Tristan
The acquisition report on my desk has been open for twenty minutes and I’ve read maybe four sentences of it. This is not how I normally operate.
“Goddammit,” I mutter, leaning back in my chair and loosening my tie a bit.
Chloe has been distant for a week. Ever since that nightmare that woke her up in the middle of the night and her refusal to talk about it the next morning, something between us has shifted in a way I really fucking hate.
We’re still sharing a bed, still moving around each other in the house, still working together on Eclipse Studios, but whatever was starting to open up between us has closed back down.
Sleeping next to her every night and not touching her is like fucking torture—but that’s not the part that’s actually getting to me. It’s the other things I desperately want, the parts of her she keeps behind glass.
Her thoughts. Her dreams. Her fears.
What she’s carrying around that she won’t let me near.
I want to know what scared her badly enough to make her cry against my chest in the dark and then pack it away by morning like it never happened.
I want to know what she’s thinking when she looks at me across the dinner table with that expression I can’t read.
I want the woman I saw on the couch watching Casablanca and talking about cinematography like she’d forgotten to be careful around me, the one who laughed at my jokes and forgot to hold herself at arm’s length.
Instead, I’ve got the composed, professional, impenetrable version, and she’s very good at it, and it’s making it so fucking difficult to give a damn about a forty-page acquisition report.
My phone rings, and my mother’s face pops up on the screen.
She’s been calling more often lately, and I understand why.
Losing my father was complicated for everyone in this family, but she lost a husband, and the grief is real regardless of what their marriage looked like from the outside.
My brothers and I are all dealing with it in our various ways.
My way involves not dealing with it and hoping that I can bury my complicated feelings about him forever.
We’ll see how that goes.
I pick up, swiping with my thumb before tucking the phone against my ear. “Hey, Mom.”
“Tristan,” my mother greets me. “Are you working?”
I nod, even though she can’t see me—and even though, at this particular moment, it’s not completely true. “Always am.”
“Are you too busy for lunch?”
There’s enough on my to-do list that the answer should probably be yes, but I won’t turn her down. She needs me, and she’s family.
“No,” I lie. “Where do you want to go?”
We settle on Paulie’s, the Italian place downtown she’s always liked. I close the report, grab my jacket, and have my driver take me across town. When I arrive, I spot my mother at a corner table. She lifts a hand to wave me over.
“How are you?” I ask as I take the seat opposite her.
She offers me a tired smile, eyes a bit red around the rims. “Oh, you know. Just taking it one day at a time.”
I nod and try to catch a waiter’s eye to order a drink. It’s far too early for whiskey, so it’ll have to be coffee, something to keep me going when I get back to the office.
“I’ve been keeping busy with the charity work.” There’s a hint of pride in her voice. “It helps to have something to focus on, you know? And it’s such a good organization.”
Lately, my mother has been involved with an LA-based environmental group, helping them finance their expeditions to clear garbage from the Pacific.
She’s always cared about environmental causes, and throwing herself into this work seems to be how she’s channeling her energy and coping with her grief.
“Anyway, enough about me.” She waves a hand. “How are you? How’s married life?”
I take a beat before answering, unsure how much to reveal. She’s been through enough already with my father’s passing, and I don’t want to add to it.
Besides, I’m not entirely sure how to answer. I’m closer to my mother than I was to my father, but we’ve never had the most emotionally open relationship. This family doesn’t deal in feelings and honesty.
“It’s complicated,” I admit with a shrug, opting for the truth without the details. It’s the simplest way to sum up the mess that’s come to define my marriage to Chloe.
“Complicated?” Her eyebrows rise. “Well, that’s one way to put it, I suppose.”
I can hear the curiosity in her voice. She’s digging.
I meet her gaze and shrug again. “Yeah. Complicated.”
My vague answer will only make her dig harder. My mother has always been perceptive, good at reading between the lines. I can feel her pushing for more, but I’m not sure how much I’m willing to give her yet.
There’s a question I’ve never asked her, though, one that’s been sitting at the back of my mind for years.
We’ve never gone there before, maybe out of mutual understanding or a shared agreement to leave painful memories alone.
But the conversation is already close to that line, and I can’t ignore it.
“What about you?” I ask, clearing my throat.
“What do you mean?” Her brows knit together, lips pursed.
“What was it like?” I get the words out before my better judgment can shut me up. “Being married to someone you didn’t love for so many years?”
A flicker of surprise crosses her eyes, then disappears. She seems lost in her own thoughts, her gaze distant. When she finally speaks, her voice is measured and quiet.
“Who says I didn’t love your father?”
Her response catches me off guard.
“I mean, I know it was an arranged marriage.” I speak slowly. “I figured you two were more like business partners.”
“It was an arranged marriage,” she confirms with a nod. “But I loved your father. I loved him more than words could ever express.”
The emotion in her voice is striking, the honesty of it. There’s something open in her words, a vulnerability that shows me what I never managed to see.
