1. Juliette #2
“Zachary, darling.” Her voice warms three degrees, the particular tone she reserves for her son. “Yes, I’m at the house. I know, I know, but the Harringtons - no, it can’t wait. Richard Harrington specifically asked-”
She paces my foyer, phone pressed to her ear, and I think about all the ways I could interrupt. All the ways I could take my phone out and tell Zachary myself that this can wait, that we matter, that six years of marriage should count for more than one evening of donor management.
I don’t do any of them.
“He wants to speak with you.” Eleanor holds out the phone, her smile benevolent. She’s already won and we both know it.
I take it. “Hey.”
“Jules.” He sounds tired already, and he hasn’t even started the calls. “I’m so sorry. Mother says the Harringtons are threatening to pull their funding from three other programs if we don’t-”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. I know it’s not fine. But if I can just get Richard on the phone for an hour, maybe two-”
“Zachary.”
“I’ll make it up to you. Tomorrow. This weekend. However you want.”
“You said that last time.”
Silence. Eleanor pretends not to listen, examining the flowers on the hall table with exaggerated interest.
“I know.” His voice is quieter now. “I know I did. And I meant it then, and I mean it now, and I know that doesn’t-” A pause. Another voice in the background, urgent. “Hang on.”
He doesn’t mute the phone. Tell them I’ll call back in five minutes. Then another voice, closer: they’re asking about the Thayer timeline. Then Zachary: I said five minutes. Then he’s back, but the pause was long enough for me to understand exactly where I fall in his list of priorities.
“Jules?”
“I’m here.”
“I’m sorry. That was - look, can we push dinner to nine? I’ll make the calls from the car, I’ll-”
“Zachary.” I keep my voice even. Pleasant, even. The voice of a woman who has learned that frustration buys nothing in this family. “Handle the crisis. I’ll be here when you’re done.”
“Are you sure?”
No. I’m not sure. I’m standing in my anniversary dress in my own foyer while his mother examines my flowers and his office pulls him in three directions and I’m so fucking tired of being the thing that can wait.
“I’m sure.”
“I love you.”
“I know.”
I hang up before he can hear my voice start to shake.
Eleanor takes her phone back with a gracious smile. “You’re a saint, Juliette. Truly. So many women would make a fuss about something like this.”
“Would they?”
“The wrong kind of women. The kind who don’t understand what it means to support a man like Zachary.”
“And what kind am I?”
“The kind we’re all still getting to know.” She tucks the phone into her bag, mission accomplished. “Even after six years. I’ll see myself out. Enjoy your evening.”
She’s gone before I can think of something to say that isn’t openly hostile.
I stand in the foyer for a long moment, looking at the wrapped book on the hall table, the flowers with Marcy’s initial on the card, my reflection in the mirror above the sideboard. Hair up the way he likes it. Earrings he bought me. Dress that fits differently than it did last year.
The candles are already lit in the dining room. I set them out this afternoon, just in case - just hoping we’d have a moment at home before dinner. Something intimate. Something ours.
I go through and blow them out, one by one, and let the smoke curl toward the ceiling.
He comes home at midnight.
The key turns in the lock. His footsteps carry their familiar weight down the hall, and then he’s in the doorway of the kitchen looking at me with so much guilt on his face that I almost feel bad for him.
Almost.
“Jules.”
“Hi.”
“I’m so sorry.” He crosses the room and pulls me into his arms and I let him, because what else can I do, because I am so tired of having this fight that I’ve stopped having it.
“The Harringtons wanted to rehash their entire relationship with the foundation. Mother kept feeding me talking points. By the time I got off the phone-”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” He pulls back to look at me, his hands on my shoulders. “I wanted tonight to be perfect, and I ruined it, and I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t ruin it alone. Your mother helped. She’s very efficient.”
“She didn’t know it was our anniversary.”
The lie is delivered so gently, and he believes it so completely, that for a moment I almost let it stand.
“She apologized for intruding on it, Zachary. In my foyer. Those were her words.”
His mouth opens. Closes. He rubs the back of his neck, and I recognize the gesture, because it’s the one he makes when two facts refuse to fit in the same hand.
“I’ll talk to her.”
“You won’t.”
“I will.”
“Okay.”
He means it. That’s the worst part. He always means it, the way he means everything, and somehow the meaning never translates into change.
“Tomorrow,” he says. “Oleana. Just us. I’ll turn my phone off at the door.”
“Okay.”
“I love you.” He presses a kiss to my temple, the same spot he always kisses, and I wait to feel something other than tired. “I love you so much, and I’m going to make this up to you.”
“I know.”
“Come to bed?”
I should. It’s late and I’m exhausted and he’s here now, finally, warm and solid and smelling like the sandalwood cologne I picked out for him one Christmas.
“In a minute,” I say. “I’m going to finish my wine.”
He kisses my temple again and goes upstairs, and I sit alone in the kitchen with the candles I blew out and the flowers his assistant sent and the wrapped first edition still sitting on the hall table where I put it this morning.
He walked right past it.
Walked right past it coming in and didn’t see it, didn’t notice the paper I chose because it matched his eyes, didn’t even ask what it was.
I finish my wine.
I wash the glass.
I walk to the hall table and pick up the wrapped book and feel the weight of it in my hands.
You already were. -J
I put it back exactly where he left it. Not as a test. Not as a trap. As a hope.
The right moment is coming. It has to be. I found this book for the man who told me it made him want to be better, and that man is upstairs right now, and I just have to wait for him to come back down.