1. Maren
— ? —
Maren
I know the time because I’ve been watching it change on the clock for the last hour, ever since I gave up pretending I was asleep and started just lying here in the dark, waiting.
Listening for the garage door. The creak of the stairs.
The specific sound his shoes make on the hardwood when he’s trying to be quiet.
Rhodes slides under the covers with practiced efficiency, barely disturbing the sheets.
He’s gotten good at this, the silent return, the careful movements designed not to wake me.
He doesn’t know I’m never actually asleep anymore.
He doesn’t know I’ve spent the last year cataloging every late-night arrival, noting the way they’ve gotten later and later, more frequent, more normal.
My body does something traitorous before my brain can stop it. I shift toward him on instinct, muscle memory from a decade of reaching for my husband in the dark, and my hip brushes his before I remember.
I’m angry.
I turn away instead, rolling onto my side, putting my back to him like a wall. My heart is pounding, with frustration, with grief, with the pathetic hope that still flares every time he comes home, even now, even when I’m furious.
He goes still behind me. I can feel him there, feel the heat of him, the weight of his presence in our bed. For a long moment, neither of us moves.
Then he sighs, soft and tired, and I hear him settle into his pillow. Within minutes, his breathing evens out. He’s asleep.
I lie awake until dawn.
By seven, I’ve been up for an hour. Showered, dressed, made coffee. I’m sitting at the kitchen island pretending to read something on my phone when Rhodes comes downstairs, already in a suit, already looking at his own phone, already somewhere else even though his body is right here in front of me.
“Morning,” he says, not looking up.
“Morning.”
He pours himself coffee from the pot I made, doesn’t thank me, doesn’t ask how I slept, doesn’t acknowledge the hours I spent staring at the ceiling waiting for him. Just pours his coffee and keeps scrolling.
“There’s a thing at The Sinclair tonight,” he says eventually, still looking at his phone. “The Harlow wedding reception. I want to oversee it myself.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll probably be late again.”
“Okay.”
Now he looks up. There’s something like confusion in his expression, like he expected more of a fight and doesn’t know what to do with my flat compliance. Good. Let him be confused. Let him wonder what’s going on in my head for once.
“You didn’t wait up,” he says.
“You told me not to.” I take a sip of my coffee, holding his gaze over the rim of my mug. “Eight months ago. You said there was no point in both of us being tired, that I should just go to bed and you’d be home when you got home. So I stopped waiting up. I finally listened.”
Surprise moves across his face, or the beginning of guilt. He opens his mouth to respond, but I’m already standing, already rinsing my mug in the sink, already moving toward the door where my jacket and bag are waiting.
“I need to get to the shop,” I say. “Nora’s opening, but I have a consultation at nine.”
“Let me drive you.”
The offer catches me off guard. Rhodes hasn’t driven me to work in months, he’s always gone before I am, or he has calls he needs to take, or there’s something at one of his properties that demands his immediate attention.
The fact that he’s offering now feels like an olive branch, or maybe a peace offering he doesn’t know how to name.
I should say no. I should protect myself from the inevitable disappointment of hoping for more and getting less.
But there’s a small, stubborn part of me that still wants to say yes to him, that still remembers the man who kept a crooked flower in a champagne bottle, who asked what I wanted and actually listened.
“Fine,” I say. “But I’m controlling the music.”
In the car, I connect my phone to his Bluetooth before he can object, filling the silence with something soft and acoustic. Rhodes makes a face but doesn’t change it, which feels like a minor victory.
“This is depressing,” he says after two songs.
“This is Phoebe Bridgers. She’s a genius.”
“She sounds sad.”
“Art is supposed to make you feel things, Rhodes.”
“I feel like driving into oncoming traffic.”
I snort despite myself, and something in my chest loosens slightly. This is familiar, the teasing, the bickering over music, the easy back-and-forth that used to be the foundation of our entire relationship. For a moment, it almost feels normal. For a moment, I almost forget why I’m angry.
Then his phone buzzes in the cupholder, and I see Rachel’s name flash across the screen before he silences it without looking.
“You can answer that,” I say, and my voice is flat again, all the warmth gone.
