In Silence, I Let You Go novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Never Have I Ever
At the Fieldwork IPO party, Sienna's glass starts a game, Tim pours Hannah a whiskey and announces his secret wife and baby, and Hannah walks out in silence to find her key card dead.
Three hours after Tim rang the NASDAQ bell, two hundred people stood on a hotel rooftop with a glass in every hand.
I stood by a heat lamp with a club soda, still checking the order servers on my phone.
Our company was public now.
Tomorrow the home-health nurses who used our app would open it and not notice anything had changed.
At seven-forty Tim had texted me that tonight was for me, and that after the bell he would say something about us.
I had read it twice and smiled at my screen.
Sienna found me in the restroom before the speeches.
She was Tim's assistant, twenty-seven, eight months at the company, and the only person in the building who knew my coffee order without asking.
My hem had come loose on the way up from the car.
"Hold still," she said, and pinned it with a safety pin from her clutch.
"There. Nobody will see it. You're the only person here who actually works, you know."
I laughed and thanked her.
The thin gold ring she wore on her right hand at the office was on her left tonight.
I thought she had finally gotten engaged and was too shy to say so.
By nine the speeches were over, and someone from sales pulled everyone into a circle for Never Have I Ever.
Tim stood across from me with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled, happier than I had seen him in a year.
The first three rounds were silly.
Never have I ever slept under my desk. Half the circle drank and cheered.
Sienna raised her glass for the fourth round.
"Never have I ever worked at a company that forgot who wrote its first line of code," she said.
Nobody laughed.
Every person on that roof knew who had written it, and every one of them looked at me.
Tim crossed the circle and pushed a heavy glass of whiskey into my hand.
His fingers were warm, and he was smiling.
"Go on, Hannah," he said. "This one's yours."
"Tim, what are you doing?"
"Telling the truth."
He used the voice he used on investors, easy and sure, and he turned to face the room.
"Sienna and I were legally married last spring, in Las Vegas," he said. "She's four months pregnant. I'm tired of lying about her."
Phones came up all around the circle.
Several lit up before I looked away.
Sienna put a hand on her stomach and looked at the floor, and somebody near her started to clap.
It was thin and awkward and it died quickly.
I was thirty-one years old.
I had spent nine years building the thing he had just rung a bell for, and he had finished that story in one breath with me left out of it.
Four years of engagement.
A ring on my finger that I had polished that morning.
Everyone on the roof was waiting for me to scream.
I understood that the scream was the part they would film, so I gave them none of it.
I set the whiskey on the ledge without spilling a drop.
I slid the ring over my knuckle and put it down beside the glass.
"Hannah," Tim said, and his voice had changed. "Don't make this ugly. Let's talk in private."
I did not answer him.
So I stepped out.
The elevator was empty and I rode it down alone with my forehead against the cold wall.
In the lobby I opened my wallet to find my phone's car app.
Behind the card slot, folded soft from nine years of carrying it, was the gold-edged certificate from the Reno chapel where we had stopped on a road trip.
It was the souvenir Tim always said never counted.
I left it where it was and ordered the car.
I did not go home.
My laptop and the only copy of my product notes were on my desk at the Fieldwork warehouse in Brooklyn, and I wasn't going to leave either one there overnight.
The car dropped me at the glass doors at eleven.
The night guard knew me.
He had once let me in at four in the morning on the day we shipped version one.
I held my key card to the reader.
It blinked red.
I tried it again, and again.
"Ms. Brecker." The guard came out from behind his desk, and he would not meet my eyes. "I'm sorry. Mr. Corbin had your access shut off at four this afternoon."
Four o'clock.
Five hours before he poured me that drink.
On the desk behind him sat a banker's box with my name on the lid in black marker.
"He said you'd be coming for it," the guard said.
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