“He was a complicated man.” Her voice carries sadness and something else underneath it. “Difficult to get close to, yes, but he loved with his whole heart. He loved hard, and intensely. Being close to him was like being close to—to fire.”
I lean forward, drawn in despite myself. I’ve never heard her speak this way before.
“We fell in love at the beginning.” Her voice softens. “But then things started to shift. Your father became obsessed with work, and we didn’t take care of what we had like we should have.”
I can feel the regret in her words, everything she hasn’t said for years.
“It stayed there between us, but it stopped growing.” Her voice falters slightly. “We were so focused on the day-to-day responsibilities of life that we forgot to put each other first. It was always there, but it never… grew.”
A quiet sadness settles over her face, and my chest constricts, filling me with an urge to ease some of the pain. I reach out, my hand finding hers, and give it a squeeze.
The waiter interrupts the moment as he comes up to our table, flipping open a notepad and clearing his throat. I pull back and look over the menu while my mother gives her order. When the waiter’s eyes turn to me, I ask for a black coffee and a Caprese salad.
We eat in relative silence, with occasional small talk. I tell my mother about the progress of Eclipse Studios, and she listens with interest. We don’t bring up my father again, but her words still echo through my mind as we finish our food and the waiter clears our plates.
As my mother and I rise from our seats, getting ready to leave the restaurant, something close to calm settles over me. Lunch has been a break from the noise in my head, a few minutes away from it all.
But as we make our way toward the exit, that calm crumbles.
There, at the hostess’s stand, is Iris.
She’s in a tailored outfit that shows off her slender figure.
Her flame-red hair is slicked back into a tight ponytail, her angular face on full display.
A fitted black blazer with sharp lapels adds a touch of authority to her appearance, and a thin gold necklace sits against her slender neck, its pendant glinting in the light.
Discomfort shoots through me as I recognize the necklace. It’s one I got her, a birthday present from years ago. I wonder if she put it on for a reason. If she somehow knew she’d run into me here.
That’s impossible, of course, but still… avoiding Iris seems impossible too.
I remember Chloe’s envious recounting of her run-in with Iris at the gym, and my jaw tightens.
My ex spots me almost instantly, her eyes locking on mine. A smile twitches at the corners of her red-lined lips.
“Tristan!” She lifts a hand to wave. “What a surprise to see you here.”
She comes toward me with a smile full of false warmth, and tension coils in my chest. I want to put distance between us, as fast as possible. There’s no need for pleasantries with someone who has been so actively unpleasant.
“Congratulations on your wedding.” Her smile shifts into an ironic smirk. “I saw your photos online. You looked great.”
I give her a tight-lipped nod and step back slightly. “Thank you.” My tone has no warmth in it. “Excuse me.”
I move past her, focused on putting as much space between us as I can. I can feel her eyes on my back, but I refuse to look, determined to leave her behind me where she belongs.
My mother follows in my wake. I can practically hear her mind racing, but if she has anything to say about my run-in with Iris, she keeps it to herself. Her car is waiting at the curb, and she gives me a one-armed hug before climbing into the back seat.
Alone on the sidewalk, I pull out my phone to call my own driver. Once the car is on the way, I glance back at the restaurant’s entrance, half wondering if Iris will come out and try to talk to me again.
The best way to avoid that is to be busy. Without thinking about it, I dial Gabriel’s number and put the phone to my ear.
“Hello, this is Gabriel,” he answers.
My oldest brother is always so fucking serious. He answers the phone like he’s taking a call from the president even when it’s one of us calling.
“Gabe,” I mutter, “you have caller ID, right? There’s no need for that.”
“What do you need?” Straight to business, as always.
“I just got out of lunch with Mom,” I tell him.
“And how was that?” He sounds distracted, busy. He’s been handling the rest of my father’s estate, which, given the size of it, is basically a full-time job at the moment.
“Good. Listen, I have a favor to ask of you.”
“What?”
“I need to know if there was anything passed down in the will, or found among Dad’s possessions. Any notebooks or journals, something like that.”
There’s a moment’s pause. “No,” Gabriel says finally, his tone curious. “Why do you ask?”
I shake my head. “No reason.”
The way my mother talked about my father just now is stuck in my mind. I desperately want some more insight into my father’s head, more information about the kind of person he was behind closed doors. A way to understand him, even now, when it’s far too late.
“I’ll let you know if anything like that comes up,” my brother promises. “I’m still sorting through the rest of his things.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
My car pulls up to the curb, and I catch my reflection in its tinted windows. I say goodbye and hang up as I get in, my mother’s words still churning through my head as I settle onto the plush seat.
I think about Chloe lying with her back to me on her side of the bed, not saying anything, carrying whatever the fuck is eating away at her and not letting me near it.
My mother said she and my father had something real.
She said it stalled because they stopped doing the work.
And even though I promised myself I’d never be like my father in all the ways that count, here I am sitting in the back of a car not knowing what’s going on in my own wife’s head, not knowing what woke her up crying in the dark.
Not knowing how to get past a wall I can feel but can’t see.