The Bear Market of Late October

Margaret stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of her corner office, watching the sunset bleed across the Manhattan skyline. The light was the color of a bruised peach, that sickly sweet orange that reminded her of the gummy vitamins her mother used to force down her throat before chemotherapy stole her sense of taste.

"You're going to lose everything, you know," David said from behind her. He was sitting in her guest chair, spinning a baseball between his fingers. A Mets souvenir from a corporate box they'd shared years ago, back when they were both junior analysts, drunk on possibility and expensive whiskey. "This bear market isn't just eating profits. It's eating people."

Margaret turned. David's hair had thinned since college—she remembered when it fell in dark waves over his eyes, when he'd flip it out of his face while explaining derivatives with evangelical fervor. Now he was balding, tired, holding her career in his manicured hands.

"We're not friends anymore, David," she said. "You sold your shares last quarter. You're not worried about the fund. You're worried about your golden parachute."

He stopped spinning the baseball. The silence stretched between them like a wire about to snap.

"I did what I had to do."

"So did I."

She walked past him to her desk, opened the drawer where she kept the bottle. bourbon, twenty years old. It cost more than her first car. She poured two fingers, thought better of it, poured again. The liquid caught the last of the orange light as she raised the glass.

"My father told me once," she said, not looking at him, "that you have to know what you can bear. Not what you can endure—anyone can endure. But what you can carry without becoming something else. Something smaller."

"And what can you bear, Margaret?"

She turned to face him. "Not this. Not selling out my investors because some algorithm predicts a correction. Not watching you pretend this is about anything but your ego."

David stood up. He placed the baseball on her desk, walked to the door. "You'll be broke by Christmas."

"Maybe," she said, and she meant it. "But I'll still know who I am."

The door clicked shut. She finished her drink, watching the last of the orange light fade into something that looked almost like forgiveness, or perhaps just the ordinary darkness that comes after every kind of ending.