7. Daniel
CHAPTER SEVEN
Daniel
Iknew something was wrong before we made it to the car.
Natalie was quiet in the way she got quiet when she was building an argument in her head instead of having it out loud, and I spent the walk to the parking lot running through the evening trying to find the specific thing I'd broken.
The client's mistake, Rebecca for Natalie, that had been embarrassing but not my fault, and I'd corrected it fast. The work wife joke, maybe, though that had gotten a laugh and I honestly couldn't remember exactly what I'd said, just that it had come out easy the way jokes did when I wasn't thinking too hard about them.
Rebecca caught us near the coat check on the way out, still glowing from the night, and touched my arm lightly. "You were incredible up there. Twelve years, Daniel. I hope you actually let yourself feel that tonight instead of already worrying about Monday."
"Trying to," I said.
"You should be so proud of him," she said, turning to Natalie with what looked, to me at the time, like genuine warmth.
"I know it probably feels strange sometimes, being married to someone this many people want a piece of.
I just want you to know, from the inside, he never once let any of it go to his head. "
"That's kind of you to say," Natalie said, her voice perfectly pleasant, and it wasn't until much later, replaying the moment, that I understood how strange it must have sounded to her, a woman she barely knew offering reassurance about a marriage she had no standing to reassure anyone about, however well-intentioned the comment might have been.
"You okay?" I asked, once we were in the car.
"I'm fine." She looked out the window, not at me.
"You don't seem fine."
"I'm tired. It was a long night." She said it in a voice that wasn't lying exactly but wasn't telling the truth either, and I let it sit for a block or two, because I genuinely believed, in that specific and limited way a man believes what's convenient, that the speech itself had been the whole problem.
"Hey," I said, reaching over to find her hand in the dark of the car. "I should have said your name up there. I got caught up thanking everybody in the room and I completely blanked, and I am sorry, that was a real miss on my part."
She let me hold her hand. She didn't pull away, which I took, incorrectly, as evidence that I'd found the wound and started closing it. "Thank you for saying that."
"I mean it. Twelve years and I forget the one person who actually built it with me.
" I said it lightly, self-deprecating, the way I apologized for most things, quick and warm and confident the apology would land the way it always had.
"I'll make it up to you. We'll do something, just us, this week. "
"Okay," she said, and something in her voice made me think the conversation was actually closing instead of just pausing, and I drove the rest of the way home congratulating myself on having caught the problem and fixed it before it could fester.
The babysitter, a college kid named Riley who'd watched Maddie and Jack since Jack was in diapers, reported that both kids were asleep, Maddie having stayed up an extra twenty minutes insisting she wasn't tired while visibly fighting to keep her eyes open.
Natalie paid her, walked her to her car the way she always did regardless of the hour, and came back inside while I paid the last of the caterer's balance from my phone at the kitchen counter.
Rebecca had texted twice by the time we got home, both about Monday's schedule, nothing urgent, and I answered the first one standing in the kitchen while Natalie went up to check on the babysitter's handiwork and the kids.
I didn't think anything of it. It was eleven o'clock and I was still wearing a tux and I answered a work text because that was simply what I did, the way another man might check a score or read one more headline before bed.
Natalie came back downstairs a few minutes later, out of the dress, wrapped in the old flannel robe she'd had since before we were married, and found me still on my phone.
"Who's that," she asked, and something in her tone made me look up properly for the first time all night.
"Rebecca. Monday's schedule."
"At eleven o'clock on the night you just won an award."
"It's not a big deal, it's one text." I set the phone down, hearing myself say it and hearing, a half beat too late, how it sounded out loud in a kitchen where the night's earlier moments were apparently still very much alive for her.
"How many people at that gala thought Rebecca was your wife?" she asked.
The question landed strangely, sideways, not the question I'd been braced for. "What? Nobody thought that. Frank made an honest mistake, I corrected him immediately."
"Frank wasn't the only one." Her voice was even, controlled, the voice she used at client dinners when she was managing an awkward moment without letting anyone see the management happening.
"A woman on the awards board asked me if I was proud of everything you and Rebecca had built.
Somebody near the bar said work wife loud enough for half the room to hear.
And then you told a table full of people that you and Rebecca are basically the old married couple around here. "
"That was a joke, Nat."
"I know it was a joke." Something cracked, just slightly, in the evenness of her voice. "That's what I can't stop thinking about. It was so easy for you to say it. It came out like something you'd said a hundred times before, because you probably have."
"That's not fair. It doesn't mean anything, it's just office humor, everybody has some version of that joke about somebody they work closely with."
"How many people at your company would say that about the two of you, do you think? Genuinely. If I asked around."
I opened my mouth to say nobody would, and then, standing there in the kitchen at eleven forty-five with my bow tie hanging loose around my neck, I actually thought about it, actually ran the tape back through Deb's comment in the hallway that same week, through the way half the office referred to Rebecca as though she came with the job description, and I didn't have an answer that survived the two seconds it took me to consider the question honestly.
"I don't know," I admitted.
"That's the answer, then." Natalie pulled the robe tighter around herself, though the kitchen wasn't cold. "I'm not accusing you of anything with her. I want to be really clear about that, because I know that's where your head is going to go, and I need you to hear that it's not where mine is."
"Then what is this?"
"Tonight, three separate people looked at you standing next to a woman and assumed she was your wife.
They aren't stupid. That's what it looks like from the outside.
That's the impression twelve years of your life together has created, and I was standing right there in a green dress you picked out yourself, watching it happen, and I didn't have a single thing to say that would have made it not true. "
I didn't have anything to say to that either.
I stood in my own kitchen, still half in a tuxedo, holding a phone I now desperately wished I hadn't picked up ten minutes earlier, and understood, distantly, that whatever had happened tonight was bigger than a missed sentence in a speech, though I still could not have told you, if you'd asked me right then, exactly what its actual shape was.
"I'm sorry," I said, because it was true and because it was the only thing I had. "I'm sorry it happened, and I'm sorry I didn't see it happening while it was happening."
Natalie looked at me for a long moment, something exhausted and searching in her face, and then she turned toward the stairs. "I know you're sorry, Daniel. I believe that you're sorry. I just don't think you understand yet what you're sorry for."
She went up to bed. I stood in the kitchen a while longer, turning the trophy over in my hands where I'd set it on the counter, twelve years of my life etched into a piece of crystal that suddenly felt like it weighed a great deal more than it had two hours ago.
I thought about Rebecca's comment near the coat check, the strange presumption of it, a woman I employed offering my wife reassurance about a marriage that belonged to neither of us, and for the first time that night an old, uneasy discomfort surfaced, though I still couldn't have named what it was.
I went to bed beside a wife who lay very still and very awake beside me, and I still believed, that night, that I had already found and fixed the problem.
I had not. I hadn't even correctly identified it yet.
I would spend most of the next several weeks discovering exactly how wrong I'd been, and by the time I understood it fully, I would already have made it a great deal worse.