Anger still wants something from the other person.

Finished wants nothing at all.

I listened to a few of those messages before I stopped listening to any of them, and what struck me was the shape of the bargaining. I’ll end everything with Blair. As though the affair were the injury, as though ending it now, with the company already in freefall, could reach back and undo the restroom. I’ll resign if that’s what you want. As though the chairmanship were mine to be placated with, a toy he could offer up to calm me down.

Every message was a variation on the same theme, which was: tell me the price, and I will pay it, and then things can go back to the arrangement that suited me.

He still could not conceive of a version of events in which there was no price — in which I did not want a concession from him, did not want him to suffer, did not want anything from him at all, but had simply stopped.

That was the thing he could not process, calling and calling into a silence that never called back.