Chapter Four
Nadine has known me since college, which means she's known me longer than Christian has, and she's one of the only people left who remembers who I was before I became someone's wife.
We met for lunch on Thursday at the place near her office, a small bistro with tables too close together for the kind of conversation we usually ended up having, so we kept our voices low out of habit rather than necessity.
"How's gala week treating you?" she asked, already knowing the answer from the way I'd sighed into my chair.
"Like every gala week." I unfolded my napkin. "I've become fluent in seating charts."
"You could run events professionally at this point."
"I did, once. Sort of." I said it lightly, the way I say most things about the years before Christian's company existed, but Nadine caught something in it anyway, the way she always does.
"You wanted to do the design thing," she said. "Before. The textile stuff."
"Textile design," I said. "God, I haven't said that out loud in years."
"You had a whole plan. Portfolio, that program in Chicago you got into and didn't go to."
"I got in the same month Christian's company almost went under." I said it simply, a fact rather than a grievance, because that's genuinely how I've always held it. "There wasn't a version of that year where I packed a bag and left for a program while he was trying to keep four people employed."
"I know," Nadine said. "I'm not saying you made the wrong call."
"I didn't feel like I was making a call at all, honestly.
It felt more like the only thing available.
" I turned my water glass slowly on the table.
"I wanted to help him. I wasn't performing some huge sacrifice in my head.
I just wanted us to survive that year, and then I wanted to survive the next one, and at some point survival turned into just how we lived. "
"And the program in Chicago?"
"Deferred, then declined, then eventually I stopped thinking of it as something I'd deferred and started thinking of it as something that had belonged to a version of me who didn't exist anymore.
" I smiled, though it didn't feel entirely like a smile.
"That sounds sadder than it was. I wasn't miserable.
I loved him. I loved the life we were building.
I just don't think about the portfolio much these days. "
"Do you regret it?"
I thought about that honestly, because Nadine deserved an honest answer and because it was a question I hadn't let myself sit with in a long time.
"No," I said finally. "I don't regret giving it up. I regret, maybe, that nobody remembers I had it to give up in the first place. Including me, most days."
"What would you even do with it now? If you picked it back up."
"I have no idea," I admitted. "I used to have such a clear vision. Textiles, small batch, something handmade in a world that was already going the other direction. I don't know if that girl's plan would even make sense anymore. I don't know if I'd even recognize it as mine."
"Would you want to find out?"
The question sat there between us, bigger than I think either of us expected it to be.
"I don't know," I said again, and this time it felt less like deflection and more like the truth.
"I haven't let myself want anything that specifically in a long time.
It's easier to want things for the house.
For Christian's mother's birthday. For the gala.
Those wants have clear endings. I know what winning looks like. "
"And the portfolio doesn't."
"The portfolio never had a clear ending," I said. "That was sort of the point of it. It was supposed to be mine to define."
"Do you remember the piece you were working on right before you got the acceptance letter?" Nadine asked. "The one with the indigo dye, the one you were so obsessed with getting right that you dyed half your bathroom blue in the process."
"God, I forgot about that." I laughed, surprised by how quickly the memory came back, vivid and whole, the smell of the dye bath, the stained grout I never fully got clean. "I was trying to replicate a technique I'd seen in a museum exhibit. I never did get it quite right."
"You were so alive when you talked about that stuff," Nadine said.
"I used to love visiting you in that apartment because you'd have fabric hanging everywhere, drying, and you'd talk my ear off about weft and warp and I didn't understand half of it, but I loved watching you care about something that much. "
"I did care about it that much," I said, quietly. "I think I forgot how much, honestly, until just now."
"Where did the acceptance letter even end up? Do you still have it?"
"I think so," I said. "Somewhere in a box. I haven't looked at it in years. I'm honestly a little afraid to, if I'm being truthful. I don't know if I'd feel proud of the girl who got in, or sad for her, or both at once."
"Probably both," Nadine said, gently. "That seems like the honest answer for most things we used to want."
