Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The problem with a lie everyone believes is that everyone also wants the details, and Donovan and I had none ready, so we spent three evenings in his study inventing a romance convincing enough to survive a society that lived for exactly this kind of forensic gossip.
We decided he'd noticed me at a fundraiser eight months earlier, long before Charles's engagement party, which gave the story a believable head start and made our sudden public reveal look less like a reaction to scandal and more like a slow burn finally coming to light.
We decided he'd been too occupied with a hostile acquisition to pursue anything at the time, which was true, separately, and which lent the whole fiction a texture of plausible inconvenience that fiction usually lacks.
"What did I wear," I asked him, the second evening, testing the edges of how detailed this fiction needed to be. "If anyone asks what I wore the night you noticed me."
"Blue," he said, without missing a beat.
"Something simple. I'd tell people the dress wasn't the point, which would be true, since nobody believes a man falls for fashion and not the woman, but it would also let me avoid having to invent a specific dress that some helpful guest might remember differently than I describe it. "
I admired the precision of that answer more than I wanted to admit. Charles had never once thought that far ahead about anything involving me, not even the truth, let alone a lie he'd need to defend under scrutiny.
We rehearsed the small things too, the things that make a story breathe rather than recite.
How he'd supposedly asked a mutual acquaintance for my number and lost his nerve for two weeks before calling.
How I'd supposedly found him arrogant at first, which made the room laugh every time we told it, because nobody doubted for a second that Donovan Winthrop could come across as arrogant on a first impression, and the detail's plausibility did more work than any grand romantic gesture could have.
In private, rehearsing, it felt mechanical, two people memorizing a script the way actors memorize blocking, careful and a little stiff.
In public, it felt entirely different. The first time we told the story together, at a dinner with three of Donovan's board members and their wives, he reached over without warning and laced his fingers through mine on the table, and told the room he'd known the moment he saw me that every other woman he'd ever considered marrying had simply been waiting room.
He said it with such calm, total possession that I nearly believed him myself for half a second, which unsettled me more than I let show.
I'd spent five years with a man who acting out his devotion only when an audience required it and dropped the act the instant we were alone.
Donovan stepped into the role of devotion with an audience and then, in the car afterward, in the silence of the elevator, kept some small ember of it lit anyway.
Not enough to call it real. Just enough that I started keeping track.
I told myself pretending desire well was simply a skill, the same as any other skill a competent person might happen to be excellent at. I told myself that more than once over those three evenings, which in hindsight should have told me something about how hard I was working to believe it.