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"Why."

"Because hating yourself is my move. I'm better at it than you, and I can tell you, it has never once fixed anything." I lean toward him to make my point. "She's gone. We can't change that. But I am not going to spend the rest of my life in three separate dark rooms with you and Theo, all of us nursing a drink we won't drink, over a woman who is still very much alive across town. That's not mourning. That's three grown men too scared to look at what they did."

The stillness in his face cracks, just at the edges, just barely, but I've spent twenty years watching for a crack in Elias Thorne and I know one when I finally see it.

"There's nothing to do," he says, shaking his head slowly. "She won't take money. She won't take an apology. There isn't a thing we could offer her that she'd want."

“Yes, there is, but it’s not money. Not a pretty speech. It’s the one thing she'd actually believe."

"And what is that?"

I haven't wanted to say to Elias or to myself, but whatever our move is, it can't be something we buy. She'd spit on that. Which means it's going to be the three of us standing out in the open with no leverage and no way to control how it lands. Just us, wrong, out loud, standing on the ugliest corner of her whole world with nothing in our hands.

"I’m still working on that," I tell him. "But I know it's going to hurt, and I know we do it together, or we don't do it at all. So get up. We've got a brother to go collect."

Elias looks at me for a moment.

Then, for the first time since Friday, he moves.

Theo doesn't need collecting, as it turns out.

We find him at the office, of all places, at nine o'clock at night, at his desk with one lamp on, surrounded by the particular mess of a man who has written and deleted the same message forty times.

"Don't," he says, before either of us gets a word out. "If you came to tell me I shouldn't have told her, save it. I'd do it again. I'd do it a hundred more times."

"We didn't come for that," I say.

Elias hasn't said a word since we left his place. He stands in the doorway, gray and quiet. Theo looks up at him, and something passes between the two of them I'm not part of, some current of the same frustration. And for the first time in weeks, the three of us are in a room and nobody is angry.

That’s because losing ends the war. None of us got her, so there’s nothing much to be pissed off about.

For several nights, we knifed each other in the back, every one of us sneaking off to have her alone, every one of us sure the other two were the problem. Turns out, the problem was never which of us got her. The problem was that all three of us are gone on the same woman, and not one of us had the guts to say it out loud and share her.

"I've been thinking about something," Theo says. "You two keep talking about her like there's a real one and a fake one. Agnes and Diablo. Like we have to decide which woman we're even apologizing to."

"There's the woman at the desk, and there's the woman on the screen," Elias says, low. "They're not⁠—"

"They're the same person, Elias." Theo's voice doesn't rise, but it goes hard. "That's the whole thing you're both still missing. Diablo was never a mask she put on. Diablo is just Agnes with nothing held back. She’s Agnes when she finally stops hiding, stops being careful, stops apologizing for existing. The nerve, the mouth, the fire, that was in her the whole time. She just never had a place in her life safe enough to let it out. That's not two women we owe an apology to. It's one woman we never bothered to truly see.”

He swallows. "I didn't fall for the quiet one or the loud one. I fell for the whole woman. So whatever we do, it can't be aimed at half of her."

And there we have it, the reason I could never close this. I kept trying to work out which version of her to win back, like she was two separate deals. She was never two deals. She was one woman I was too dickheaded to really appreciate.

"Okay," I say, and getting the words out takes more than I expected, which is new for me. "If we do this, we do it as one thing. No more solo nights. No more sneaking off. No more three grown men lying to each other about a woman all three fell for. She gets all three of us, out in the open, or she gets none of us, and she gets to say no if she’s not in. But I'm done thinking I can have her by cutting the two of you out of it. That was the disease. I'm not doing it anymore."

Theo looks at me like he's never met me. Elias just nods.

"Then we need something real," Elias says. "You said it yourself. Not money. Something she'd actually believe."

"I've got it." And I do. "It's going to humiliate us. It's going to happen out in the open, on her turf and I don’t care who sees or hears us do it. Every instinct we have will be screaming not to do it. But we have to."

"Good," Theo says.

"Tell us," says Elias.

So I tell them as fast as I can because if I really let myself think about it, I'll find a reason to talk myself out of it. But I watch it land on both of them. Theo starts to smile, the first real one I've seen on him since this whole thing went down. And Elias goes still in the way that means yes.

Three men who spent a month buying up every last exit a woman had, are now going to go stand in a room with no exit of our own, and hand her the only thing we have left that she might believe.