4. Will
— ? —
Will
The numbers on the contract blurred together for the third time in an hour.
I set down my pen and pushed back from the desk, rubbing my eyes like that would help. It wouldn’t. The problem wasn’t my vision. The problem was that every time I tried to focus on anything, my brain replaced it with the same image on a loop.
Blair’s hand on a jewelry counter. Trip’s fingers covering hers. A ring catching the light.
I’d driven past that store on Bellevue purely by accident. A meeting had been rescheduled, and I’d taken the scenic route home, and there they were. Framed in the window, a painting I was never meant to see.
She hadn’t noticed me at first. She’d been looking at Trip, smiling at a joke he’d made, and the ring on her finger had glinted when she turned her hand. Then her eyes had found mine through the glass, and her face had shifted through surprise, guilt, and a third thing I couldn’t name.
I’d driven away because I didn’t trust myself to stop.
The study felt too quiet. Too empty. I stood and walked to the window, looking out at the hydrangeas that lined the drive.
White and blue, the colors Blair had chosen when we first moved in.
She’d spent weeks researching varieties, soil conditions, the precise amount of shade they’d need to thrive.
That was Blair. Thorough. Careful. Deliberate about the things she loved.
Was I still one of those things?
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass and let myself remember two days ago.
I’d come home early. A surprise. I’d stopped at the florist on Thames Street and picked up a bundle of hydrangeas, the white ones with the faintest blush of pink at the edges.
Blair’s favorites. I’d been thinking about the anniversary party, about how stressed she’d been with the planning, about how I should do one small, romantic thing to remind her that I noticed. That I was paying attention.
The front door had been unlocked. I’d walked through the foyer, hydrangeas in hand, calling her name.
She wasn’t in the kitchen. Wasn’t in the study. I’d found her in the living room, and she wasn’t alone.
Trip had his arms around her. Her face was buried in his shoulder, her hands fisted in the back of his shirt, and he was holding her like she was the only solid thing in his world. Like letting go would mean drowning.
They’d sprung apart when they heard me.
“Will.” Blair’s voice had been too bright. Her eyes had been red. “You’re home early.”
“Meeting got canceled.” I’d stood there with my pathetic flowers, feeling like an intruder in my own house. “Everything okay?”
“Fine. Trip was just… He’s going through something with his father. Old family stuff.”
Trip had nodded, his face carefully blank. “Charles is being Charles. You know how it is.”
I didn’t know how it was. I’d never known how it was between Trip and his father, because Trip had never trusted me enough to tell me. He told Blair everything, but I got the edited version. The surface. The parts that were safe for the husband to hear.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I’d said.
“You didn’t interrupt anything.” Blair had crossed to me, taken the flowers, kissed my cheek. “These are beautiful. Thank you.”
Her smile hadn’t reached her eyes.
I’d told myself it was nothing. Told myself that friends hugged, that Trip was going through a hard time, that Blair was allowed to comfort the people she loved without it meaning anything.
But her cover story had been thin. I’d caught the edges of it fraying even as she said the words. And later that night, when I’d asked how Trip was doing, she’d changed the subject so smoothly I almost didn’t notice.
Almost.
I walked back to my desk and opened the top drawer. The receipt was still there, tucked under a stack of papers where I’d hidden it after finding it in her coat pocket. Four thousand dollars at a jewelry store on Bellevue. No description. Just a number and her signature.
She hadn’t mentioned buying anything. I’d have noticed if she’d come home with a new piece. I noticed everything about her, cataloged every detail, a man who knew he was watching the most precious thing he had slip through his fingers.
I hated myself for cataloging.
I did it anyway.
Three lunches with Trip this week. I knew because I’d called the house twice and gotten the machine, and when I’d asked Blair about her day, she’d mentioned errands. Shopping. Nothing specific.
The phone she flipped face down whenever I entered a room. She’d always been casual with her phone before, leaving it on the counter, handing it to Henry when he wanted to play games. Now it was always screen down, always just out of reach.
The way she smiled when Trip texted. The private smile, the one I used to think was only for me.
I was building a case. I knew I was building a case. Every piece of evidence filed away, every suspicious moment cataloged and cross-referenced, every innocent explanation dismissed because the alternative was too awful to consider.
My father had done this. Thirty years of marriage, thirty years of lies, and he’d spent every one of them watching my mother for signs of betrayal that never came.
She wasn’t the one with secrets. He was.
He’d kept a mistress in a condo downtown, had a whole second life that none of us knew about until the funeral, when a woman I’d never seen before showed up in black and wept at the back of the church.
My mother had known. I was almost sure of it now.
