The Last Friday

The water in Marcus's glass trembled. Across the scarred mahogany table, David — his oldest friend, his former business partner, the man who'd stood beside him at his wedding — wouldn't meet his eyes.

"The bull market's over," David said, finally. "We need to sell."

Outside the bar, an orange sunset bled into the Chicago skyline, the same color as the warning lights that had been blinking on their trading floor for months. Marcus had ignored them. He'd always been the one to charge ahead, to ride the momentum, consequences be damned. That's what had made them fortune. That's what was about to destroy it.

"You already sold, didn't you?" Marcus heard his own voice, calm in a way that frightened him.

David nodded, shamefaced. "This morning. At opening."

The math clicked instantly in Marcus's head: David had exited at the peak, while Marcus — distracted by his wife's miscarriage, by the hollow spaces opening in his life — had held. He'd lost everything.

He remembered the goldfish they'd won together at a carnival when they were twelve, how it had died within a week because they'd forgotten to feed it, too busy with baseball and girls and the careless invincibility of being young. Some things, he realized, you never outgrew. You just forgot to feed them until they floated belly-up.

"I'm sorry," David said. "I tried to tell you."

Marcus nodded, staring at the wavering reflection in his glass. The bar noise swelled around them — laughter, clinking glasses, the relentless hum of other people's lives continuing. He felt an odd lightness, the kind that comes after something essential breaks and can never be repaired.

"You paid for a drink," Marcus said, standing. "At least stay to finish it."

David looked up, hope warring with relief in his eyes.

"No," Marcus said. "Don't come back to the office on Monday. Neither of us."

He walked out into the cooling evening, alone in the city that had taken everything, carrying nothing but the sudden understanding that some endings aren't catastrophes — they're just overdue truths finally spoken aloud.