I would be using the serviced apartment that I had on previous trips there.

I walked toward the floor-to-ceiling window to gaze out at the downtown skyline. And in that moment, amidst the hustle and bustle of urban life, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that London was some kind of step forward from where I had been in my life, which had been filled with success professionally but stuck in a quagmire personally.

It was a moment of recognizing the future was here, and that moment was going to be without my wife.

I turned away from the window. The apartment had that air of modern elegance that these places always do: sleek furnishings and minimalist decor, cosmopolitan touches, and a bit of interior-design attitude, expensively marketed to guys like me.

A maid came in to change sheets and clean surfaces, always when I was out at work. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen her, even though I left her a $20 tip every day she came, which was gone when I got back. The scent of freshly laundered linens and a sweet-sharp aroma of citrus cleaner filled the air.

The living area had two fancy sofas facing each other and contemporary paintings on the walls, while floor-to-ceiling windows offered views of Downtown. A black, high-gloss kitchenette glowed glamorously in the corner of the space, its dark marble countertops flecked with gold glinting under soft recessed lighting. Everything had been wiped perfectly clean.

It was supposed to suggest you lived some incredibly tony New York life, like in some lifestyle magazine, when, in fact, guys like me, alone, overworked, coming back to rest their heads after long hours at work, were usually the ones who occupied them. You had no life because you worked so hard, so you worked hard to fill up your loneliness, but hey, at least you got to stay in places like these…

But over the years, I had stayed in countless apartments like this, from New York to Tokyo to London, Paris, Sydney, and Hong Kong. Despite their glamorous feel, these apartments were always the same – the exquisiteness and emptiness of the transient nature of work lives like mine.

And I had worked hard to get what I had. From starting out as a small startup to the cutting-edge global player it had become, I had poured my heart and soul into every aspect of my business.

But I did sometimes ask myself was there anything more than this? Or at least was there a better, more fulfilled way to live?

My wife would have asked why I hadn’t asked those questions some years ago. She would have had a point too: I knew that.

I kicked off my shoes, unbuttoned my shirt, and undid my tie – yes, I might work in tech, but I still wore a suit to work, I’m afraid! I poured myself a glass of water and wondered what I might order for dinner. Then my phone, which I had left on the kitchen counter, buzzed with a text. I reached for it and saw my wife’s name.

EMMA

Her message read:

Can we talk?

I typed back:

Sure of course

I waited a moment.

Can we talk now??

Emma and I had been together for fifteen years. She was a great woman, and I loved – or maybe it’s more correct to say, loved her – very much, but the last year or two had been hard.

With work and time, and then a bit of resentment, distance entered our relationship, and we grew apart. No one else was involved. It was sad, the sadness of a long relationship ending and reaching a point where there is not much you can do to stop it ending. But both of us had admitted something had been missing for a long time now.

I hit her number on FaceTime. The phone rang only twice, and then she appeared on my screen. I saw her apprehension at once.

“Hey, Jack,” she said, unsmiling. She used to always have a ready smile for me.

“How are you doing, Em?”

I almost called her “babe” but stopped myself.

“Oh, you know.”

The truth was that Emma and I hadn’t shared a bed in over a year. At first, it had felt like we just needed time, either to let things heal or to get back to where we had always been.

But instead, over time, it felt more and more like sex wasn’t coming back to us. What had felt like a small gap became a long, permanent one.

I’ll be honest: I was a passionate guy. I liked sex a lot, but more than that, I liked sex with the person I love. That was the most incredible thing to me, to be connected to, to be – I’ll say it – inside the person I was in love with, seeing their face, their eyes, knowing it, too. I loved all of that, never wanted anything else than that.

Emma used to be that person-one hundred percent.

So that year without touching another person had felt like a long time. I wanted to be fully satisfied as a man – to experience the fulfillment of that intimacy, that connection, that emotion and desire.

I also longed to care for my partner, to protect them, to hold them, to be the man needed by my partner, wanted by them in return.

The ache of not having that had begun to gnaw at me – along with the sense that the void we had been dancing around for a couple of years was finally consuming us.

“How was your day?”

“It was busy, as usual,” she said. “Work is crazy, but nothing I can’t handle. How about you? How’s New York?”

I chuckled.

“New York’s New York,” I replied with a shrug. “Like you say, nothing I can’t handle.”

“Why are you there?”

“I am arranging a visit to the new London office with some guy from the office here.”

“You’re going to London with him?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Some tension entered her face.

“Of course you are.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“There’s always more work, Jack. There’s never enough work for you.”

