Chapter 21 Victoria
Victoria entered the ballroom with such dread, she almost wished she could go into early labor and recuse herself from the charity gala at which her firm had bought a table, thus mandating her presence.
She had no stomach for these things under the best of circumstances, but now, to have to go alone, without being able to enlist Ace as a social buffer, Victoria felt nearly as miserable as Liz had seemed in the weeks since she’d had Charlie.
Victoria’s eyes swept over the room: Gargantuan floral arrangements stood sentry in the middle of each table and an orgy of pretzel rolls filled bread baskets.
Gold-rimmed plates sat atop chargers and would soon host barely edible entrées.
The quality of food at these things seemed to plummet in direct disproportion to the cost of a seat.
Victoria reminded herself that it was for a good cause and that this was her last obligation requiring heels, facial gymnastics, and rubbery chicken paillard before she went on maternity leave.
Any positive feelings instantly evaporated when Victoria arrived at her table and found Mark leaning against his velvet slipcovered chair with an air of arrogance that would make Napoleon seem humble.
Mark’s blandly sweet but forgettable wife was sipping a glass of white wine on one side of him. Nash Winton stood on the other.
Victoria swallowed a bite of air. Nash turned to her, so she recovered as quickly as possible and offered everyone a polite wave.
“Victoria, I didn’t know you’d be here,” Nash said with a grin. “Mark mentioned that you were due any second.”
“How sweet of him to keep tabs on my uterus,” Victoria replied evenly.
“You look amazing!” Mark’s wife gushed. She apparently hadn’t gotten the memo that her husband and Victoria were engaged in the silent subterfuge of a cold war, and this compliment had been lobbed across enemy lines.
“Thank you,” Victoria said. “Shall we sit?” She did without waiting for anyone else, availing herself of one of the benefits of pregnancy. Nash sat down next to her.
“All right if I keep his seat warm?”
Nash gestured to the place card. It took a moment for Victoria to register her husband’s name on it.
She thought she had changed the RSVP to reflect that she would be attending on her own, but apparently this task had slipped through the cracks.
As a result, Victoria was being confronted with the uncertain status of their relationship by Nash Winton, of all people, in front of Mark Berg, really of all people.
“Ace actually can’t make it,” Victoria said.
“Lucky me,” Nash boomed. Did Victoria imagine the genuine pleasure on the billionaire’s face, and its exact opposite spreading across Mark’s like a rash?
They all turned their attention to the stage as the program began, a celebrity emcee trotting out jokes before urging the crowd of deep-pocketed attendees to dig even deeper during the live auction, which would follow the appetizer course.
Waiters appeared with salmon crostini and Victoria had an unfortunate flashback to the smoked-salmon-induced conference room incident.
She and Nash looked at each other at the same time.
He raised an amused eyebrow, turned to the waiter, and waved off the appetizer.
“For neither of us, thanks.” Then he winked at Victoria.
“We should probably get some air, to be safe.”
Victoria was past the food-provoked-nausea phase of her pregnancy but couldn’t turn down the petulance that a tête-à-tête with Nash would bring about in Mark.
“Probably best,” she agreed, and Victoria and Nash stood and politely excused themselves.
“Mark is going to be breathing fire,” Victoria told Nash when they reached the atrium and sat down in a set of chairs nestled in the foliage. “Unless you already signed with him?”
Nash threw his head back in a hearty guffaw. “Why would I ever do that?”
“Then why have you been meeting with him?” Victoria asked.
“Doctor’s orders. I’ve had to stay off the court since I pulled a ligament,” Nash said. He met Victoria’s confused glance with a mischievous expression dancing in his eyes. “I need to get my fun in somehow.”
“You’ve been toying with him?”
“It’s almost too easy,” Nash said. “You should see him running in circles to impress me.” Nash squared to look at Victoria. “Did you really think I would sign with Mark Berg?”
“I was once pretty sure you were going to sign with me,” Victoria said pointedly. “Until my pregnancy disqualified me.”
“Why would it do that?” Nash replied.
“Then why?”
