CHAPTER 4
EVE
The launch dinner is held in a hangar, because this is the aerospace industry, and nothing says elegance like eating sea bass next to a rocket engine.
To be fair, they’ve done it well. Long white tables under the high bay doors, the test vehicle visible through the glass at the far end, lit up against the dark desert.
String lights, an actual string quartet, two hundred people in formalwear.
Officials, investors, two astronauts — actual astronauts, with that astronaut posture — and enough industry money in one room to fund a small war.
I am wearing a dress that zips. Yes, it zips, all the way, and I did my hair, and Delia has the twins at the residence with a full bottle bank and instructions to call for any reason, and for the first time in five weeks I am out in the world as Eve, not as a feeding apparatus.
Leaving the twins took twenty minutes of logistics and one moment of actual cowardice.
Delia stood at the door with Sasha on one shoulder and the checklist in her free hand — bottles labeled, wedge angled, my number first, pediatric nurse line second, 911 is not a joke in the desert, ma’am — and Simon was asleep in the bassinet with his little fist up by his ear, and I almost took my heels off and stayed.
Five weeks old and I have never been more than one building away from them.
“Go,” Delia said. “Eat something hot. Talk to adults.”
“I talk to adults?”
“You talk to your husband’s voicemail. Go.”
Mason meets me at the entrance with a look that reminds me why I married him. “Wow,” he says, simply, and for a second it’s just us, the way it used to be at these things, when he was nobody and I was the woman he couldn’t believe showed up.
He used to introduce me at these dinners as the brains of the marriage. He used to pull out my chair and ask about the licensing deal I was untangling, back when I had my own deals to untangle.
I stand beside him with my hand on his sleeve and I can feel the whole room computing us, the billionaire and the wife, and I wonder when I stopped being a person in the retelling and became an attendee.
Then his chief of staff peels him away to greet some senator, and I go find my seat.
My seat is at table eleven.
Table eleven is a lovely table. It has donors on it, and a supplier’s wife from Dallas who is delightful and three margaritas deep, and a pair of retired Air Force colonels who tell me stories about test pilots, and honestly I enjoy myself. Table eleven is fine.
Table one is at the front, under the lights, and it has Mason at the center of it, and on his right, in midnight blue, where my name card should be, is Jessica.
I check the seating chart at the little easel by the door.
TAILOR, EVE — 11. MORT, JESSICA — 1. Somebody made this decision on purpose.
Somebody with access to the chart moved the CEO’s wife to the donors’ table and put herself beside him under the lights, and the only person with the motive and the audacity is currently touching Mason’s cuff, adjusting it, a gesture of such casual ownership that the photographer across the room catches it.
“Eve Tailor.” The supplier’s wife pats my hand. “Honey, is that seat supposed to be yours?”
“It was last week.”
“Men,” she declares, to the whole table, raising her margarita, although it is not men, it is one specific woman, and my husband’s profound strategic cowardice.
I stay at table eleven. I am pleasant. I learn about the supplier’s wife’s granddaughter’s rodeo scholarship and both colonels’ opinions on the new engine, and I am, I think, genuinely good company, because the alternative is walking across this hangar in front of two hundred people and a photographer and making the scene Jessica has been engineering for weeks.
Between courses, Jessica comes to me. The queen touring the provinces.
“Eve, darling, you look incredible.” She says it loud enough for the table, hand on my chair back.
“I don’t know how you do it, five weeks after twins.
I was just saying to Mason, she’s barely recognizable.
” A beat. “In the best way. Most women just sort of surrender to it, don’t they?
The body, the whole —” a little wave at me, at all of me “— situation. And here you are, fighting back.”
The supplier’s wife, now four margaritas in, bless her, goes still and says, “Surrender to what, exactly? Having a baby?”
“To all of it,” Jessica says smoothly, already drifting off. “Enjoy your evening, Eve. So glad you could make it out.”
So glad you could make it out. She delivers it like a kindness and leaves it smoking on the table behind her.
“That woman,” the supplier’s wife announces to her margarita, “is a rattlesnake in a wrap dress.”
“Careful,” says the older colonel. “She owns half the room.”
“She rents the room,” I say, surprising myself. “There’s a difference.”
I realize I’m not devastated. I keep waiting to be devastated. Instead there is this flat, clear calculation running under everything, adding up the weeks, the feeds, the seat assignments, and I don’t know yet what the total is going to make me do.
Dinner ends. Toasts begin. Mason speaks, and he is wonderful, gracious to the teams, funny about the thermal problem — “we have had vigorous technical disagreements with physics, and physics is currently winning” — and the room loves him.
