Chapter 10 #2
Next to me, Greg is telling a story. He tells stories the way he does everything—louder than necessary, taking up more space than the content warrants.
This one involves a golf trip and a celebrity I’m supposed to be impressed by.
The table is laughing in that polite, wine-lubricated way that could mean anything.
I’m half-listening, dipping a cube of bread into the Gruyère, when I notice Greg lean toward our waitress—a brunette, mid-twenties, the kind of effortlessly pretty that makes you feel like you’re working too hard at your own face—and murmur something near her ear while touching the inside of her wrist.
It’s three seconds. Maybe less. His thumb grazes her pulse point and she smiles—not a service smile, a real one—and he holds the contact a beat too long before pulling back and returning to his story like nothing happened.
I dip my bread. I chew. I swallow.
Whitney’s hand finds my knee under the table and squeezes.
I don’t look at her. I know what I’ll see if I look at her, and I am not interested in seeing it tonight.
Not on my birthday. Not in this restaurant that I rented and this life that I chose and this marriage that I am holding together with the same meticulous attention I bring to a seam that’s starting to fray—steady hands, even pressure, the quiet belief that if I just keep stitching, nobody will notice the fabric is coming apart.
But thirty minutes later, right after my birthday cake is served, Whitney is missing. My birthday candles still giving off wisps of smoke when I notice she’s gone.
And I mean gone-gone. Her clutch is missing.
The vintage Chanel jacket that she found at a consignment shop in SoHo and considers her greatest material achievement—is no longer draped over the back of her chair.
A cold draft from the front of the restaurant tells me the door has been opened recently, and so I take a chance and leave the table while my guests are lost in small talk and surface-level conversations.
Rina notices me rise, and gives me a concerned look.
I smile and nod, a charade of: it’s all fine.
I just need some air. I grab a to-go box and stuff a slice of the cake in the square, plastic container.
It’s tiramisu—my favorite, to most of my guests’ chagrin.
But it’s my birthday. Whit special-ordered from that place in Carroll Gardens because “regular cake is a betrayal of the Italian people.” She didn’t even stay for dessert which is very un-Whit-like.
I pack her a piece as either an offering or a hostage. I’m not sure yet.
As I suspected, I find Whit on the sidewalk. She’s pacing, which is what Whitney does when she’s trying not to explode—short, tight laps, heels clicking, arms crossed, the emerald dress catching the streetlight and throwing it back in shards of green.
“Whit.”
She stops pacing. Turns. Her face is flushed and her eyes are bright with something combustible.
“Don’t,” she says.
“Don’t what? I just came to see if you’re okay.”
“I’m fine. Go back inside. Enjoy your party.”
“You are clearly not fine.”
She presses her fingers to her temples—a gesture I realize, with a jolt, is one I’ve stolen from her. Or she stole from me. After eighteen years of friendship, the plagiarism runs both ways.
“I can’t do this anymore, Celeste.”
“Do what?”
“Sit in there and pretend.” She gestures toward the restaurant, toward the warm glow of the windows and the muffled laughter and the man at the head of my table.
“Pretend I don’t see what’s happening. Pretend Greg isn’t—” She stops.
Breathes. Starts again. “The audacity. It’s your birthday and he’s shamelessly hitting on other women right in front of you. ”
“Oh, he’s just a flirt when he’s drunk. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”
“Lessi! Wake up. The waitress inside is the tip of the iceberg. What about the fact that he has two phones—”
“Two work phones. Two totally different businesses—”
“The plane ticket receipt you found which was to a city he never told you about.”
“Because we don’t babysit each other! That’s called trust. Without it, we have nothing.”
“It’s called gaslighting. Greg has officially made you feel like you deserve the way he treats you.”
Her voice cracks the quiet of the street like a rock through glass. A couple walking their dog across the street glances over. Whit doesn’t care. Whit has never once in her life modulated her volume for the comfort of strangers.
“I’ve been keeping my mouth shut,” she says, lower now but no less intense.
“For years, Celeste. Years. Because I kept telling myself it wasn’t my place.
You’re a grown woman, you make your own choices, and it’s not my job to stand between you and your marriage.
But I can’t—” Her voice catches. “There is no way you aren’t seeing this.
