6. Natalie
CHAPTER SIX
Natalie
"And the award goes to Kessler Outdoor."
The room erupted. Daniel's hand tightened around mine for one electric second before he let go to stand, straightening his jacket, and the applause carried him all the way to the stage while I clapped until my palms stung, tears already threatening, stupidly, happily, because whatever else the night had thrown at me, this part was real and it was ours and I had wanted this for him for as long as I'd known him.
He took the small crystal trophy from the board chair and stepped to the microphone, and I watched him find his footing the way he always did in front of a crowd, that easy, unshowy confidence that had talked our very first commercial client into a contract when we had nothing to show him but a folder of sketches and a lot of nerve.
"Twelve years ago," he began, "this company was a card table in my garage and a truck that only started about half the time." Laughter, warm, the room already leaning toward him. "I want to thank a few people who made tonight possible, because I sure as hell didn't do it alone."
I settled back in my chair, ready to hear it, ready for the moment I'd been quietly rehearsing all week without admitting I was rehearsing it, the sentence where he'd look for me in the crowd and say something about the garage, about the two of us, about the woman who'd covered payroll out of her own savings account the month the company almost didn't make it.
He thanked the board. He thanked the trade association.
He thanked his crew, calling out Marcus by name, calling out two of the original guys who'd been with him since year two, and the room applauded each name warmly.
He thanked Ben, briefly, for nine years of running crews nobody else wanted to run, and Ben, three tables over, raised his glass with a grin that didn't quite reach his eyes, already, I would think much later, watching the same absence I was watching.
"And I want to thank Rebecca Voss," he said, "who's been the backbone of this company's growth for the last six years. Rebecca, I could not have built what we've built without you. You've been there for every deal, every crisis, every three a.m. phone call, and I am endlessly grateful."
The room applauded. Rebecca stood briefly at her table, hand pressed to her chest in a gesture of practiced modesty, and sat back down glowing.
He thanked his parents, seated near the front, his mother already dabbing at her eyes with a cocktail napkin.
He thanked the client who'd taken a chance on Kessler Outdoor's very first commercial contract, a man in the third row who raised his glass.
He thanked, by name, a loan officer who'd approved financing when no one else would, a woman I vaguely remembered meeting once, years ago, at a closing that had taken place at our own kitchen table because we couldn't afford an actual office to hold it in.
He did not say my name.
I sat perfectly still in my chair while the applause rolled on around me, my hands moving automatically through the motions of clapping, my face arranged, I hoped, into something that looked like pride and not like the sensation actually moving through me, which was closer to falling, a long silent drop with no floor announcing itself.
I thought about the invoices I used to write by hand at our kitchen table because we couldn't afford software yet, filed under a system only I understood.
I thought about answering client calls in the parking lot of Jack's pediatrician's office because there was no one else to answer them.
I thought about the twenty-two hundred dollars I'd pulled from my own savings, the account my grandmother had left me, to cover a payroll run the month a client paid ninety days late and Daniel hadn't slept in four nights worrying about it.
I thought about bringing dinner to a job site at nine o'clock at night because the crew was working through a deadline and Daniel had forgotten to eat since lunch.
I thought about the winter our first real commercial client had almost walked over a missed deadline, and how I had personally called the man's office three times in one day, rehearsing what to say in the bathroom mirror beforehand because I was terrified of losing the account that would let Daniel finally hire a second crew.
I thought about the loan closing itself, actually, now that his name had been read aloud, how I'd worn the only blazer I owned to sit across from that banker and answer questions about our projected revenue with a confidence I hadn't remotely felt, because Daniel had been too nervous to trust his own voice that morning and had asked me, quietly, in the truck beforehand, to do most of the talking.
I thought about a hundred small unpaid things that had never shown up on a balance sheet because they weren't the kind of thing a balance sheet measured, and I understood, sitting in that chair in the green dress he'd once told me did something to his brain, that almost no one in that room knew any of it had happened.
Twelve years of my own labor, and the speech had run four minutes and I hadn't merited a sentence.
I looked around the room while the applause continued, searching, absurdly, for someone who might know, who might turn to me and say something that acknowledged what I'd just watched happen.
Whitney caught my eye from the back near the florals table, her face already sharpening with concern, already reading something in my expression that I hadn't managed to hide as well as I'd thought; she pressed a hand flat to her own chest, a small, silent I see you.
Paula, at a table near the stage, wasn't clapping quite as enthusiastically as everyone around her, and when our eyes met for half a second, something passed between us that felt like recognition, though neither of us could have named it out loud in that room.
My phone buzzed once in my clutch, a single text from Whitney sent from thirty feet away. *He forgot you. I saw it. I'm so sorry.*
I didn't answer it. I put the phone away and kept clapping.
Daniel wrapped up the speech, thanked the association one more time, and started back toward our table to a fresh round of applause. I watched him come, watched the exact moment his eyes found mine across the twenty feet of ballroom floor, watched his face begin, at last, to register something.
Whatever he saw on my face in that moment, it was enough to make the easy, victorious smile falter, just slightly, just at the corners, the way a man's smile does when he suspects, without yet knowing why, that he has done something he cannot undo.
He sat down beside me, trophy still in hand, and the room was still applauding, and the trio was already easing into the next song, and I smiled at him the way you smile at your husband in a room full of three hundred people, because there was nowhere in that room to say what needed saying, and because some part of me was still, God help me, waiting for him to lean over and say the thing that would fix it.
He didn't. Not yet. He set the trophy on the table between us, kissed my cheek, and said, "I can't believe that just happened," his voice full of an unclouded joy I couldn't bring myself to begrudge him even as it widened, second by second, the distance that had just opened up between us.
I picked up my wine glass, found it empty, and set it back down without saying anything at all.