“You apologized once,” Nash said. “Then I didn’t hear from you. Mark was on my call sheet day after day. I thought you passed me off to him.”
“Never,” Victoria said, horrified.
Nash looked her in the eye. “If I gave you my business, would you pursue every deal with the same ferocity with which you once went after me?”
“Yes,” Victoria said unequivocally.
At that exact moment, Mark burst into the atrium, looking at them as if he had caught them naked, fornicating in the bushes. “The live auction is about to start,” he said.
“We don’t want to miss that,” Nash replied.
“Thanks so much, Mark,” Victoria said as she walked past him, back into the ballroom, relishing the pout on his face—Mark had really thought he’d had a shot at prom king.
Two nights after the charity gala and several emails from Nash later, in which they were starting to hammer out the details of their business, Victoria pulled into the driveway of the Bel-Air and stepped out of her car.
The valet attendants opened her door and welcomed her back by name.
She wondered what the staff thought of this extremely pregnant woman who had decamped to a hotel on her own.
Her room wasn’t equipped to welcome a baby, much less to accommodate Magda, the baby nurse she and Ace had hired months ago.
During the tense few moments when Victoria and Ace had been alone together at her last doctor’s appointment, before Dr. Waldman came into the room, Ace told Victoria he would move out so she and the baby could be at home, where they belonged.
This arrangement made the most sense, but Victoria had told Ace that she was comfortable at the hotel and would stay there until her C-section.
The truth was, Victoria wasn’t ready to see or step foot in their house again, the house in which she and Ace had been deliriously happy, the house in which she had been blissfully ignorant and cruelly deceived, the house that was fraught with memories that were now tarnished because in their beauty they also contained Victoria’s stunning ignorance.
Victoria walked into the interior of the hotel, pulling out her phone to check her schedule for the next day to see when she could duck out to visit Liz and Charlie.
She noted that her new assistant, Edward, who had taken over for Harper a couple weeks earlier, possessed a militant command over Outlook (and a degree from HBS), if not any of his predecessor’s charm.
Victoria texted Harper to see how her job interviews were going, then fired off an email to Edward asking him to cancel her lunch the next day so she’d have time to see Liz and Charlie.
Victoria only looked up from her phone as she entered the intimate hotel bar to order a quick dinner before retiring to her room. When she did, she saw her husband sitting there.
Waiting for her.
Victoria was so taken aback that she halted in her tracks.
Ace looked at her apologetically. He mouthed, “I’m sorry, but…
,” then held up his hands helplessly, palms to the ceiling.
Victoria took him in; there was a force field of mournfulness around him.
Victoria had avoided looking directly at Ace when he had come to her recent doctor’s appointments, but now that she did, she saw that he had aged what looked like decades in weeks.
His face sagged and the laugh lines Victoria had loved so much now just looked like wrinkles. His dimples had vanished.
Victoria forced her feet to move closer to him but stopped to allow a three-foot gap between them: near enough so they could talk without shouting, far enough to preclude the possibility of touching.
“I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to see you. I had to talk to you,” Ace said.
Victoria could no longer put this off. She motioned to a discreet nook in the corner and Ace followed her there.
They sat down in the cozy velvet chairs across from each other.
It was dark in the bar, the dimness of the place an intentional choice to flatter its guests, muting any imperfections and disguising what a killer martini would further help to erase.
It was still early, and the room was empty except for a few men sitting across the room, nursing old-fashioneds.
Victoria drew her eyes away from them, from their unbothered, carefree cocktail hour, and fixed her gaze on her husband.
“I’m dying without you,” Ace said.
“That’s some opener,” Victoria said.
“All I do is torture myself with the idea that the biggest mistake of my life could cost me everything. I think about a future without you and…” Ace shrugged, his shoulders slumping in defeat.
“I don’t have any interest in that. I do not want a future unless it has you in it,” he said, his eyes growing glassy.
“I know I caused this mess and I have no right to pity myself or talk about how terrible I feel, but I miss you so much. I’m sick with guilt and grief.
I’m paralyzed with the fear that you’re done with me. I am so, so sorry I did this to us.”