“It can wait.”
“It never waits.” I turn to look out the window, watching the streets of our neighborhood blur past. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Nothing ever waits. Everything is urgent. Everything needs you right now, immediately, can’t be delayed.”
“That’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair is sitting across from you at dinner and watching you check your phone seventeen times because something at The Sinclair might need you more than I do.
” I shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t be picking a fight in the car on the way to work, shouldn’t be letting all the anger I’ve been swallowing for months come pouring out, but I can’t stop.
“What’s not fair is planning a vacation and having you cancel it three days before because there’s an event you need to oversee yourself, even though you have an entire staff of people whose literal job is to oversee events. ”
“Maren-”
“What’s not fair is being married to someone who would rather be at work than home.
” My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate myself for it.
I sound needy, desperate, like exactly the kind of wife I never wanted to be, the one who can’t handle her husband’s success, who resents his ambition, who makes everything about her when he’s just trying to build something important.
But that’s not what this is. I know that’s not what this is.
“I’ll be at The Sinclair tonight,” Rhodes says after a long silence. “There’s no emergency. I just want to make sure the Harlow reception goes well. They’re important clients.”
“There’s always an important client. There’s always a reason you need to be there instead of here.
” I turn back to face him. “When is there going to be a night when being home with me is the priority? When is there going to be an evening when I’m not competing with every venue and event and last-minute crisis in your empire? ”
“It’s one event, Maren.”
“It’s never one event. It’s one event tonight and two events tomorrow and a donor dinner on Saturday and a site visit on Sunday and suddenly a month has gone by and I’ve seen you for maybe six hours total, and four of those hours you were asleep.”
He doesn’t respond. His jaw is tight, his hands gripping the steering wheel harder than necessary. I know that look, it’s the one he gets when he knows I’m right and doesn’t want to admit it.
“You knew what you were getting into,” he says finally, and his voice is quiet but sharp. “When you married me. You knew the business came with long hours. You knew I was building something.”
“I married a man who was building something,” I say. “I didn’t marry a man who would eventually prefer being there to being with me.”
The silence that follows is suffocating. We pull up in front of Bellamy Blooms, and I have my hand on the door handle before the car even stops, desperate to escape this conversation, this car, this feeling of talking and talking and never being heard.
“Maren, wait.”
I stop. I shouldn’t, but I do.
Rhodes is looking at me with something complicated in his expression, frustration and guilt and something softer underneath, something that looks almost like fear.
“I know things have been… I know I haven’t been around as much as you’d like.
But the company is at a critical point right now.
There are expansion plans, new projects-”
“There are always expansion plans.” I push the door open. “There’s always another deal, always something more important than me.”
I’m out of the car before he can respond, the door slamming behind me harder than I intended. But Rhodes gets out too, following me toward the shop like he’s not ready to let this go.
“You dropped this,” he says, holding up my phone. I must have left it in the cupholder.
I take it from him, our fingers brushing briefly. “Thanks.”
He doesn’t leave. He’s looking at the storefront of Bellamy Blooms, the window display I refreshed yesterday, the new signage Nora convinced me to invest in, the banner hanging inside that announces our upcoming tenth anniversary party.
“What’s that?” he asks, pointing at the banner.
“The shop’s tenth anniversary party.” My voice is carefully neutral. “I told you about it last month.”
His expression flickers, and I watch the realization dawn, he forgot. Of course he forgot. He probably nodded along while I was talking, already composing an email in his head, already somewhere else.
“Right,” he says. “Right, I remember. When is it?”
“Two weeks from Saturday. I already put it on your calendar.”
“I’ll be there.”
The promise should make me feel better. A year ago, it would have.
A year ago, I’d have smiled and kissed him and felt reassured that he wanted to show up for something that mattered to me.
But that was before a hundred other promises that got broken, before a year of “I’ll be there” turning into “something came up” turning into me standing alone at events I planned around his schedule.
“Come if you can,” I say, and I don’t mean it as a dismissal, not exactly. I just can’t make myself hope anymore. The hope hurts too much when it doesn’t work out.
Hurt crosses his face, or the realization that I’ve stopped expecting him to follow through. “Maren…”