2. Adrian
Adrian
By ten thirty, my wife has disappeared from our anniversary party.
I notice because the noise changes when Elena leaves a room.
Nothing becomes louder, exactly. It becomes less controlled.
A server crosses the terrace carrying champagne and nearly collides with my cousin.
The quartet finishes a song, then hesitates before beginning the next.
Someone has moved the candles from the edge of the pool, leaving one end of the water dark.
Elena would notice.
Elena notices everything.
“You’ve been looking toward the house for the last five minutes,” my brother says.
“Have I?”
“Either you’re searching for your wife or you’ve developed a deep emotional attachment to the upstairs windows.”
I glance down at the watch on my wrist.
It fits as though it has always belonged there.
My grandfather wore one exactly like it in the photograph I keep locked in my desk. I told Elena about that picture years ago, during the first winter of our marriage. I barely remember the conversation. She remembers the serial range, the year, and the type of leather used for the strap.
Still choosing you.
I run my thumb over the hidden engraving.
“Where did Elena find this?” my brother asks.
“I have no idea.”
“And you bought her jewellery.”
His tone makes me look up. “She likes jewellery.”
“Does she?”
“She said the necklace was beautiful.”
“Elena also told Father his speech was ‘memorable’ after he spent twenty minutes insulting everyone under sixty. She knows how to protect a man from embarrassment.”
I study him, but he has already lifted his drink.
The necklace was expensive. The diamonds were nearly flawless, the setting custom-made. I told Claire to choose something exceptional and gave her no budget.
That should count for more than remembering some obscure story from ten years ago.
Except I cannot remember choosing it.
I remember signing the invoice while walking into a meeting. I remember Claire saying the jeweller already had Mrs. Vale’s preferences on file. I remember telling her to handle it.
The rest of the night keeps moving. Friends clasp my shoulder and congratulate me on ten years. My father corners me beside the bar to discuss a merger. Two foundation trustees ask whether Elena and I will host another fundraiser in the fall.
They all admire the house, the food, the flowers floating in bowls of water.
I accept their praise because explaining Elena’s involvement would require me to know what she did.
I know only that the party appeared.
That is how most things happen around Elena.
My mother joins me near the pool after my brother leaves. Her silver dress gleams beneath the terrace lights, and not one strand of her hair has moved in the heat.
“Where is your wife?”
“Inside.”
“Sulking?”
“Elena doesn’t sulk.”
“No. She withdraws and waits for everyone to notice.”
I look toward the bedroom windows again. They are dark.
“She’s been working all evening.”
“At her own party. Very noble.”
There is something in my mother’s voice I should challenge. Instead, I take a drink.
“She enjoys this,” I say.
“Does she?”
It is the second time tonight someone has asked me that question.
My mother follows my gaze to the house. “You’ve given Elena everything she ever wanted. This estate. The apartment in Manhattan. The foundation. A name people respect.”
“She had a respected name before she married me.”
“The Mercers had pedigree, not money. There is a difference.”
“And Elena has never cared about either.”
“That is what she wants you to believe.”
I turn to her. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Vivienne lifts one shoulder. “Only that a woman works very hard to secure a man like you. Once she has the marriage, the homes, and the position, she no longer needs to work as hard to keep him.”
“You think Elena has stopped trying?”
“I think you wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t.”
The answer lands too close to thoughts I have never spoken aloud.
There was a time when Elena fought with me about everything.
She demanded that I come home for dinner.
She called me at the office and told me which weekend she had blocked in my calendar because she was stealing me away.
If I answered an email in bed, she climbed onto my lap, took the phone from my hand, and gave me something better to do.
She used to want things from me.
Time. Attention. My hands on her. My mouth. My full presence for longer than the space between calls.
Now she asks for almost nothing.
I told myself the quiet was maturity. Ten years of marriage sanding away the sharpest edges of our need for each other.
Comfortable was supposed to be the reward for surviving the first years, when we could turn a disagreement about dinner into a fight that ended with her dress on the floor and my name breaking from her lips.
But comfortable is not the same as happy.
And lately, Elena seems comfortable without me.
My father taps his glass with a spoon, calling everyone’s attention toward the shallow end of the pool.
“A few words from the fortunate husband,” he announces.
The guests turn toward me.
My heart gives one hard, painful beat.
I can dismantle a hostile board without notes.
I have negotiated acquisitions across tables occupied by men who would celebrate my death.
Put me in front of people I know and ask me to speak about something I cannot reduce to numbers, and the eight-year-old boy my father locked inside a linen closet wakes beneath my ribs.
The terrace seems to narrow.
Then Elena is beside me.
I did not see her come outside.
She has removed the necklace.
I register her bare throat just before she presses two fingers against the inside of my wrist.
My pulse steadies beneath them.
It always does.
“You’re fine,” she says quietly.
I cover her hand for a second. “Where were you?”
“Fixing my face.”
Her makeup looks the same, but her eyes don’t.
Before I can ask, the guests begin clapping.
I step forward with Elena beside me and say what a man is supposed to say after ten years. I tell them she is beautiful. I tell them I am lucky. I praise the life we have built and the home we have made.
Every word is true.
None of it feels sufficient.
When I look at Elena, she is smiling for our guests. That composed, lovely smile asks nothing of me.
An uglier part of me resents her for it.
I want the woman who used to interrupt me. The woman who once dragged me away from my own birthday dinner because she was tired of sharing me. The woman who fought, demanded, touched, and burned.
I want proof that she still wants something only I can give her.
As the applause rises, Elena’s fingers leave my wrist.
My heartbeat immediately accelerates.
I reach for her hand, but she steps away to speak to a server. I tell myself I am irritated because she has abandoned me in the middle of our guests.
I do not let myself name the colder thought beneath it.
Maybe my wife stopped fighting for this marriage because, somewhere along the way, she stopped believing I was worth the fight.