I picked at the food on my plate for a moment, working up to something I hadn't planned to say out loud.
"Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if the company hadn't nearly failed that year.
If Christian hadn't needed the money. I don't wonder it with any bitterness, I want to be clear about that.
I just wonder, the way you wonder about a road you didn't take.
I don't regret the road I did take. I'm just curious what the other one looked like. "
"That's allowed," Nadine said. "Wondering isn't the same as regretting."
"I know," I said. "It just feels like it, sometimes, when I let myself do it for too long. Like wondering is a small betrayal of the choice I actually made."
"It's not," Nadine said, firm now. "You're allowed to love the life you built and still be curious about the one you set aside to build it. Those aren't in competition with each other."
Nadine watched me for a moment, the particular look she gets when she's deciding whether to push further. "Has something happened? You seem different this week. Sharper."
"Nothing's happened," I said, which was true, technically, in the sense that no single event had occurred.
It was more that a hundred small moments, the booklet, the events girl's question, Damon's comment about how lucky Christian was, had begun accumulating into something I couldn't yet name, a pressure building somewhere behind my ribs that had nowhere to go.
"You'd tell me," Nadine said. "If something had happened."
"I'd tell you," I said, and meant it, even though I couldn't have told her, at that point, what exactly there was to tell.
We talked, for a while, about smaller things.
Her sister's wedding, still eight months out and already generating chaos.
A book she wanted me to read, something about women who'd given up careers for their families and what happened when they tried to reclaim them, which she mentioned almost sheepishly, like she suspected it might feel closer to home than she wanted to admit out loud.
I told her about Christian's mother's dress dilemma, navy or green, and we spent a genuinely happy ten minutes debating the merits of both, the easy, ordinary kind of conversation that has kept us close for over twenty years.
"I love you, you know," Nadine said, as we were gathering our things to leave. "I don't just mean that as a thing people say. I mean I've watched you build an entire life around making everyone else's days easier, and I love you, and sometimes I worry about you."
"I'm fine," I said, automatically, the way I always say it.
"I know you're fine," Nadine said. "Fine's never really been my worry."
We hugged goodbye on the sidewalk, and by the time I got to my car the conversation had mostly settled, but it followed me home anyway, sitting in the passenger seat of my mind the whole drive, that phrase circling back on itself: the only thing available.
I had given up the program in Chicago the same way I had given up the inheritance, the way I had given up a hundred smaller things over fifteen years, no one had demanded it of me.
At the time it had simply seemed like the obvious, uncomplicated thing a person does for the people she loves.
It only became complicated in retrospect, when I looked around at the life those choices had built and noticed that only one name was on the door.
I stopped at a bookstore on the way home, something I did more out of habit than intention, and found myself, without quite planning to, in the small design section near the back, flipping through a book on contemporary textile artists.
I recognized several names from my old program, women I'd once considered peers, whose careers I'd followed loosely over the years the way you follow people from a life you no longer live, admiring their work in gallery write-ups and craft fair announcements without ever letting myself feel the full weight of the comparison.
One name stopped me. A woman named Odalys, two years behind me in undergrad, someone I remembered as talented but not remarkably so, someone whose work I might once have privately considered less interesting than my own.
Her profile in the book described a modest but thriving studio practice, handwoven pieces sold through a handful of boutique galleries, exactly the kind of small, self-directed business I'd once imagined building myself.
I stood in the aisle for a long time, the book open in my hands, feeling something complicated that wasn't quite envy and wasn't quite grief, something closer to a quiet, unresolved ache for a version of my life that had never gotten the chance to develop past its earliest sketches.
I bought the book, in the end, and carried it home, and tucked it into the bottom of a drawer where I wouldn't have to look at it every day but would know, always, exactly where to find it.
That evening, before Christian got home, I found myself in the closet office again, standing in front of the same box I'd gone through earlier in the week.
I didn't open it. I just stood there for a moment, hand resting on the lid, feeling the particular weight of a decision I hadn't made yet and wasn't sure I was ready to make.