The Cut Wire

The ethernet cable lay severed across his desk like a dead snake, its internal copper intestines exposed to the fluorescent overhead lights. Marcus hadn't meant to cut it—he'd brought the knife for something else entirely—but there it was, and suddenly his presentation was due in twelve minutes and he had no way to connect to the projector.

"You okay?" Sarah's voice from the doorway. They'd called each other friend for three years, since that disastrous team-building retreat where everyone else had gotten food poisoning and they'd spent twenty-four hours sharing chips and increasingly personal secrets in a hotel room. Now she stood there in her ridiculous winter hat, the pom-pom bobbing as she tilted her head.

"Fine," Marcus said. "Just working through some technical difficulties."

She stepped inside, closed the door. "You're not running the deck from backup?"

"No backup. Not after last week."

"Ah." Last week, when Marcus had discovered Sarah had been going to meetings with the VP he was supposed to be leading. Meetings about his project. The project they'd built together from scratch, from coffee-stained napkins to million-dollar contracts. He'd confronted her yesterday, and she'd said: "I was trying to protect you from yourself"—the same thing everyone always said when they were actually protecting their own interests.

Now she crossed to his desk, picked up the severed cable. "I can get another one from IT. Five minutes."

"Don't bother," Marcus said. "I'll just run it from my laptop directly."

"Marcus—"

"It's fine, Sarah. Really."

She set the cable down gently, like she was handling something fragile. Then she reached up and pulled off her hat, her hair static-frizzy underneath. "I told them you built the architecture. I told them without you, the whole thing falls apart."

"But you still went."

"I went because they asked. Because I've been running interference since you started forgetting to eat during crunch time. Because someone had to."

The pom-pom hat sat on his desk beside the dead cable, two things that didn't work anymore. Marcus looked at her—really looked at her—and saw how tired she was. How she'd been carrying things he hadn't noticed.

"Five minutes," he said. "If IT doesn't have it, we reschedule."

Sarah smiled, picked up her hat. "I'll run down there now."