He thanks the engineers. He thanks the investors.
He thanks, and I hold my breath across the whole hangar, “my wife, Eve, who is here tonight with our five-week-old twins asleep down the road,” and there’s a warm ripple of applause, and I smile, and it is nice, and it is also a name-check, and we both know it.
Then Jessica stands.
Nobody invited her to stand. She simply does, midnight blue, glass raised, and the room goes quiet because she has that quality, the absolute certainty that a room belongs to her.
“To Odyssey,” she says. “Mason and I have spent years on her. People ask me why we keep pushing after every failure, and the answer is simple: some of us are willing to risk everything for history.” She looks around the room, letting the pause work.
“There are people who talk about the future, and there are people who build it. To the ones who build it.”
Applause. Real applause. The colonels clap.
The photographer shoots. Mason applauds too, because the toast is about the mission and not applauding would be the story, and I sit at table eleven and clap with everyone else, my palms stinging, while Jessica Mort toasts herself as the woman at my husband’s side in history.
Some of us are willing to risk everything. And some of us, the subtext says, sitting at table eleven in her forgiving dress, stayed home and got small.
What she doesn’t know, what she would never believe, is that I am not sitting here feeling small. I am sitting here doing math.
Three nights ago, Simon’s reflux went nuclear at two a.m. I walked him for three hours. Mason slept through it in the guest room down the hall because he had an early briefing, and I let him, because one of us had to be functional and the rocket needed him.
That was my choice and I stand by it. But I stood in that dark nursery at four a.m., holding my screaming son, and I knew with complete certainty that somewhere Jessica Mort was asleep in silk, resting up to be the woman willing to risk everything.
She risks money and reputation. I risk my body, my sleep, my sanity, and my children’s first weeks of life. But her risk photographs better.
After the speeches, after the dessert, I find Mason near the stage, shaking hands, and I wait for a gap, and I say, quietly, “Walk me out.”
He reads my face and comes.
Outside, the desert night is cold and enormous and full of stars, and for a moment neither of us speaks, and I hate that it’s beautiful.
“The seating chart,” I say.
“I know. I saw it when I sat down. Eve, I asked Julia, and she said the event team—”
“The event team works for whoever leaned on them, and we both know exactly who leaned on them, and then she spent the whole night touching your arm in front of a photographer, and then she stood up, uninvited, and gave a toast about how the two of you are the ones willing to risk everything, and you applauded.”
“Because the toast was about the mission—”
“The toast was about her, beside you, under the lights, in my seat.”
He drags both hands down his face. “What did you want me to do? Stand up and correct the seating chart? Publicly freeze out the CEO of the company whose technology we need, forty-eight hours before a test, with two hundred people and press watching? That becomes a story, Eve. A Tailor-Mort rupture story, the night before we need her team in our blockhouse. It would have endangered the negotiations. It could have damaged the mission.”
“Okay.” I nod. I have been saving up this calm all night, across the whole hangar, from table eleven.
“So here’s my question. When does it count?
When does humiliating your wife become serious enough to be an emergency?
Because Jessica’s books are not an emergency.
Jessica calling your rocket your baby on camera is not an emergency.
Jessica taking my seat and toasting you as her partner in history, in front of everyone we know, is not an emergency.
So tell me the threshold, Mason. What does she have to do? ”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. The hangar glows behind him, all that light, all those people who love him.
“After the test,” he says finally. “I will sit down with her after the test and I will make this stop. I swear to you.”
Later. The answer is always, structurally, later.
“Do you know what I keep thinking about?” I say.
“The seating chart was set days ago. Someone moved me off that table days ago, and you sat down tonight and saw her name card where mine should be, and you made a decision in about half a second. And the decision was that my humiliation was absorbable and the negotiation was not. You didn’t even agonize.
That’s the part I can’t get past. I’m the line item you can always afford. ”
“That is not—” His voice cracks. “You are not a line item. You are the whole reason any of this matters. Odyssey is for you. It’s for the twins. Everything I build, I’m building so our kids grow up in a world where their dad—”
“Where their dad did something historic, yes, I’ve read the brochure. Mason. They are five weeks old. They don’t need history. They need the four o’clock feed.”
A car pulls around — his security, taking him back to the blockhouse for the pre-test briefing.
“I have to do the briefing,” he says. “Come home with me after. Please. We’ll talk, really talk, I’ll move the—”
“Go to your briefing.”
He goes. The car swallows him, tail lights shrinking down the service road toward the blockhouse, toward the rocket, toward everything that always wins.
I stand under the stars in my dress that zips, and I go back inside to say my goodbyes.