Chapter 3 Daisy
DAISY
Klaus Brandt laughs like a man who has never once worried about money, which is to say loudly and without apology.
The sound fills the private dining room at Aurelius, bouncing off the wood-paneled walls and the ridiculous crystal chandelier that probably costs more than my father's truck.
I've been sitting through these annual dinners for five years now, and Klaus's laugh is the one constant I can count on: big, genuine, slightly too much.
"Five years," Klaus says, raising his glass of wine that costs more per bottle than my first month's rent at my old apartment. "Five years of partnership, and look at us. Still standing, still profitable, still friends."
Adam lifts his own glass with the measured precision he brings to everything. "To continued success."
"To continued success, yes, but also…" Klaus's eyes twinkle as he gestures between us with his wine, "… to love. To marriage. To the things that matter more than contracts, ja?"
I smile because that's what I do at these dinners. I smile and I nod and I play the role of Mrs. Adam Smith, devoted wife, perfect accessory, warm enough to satisfy Klaus's old-fashioned romantic sensibilities without being so warm that anyone mistakes me for someone with opinions.
Victor Smith sits at the far end of the table, cutting his steak with surgical precision.
He hasn't spoken directly to me all evening, which is actually an improvement over dinners where he acknowledges my existence only to correct my word choice or question my understanding of shipping logistics.
Ingrid, Adam's mother, sits beside him in pearls and quiet composure, occasionally offering me small smiles that feel like apologies for her husband's existence.
"A pleasure working with you both," Klaus continues, settling back in his chair with the satisfaction of a man surveying his kingdom. "And I suspect more to come, eh? The expansion talks are going well. Very well."
He winks at Adam, and a look passes between them: business, probably, the kind of deal-making that happens in looks and implications rather than words. I've learned to recognize when I'm being excluded from a conversation happening right in front of me.
"But enough business." Klaus waves his hand dismissively, turning his full attention to me.
His eyes are kind, genuinely kind, and that's the thing about Klaus.
He actually cares about people in a way that seems almost naive for a man of his wealth and position.
"You know what I want. What I ask for every year. "
I do know. My stomach tightens.
"The story," Klaus says, beaming. "How you two met. I never get tired of hearing it."
Adam's hand finds mine under the table. The gesture should feel intimate, reassuring. Instead it feels like stage direction, a cue for the performance we're about to give.
"You tell it better than I do," I say to Adam, because that's my line. That's always my line.
He squeezes my fingers once, briefly, and then he begins.
"It was a Tuesday," Adam says, and his voice shifts, warmer than his usual flat affect. "April. I was in the financial district for a meeting that had run long, and I ducked into a coffee shop to get out of the rain."
The rain. There was no rain. We met in a conference room where I'd just accused him of destroying my family, and the only precipitation was the sweat on my palms as I clutched a folder full of evidence against his company.
I remember the fluorescent lights. The long table between us. The way he looked at me like I was a problem to be solved rather than a person to be met.
"She was sitting by the window," Adam continues, "reading a book. Some romance novel with a terrible cover: a shirtless man, I think, holding a woman in an impractical dress."
"The classics," Klaus says approvingly.
"She was completely absorbed. I ordered my coffee and found myself watching her instead of checking my phone."
"Unusual for you," Victor comments dryly from across the table, not looking up from his steak. He's heard this story at every Klaus dinner for five years. Lorraine wrote it, and we've all been reciting our lines like the well-trained performers we are.
"Very unusual," Adam agrees. "But there was something about the way she laughed at something on the page. Out loud, completely unselfconscious. When she looked up and caught me watching, she didn't seem embarrassed at all."
"What did she say?" Ingrid asks, leaning forward. She knows what Daisy said. Everyone at this table knows what Daisy said. But the ritual demands the question, so she asks it.
"She said…" Adam pauses, the corner of his mouth curving into what almost looks like real fondness. "'The hero finally did something right.'"
I did say that. Once. But not to him, and not in a coffee shop. I said it to my roommate while we were reading on my dorm room floor, years before I'd ever heard the name Adam Smith.
Klaus chuckles appreciatively. "And you sat down?"
"I asked if I could. She said only if I promised not to judge her reading material.