“Em,” I murmured, but something in her face changed. I knew she was annoyed, and I did not want to irritate her. “What’s up?” I asked.

She paused, and the pause glowed with a certain danger.

“I’ve been thinking… about us.”

I nodded and suddenly felt there was trouble coming – or if not trouble, something final. Her words hung in the air, heavy, bearing down on me and her, too.

“Okay,” I whispered, the word catching in my throat as I realized what was probably coming next.

“I want a divorce.”

I was not amazed that she said it, but now that she had, I still felt rather stunned. The world seemed to spin around me, but I seemed to be stock-still – the world spinning and me left dizzy and dazed.

“Why now, Em?”

“What do you mean?”

She knew what I meant.

“Why ask now? Why not a year ago?”

“Because nothing is changing, Jack. It’s time for us to move on.” She gazed at me from the screen. “Tell me what you want,” she said.

I knew what I wanted: a partner I could hold, a partner I could make love to, a partner I could cherish and protect, and damn it, a partner who wanted me inside them, who wanted nothing more for me to be their man.

But I also wanted something meaningful emotionally that could compare to the meaning of my work. But the truth was that, even if I said I didn’t want to break up, I no longer trusted that Emma could provide that to me, any more than I could to her. My work mattered to me. That person that I wanted shouldn’t feel that they were in competition with it.

I hadn’t spoken for a while, and then my wife sighed, shaking her head.

“You can’t communicate, Jack,” she said, her voice tinged with frustration. “You can’t show yourself, show what you want. I’ve tried to get you to open up, but you never do. That’s your problem and why you’ll never find anyone who can handle you.”

“Em!”

That was a mean thing to say. But maybe it was true. I was raised not to show my feelings by my parents because they had never cared what my siblings and I had felt. They had always been more concerned with their own feelings, so as kids, we learned not to trust ours. We learned to shut our feelings up, which, as a man, is largely what the world wants from you anyway.

A lump formed in my throat, but I would never cry in front of anyone. I let out a long breath, and any risk of tears went with it. “Be a man!” my dad used to say, when I was three or four and scraped my knees, my lower lip trembling, my eyes wet.

“Emma,” I murmured. “Are you sure?”

She did not answer my question, perhaps because it didn’t have a real answer or a real solution.

“I think maybe I should move out for a while,” she said, her voice quite cold and detached.

“When?” I asked, and I could hear my own note of defeat.

Her reply was instantaneous.

“Now.”

I was shocked. It seemed brutal.

“But I’m in New York,” I protested.

She was looking at me very directly.

“Yeah, that’s why it’s perfect,” she said flatly. “I found an apartment.”

“Jeez, Em. How long have you been planning this?”

Then, emotion entered her eyes.

“Since I realized you would never change, Jack.”

Suddenly, there seemed to be nothing more to say. I had been talking about moving on, but Emma was actually doing it.

The promise of our future together was finally over. The call ended politely as if there was nothing more to say, and I stood alone in my tastefully empty apartment.

I went back to stand at the window and looked down at the city street scene below, the sea of traffic and human shapes down on Houston Street.

I tried to think of what I had in my life, a structure onto which I could hang the next weeks. I had the task of going to London, of getting the new office off the ground, seeding its success.

I always welcomed a challenge, but I would especially now when work and London could distract me from what was going on at home.

I was talking of distractions, and that was precisely what I needed.

But beneath the surface, beneath that facade of professional drive, lay another truth. I needed to get over the grief of my marriage ending and come to terms with the reality of a life in which Emma was no longer by my side. My life had been filled with success, but here was its greatest failure yet.

And as I gazed out over the city, another thought came into me, and it was sweet: I still wanted love; I still wanted that partner who wanted me, who needed me. I wanted to need them, too. Emma and I had been that for each other for so long. Surely, that meant that I could find that with someone again.

Emma was wrong that I wouldn’t. I had to hope that she was wrong, at least. I wanted her to be wrong: I wanted someone else to be out there, waiting for me. Maybe I just hadn’t met them yet.

I made a vow to myself: to try again, to be open to love, to find a future for myself that satisfied both parts of me, the professional and the personal. I would find someone who understood both, a person with whom I had that visceral, magical sexual connection that I had, honestly, once had but then lost with Emma.

All the money in the world cannot buy the simple pleasure of hearing your partner laugh, of feeling their naked body nestling against yours in bed after making love, the warmth of walking in the street with them by your side, fingers touching, enjoying a life you’re building together.

I wanted someone to love.

I wanted someone to cherish.

I wanted someone to trust.

Well… don’t we all?