He’s not even trying to hide it. The late nights.
The way he guards his phone like a Rottweiler with a bone.
The way he looks at every woman in a room that isn’t you.
And the jokes, Celeste. About your age. ‘My vintage wife.’ ‘The classic model.’ It’s not charming.
It’s not banter. He’s reminding you—and everyone else—that in his eyes, you’ve expired, and he thinks that gives him permission to shop around. ”
“Whitney, stop it. Stop it right now.”
“No. You stop. Stop pretending this is normal. Stop telling yourself this is what marriage looks like after a decade, because it’s not. It’s what happens when one person has checked out and the other person is too scared to admit it.”
I feel the anger before I understand it—a hot, sick wave that starts in my stomach and rises through my chest and hardens in my throat like concrete setting.
Not at Greg. At her. At Whitney, who is standing here in the dress I made her, telling me truths I’ve been folding into smaller and smaller squares and hiding in drawers I lock shut.
“It’s not my fault you don’t know what marriage looks like,” I say.
My voice is level. Controlled. The voice I use in boardrooms when someone has miscalculated and I need them to know it without raising my volume.
“You’ve never stayed with anyone longer than a year.
You collect relationships like frequent flyer miles and then cash them in the moment things get uncomfortable.
So forgive me if I don’t take marital advice from someone who treats commitment like a seasonal trend. ”
The words land. I watch them hit. Whitney’s face absorbs the impact the way fabric absorbs a stain, the damage spreading outward from the point of contact, darkening everything it touches.
“That’s not fair,” she says quietly.
“Neither is ambushing me on my birthday.”
“I’m not ambushing you. I’m trying to wake you up.
But you’re not sleeping are you? You’re pretending.
Acting out your life instead of living it.
” She stops. Her jaw works. I can see her choosing between the safe thing and the true thing, and I know which one Whitney always picks. “You’re turning into my mother.”
The street goes silent. Or maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe the cabs still honk and the dog still pants and the city keeps doing its indifferent thing.
But in my ears, there is nothing. Just that sentence, hanging in the cold air between us like smoke from a fire she just lit in the center of our friendship.
“I’m sorry,” she says, softer now, but the damage is done.
“That came out harsh. But, Celeste. My mother spent her entire marriage looking the other way because the alternative was admitting she’d built her life around someone who didn’t deserve it.
And you’re doing the same thing. Tolerating a man because you’re afraid of what you’ll lose if you leave.
My mother chose money and status. She said the emotional trauma was worth estates with manicured lawns, private yachts, and black-tie dinner parties that nobody likes to go to.
My mom chose a lie instead of choosing herself.
Instead of choosing me. Now, you’re facing the same decision. What do you want?”
I stare at the to-go container. The tiramisu sits in its plastic shell like something precious trapped in something cheap. I hold it still for a moment. Then I open my hand and let it drop.
It hits the sidewalk and splits open. Cream and cocoa and ladyfingers splatter across the concrete, across the toes of Whitney’s heels, across the hem of the emerald dress I spent three weeks making. A Pollock painting in espresso and mascarpone.
“How dare you. How dare you compare me to the woman you hate most in the world.”
Whit looks at the cake on her shoes. On her dress. She’s slathered in the mess I made. When she looks up, the fire has gone out. What’s left is something worse—sadness, heavy and deliberate, the expression of someone who knew this was coming and chose to come anyway.
“I don’t hate my mom,” she says. “I grieve for her. Because she’s brilliant and strong and she let a man convince her she was neither. And I don’t want that for you, Lessi. I don’t want you to wake up at fifty and realize you spent your best years performing a marriage with a man you resent.”
My hands are shaking. Tiramisu is on my shoes too. We match—stained, standing in the wreckage of dessert and honesty.
“When you’re ready to walk away from him,” Whitney says, “I’ll be right beside you.
When you’re ready to be brave and face what’s actually happening, I will face it with you.
But until then—” Her voice breaks cleanly, like a thread snapping under tension.
“I can’t watch you do this to yourself. I can’t sit at that table and smile and clink glasses while the person I love most in the world disappears into a marriage that’s killing her. ”
“So you’re giving me an ultimatum,” I say. “Greg or you.”