" Adam's thumb traces a small circle on my palm: a gesture I've felt before, in moments that were actually real, and the contrast makes my chest ache.
"I told her I'd try. She said trying wasn't the same as succeeding. "
"That sounds like Daisy," Ingrid says warmly.
"I knew right then that I was in trouble," Adam says, and he delivers the line so perfectly that I almost believe it myself. Almost forget that our first real conversation involved lawyers and ultimatums and a marriage contract thicker than any romance novel I've ever reviewed.
Klaus sighs happily. "And the bookstore? The second date?"
"A week later. I asked her to show me her favorite bookstore."
"You asked?" Victor raises an eyebrow. "That seems unlike you. You usually demand."
"I asked," Adam repeats firmly. "And she took me to this tiny place downtown—"
"Hawthorne Books," I supply, because this is my cue, this is where I'm supposed to contribute to the fiction. "On Clement Street. It's closed now, but back then it had shelves crammed floor to ceiling, barely room to walk between them."
"We spent two hours there," Adam says. "She pulled book after book off the shelves, explaining why each one mattered to her."
"Every single one had dog-eared pages," I add. The dog-eared pages are real. That part is true. It's the only part that's true, woven into a fiction so seamlessly that sometimes I forget which memories are mine and which are Lorraine's invention.
"She told me that you can tell how much someone loves a book by how worn the pages are," Adam says. "That pristine spines mean the story never got inside you."
"I stand by that," I say, and I do. I actually said that to him once, in his study, when he asked why all my books looked destroyed. It was months after the wedding. Months after we'd already started telling this lie.
"And that," Klaus announces, raising his glass again, "is when you knew you would marry her."
"That's when I knew I was going to try very hard to make her want to marry me," Adam corrects. "Succeeding took considerably more effort."
"A man who listens," Ingrid says. "How refreshing."
"A man who remembered the difference between trying and succeeding," Klaus adds. "That's the real romance."
I watch Adam's face as he accepts their approval, the softening around his eyes, the slight curve of his mouth that almost passes for tenderness.
He's good at this. He's so good at this that Klaus believes every word, that Ingrid looks at her son with pride, that even Victor pauses his steak dissection to listen with what might be genuine interest. Adam tells this fake story better than he's ever told the real one.
Because the real one is a courthouse. A legal arrangement drafted by lawyers who charged more per hour than I made in a month.
A man who hit his head on a doorframe trying to carry me across a threshold because neither of us knew what we were doing and both of us were too stubborn to admit it.
And somehow, impossibly, I fell in love with him anyway.
"Tell me, Adam," Klaus says, swirling his wine thoughtfully, "what was the moment you realized you wanted more than dating? The moment you decided on marriage specifically?"
"That's a new question." Adam's hand is still on mine under the table, warm and steady, performing intimacy he rarely lets us have in private. "You've never asked that before."
"I'm an old man. I add new verses to the song occasionally."
Adam glances at me, and for just a second his expression flickers. Uncertainty, maybe. The script doesn't cover this part.
"There wasn't one moment," he says slowly. "It was accumulating. Small things that added up until I couldn't imagine a future that didn't include her."
"Such as?"
"The way she argued with me about everything." Adam's voice softens in a way I've rarely heard in private. "The way she never pretended to be impressed by things that didn't impress her. The way she made me laugh, which was—" He pauses. "Unexpected. I hadn't laughed much before her."
This isn't in the script. This isn't anything Lorraine wrote.
I look at him, trying to read his face, but he's still performing for Klaus, still playing the devoted husband who fell in love in a coffee shop during a rainstorm that never happened.
"She made me better," Adam says quietly. "Or she made me want to be better, which might be the same thing."
Klaus beams. Ingrid dabs at her eyes with her napkin. Victor continues eating his steak, but I could swear his expression has gentled.
And I sit there, my hand in my husband's hand, wondering which parts of what he just said were script and which parts were real. Wondering if he even knows anymore. Wondering if I do.
"Daisy."
Klaus is looking at me expectantly, and I realize I've missed something. "I'm sorry?"
"I asked," Klaus says gently, "what you love about him. Your husband tells such a beautiful story of meeting you, but I want to hear from the bride. What is it about this man?"