She’d known and said nothing, kept the facade, smiled at parties while her marriage rotted from the inside.
I’d watched them when I was young, trying to understand why they never touched, why their conversations were so careful, why the house always felt like a stage set waiting for an audience.
I’d sworn I’d never live like that.
I’d sworn my marriage would be real or it would be nothing.
And now I was standing in my study at ten o’clock at night, holding a receipt for jewelry my wife had never shown me, wondering if everything I’d built was a lie.
I needed a drink.
The Bellcliff Club was quiet for a Thursday night.
A few old men in the card room, a couple I didn’t recognize at a corner table, the usual hum of money and privilege that I’d grown up marinating in.
Fritz was behind the bar, polishing glasses with the particular focus of a man who had seen everything and knew when to keep his mouth shut.
“Mr. Beaumont.” He set down a scotch without being asked. “Haven’t seen you midweek in a while.”
“Needed to get out of the house.”
“Everything all right?”
“Fine.”
Fritz nodded and went back to his polishing. That was what I liked about Fritz. He never pushed. He just poured and listened and let you sit with whatever was eating you alive.
I drank my scotch too fast and signaled for another. The burn felt good. Clarifying. Like maybe if I drank enough, I’d see the situation clearly instead of through this fog of suspicion and fear.
I am not my father.
Over and over I repeated it, a mantra, as if saying the words enough times might make them true.
I am not my father. I trust my wife. I trust my marriage.
I wanted it to be true so badly my teeth ached.
I sat there and tried to force myself back into the man I’d been a month ago, the one who would have laughed at a receipt, kissed her, believed her without needing to be told twice.
I reached for that man. I couldn’t find him.
Every time I got close, the fear reached back and pulled harder, and the terrible thing, the thing I couldn’t say out loud even to Fritz, was that some sick part of me found the fear easier to hold than the trust. The fear at least I understood. The fear was my inheritance.
But my father had trusted too. Or at least, he’d pretended to. He’d smiled at my mother across dinner tables and kissed her cheek at parties and all the while he’d been living another life. And my mother had pretended right back, and the two of them had danced that dance until death did them part.
I’d been twelve the night I figured it out, small on the cold stairs while they fought below me about a receipt he couldn’t explain and a perfume my mother didn’t wear.
What stayed with me was how tired he’d sounded, more than the fighting itself.
Not guilty. Just bored of a conversation he’d clearly had before.
They pretended for twenty years after that, and I watched, and learned, and swore I’d never become him.
Fritz set down my third scotch. I stared at it without drinking.
“Rough night?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
He nodded and moved away. I appreciated that. I appreciated that he didn’t push, didn’t pry, didn’t try to fill the silence with platitudes. Some things you had to sit with. Some things you had to let fester until you could figure out what to do about them.
The door to the dining room opened. I heard Blair’s laugh before I saw her, that bright particular sound that used to make my whole chest expand with joy.
Now it made me grip my glass harder.
She walked in with Trip, of course. They were always together now. His hand was at the small of her back, guiding her through the room like she belonged to him, and she was leaning into the touch like it was natural. Like it was comfortable. Like they’d done this a thousand times before.
Maybe they had. Maybe I’d just never been watching closely enough to see it.
Blair’s eyes found me across the room. Her smile flickered, dimmed, and I saw her register the drink in my hand, the late hour, the fact that I was here alone on a Thursday night when I should have been home with her.
She murmured to Trip. He nodded and headed for a table in the corner, leaving her to cross the room toward me.
“Will.” She slid onto the stool beside me. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”
“Needed some air.”
“At the bar?”
“At the bar.”
She studied my face, and I could see her trying to read me, trying to figure out what was wrong. I used to love that about her. The way she paid attention. The way she noticed things.
Now I wondered what else she noticed. What she was hiding behind that careful concern.
“How many of those have you had?” she asked.
“Not enough.”
“Will.”
“I’m fine, Blair. Just tired.”
“You’ve been tired a lot lately.”
“Planning an anniversary party is exhausting.”
“I’m planning the party. You’re signing off on seating charts.”
“Exactly. Exhausting.”
She didn’t smile. I didn’t either.
Fritz appeared with her usual, a gin and tonic with extra lime, and set it down in front of her without being asked. She thanked him with the warm smile she gave everyone, the smile that made people feel seen and valued, and I watched Fritz soften the way everyone softened around Blair.
She had that effect on people. She always had. Trip had fallen under her spell at fifteen, and apparently he’d never climbed out.
“I saw Posy Wetherell’s column today,” I said.
Blair’s hand stilled on her glass. “Did you?”
“Interesting reading.”
“Will, you know those blind items are nonsense. She makes half of them up.”
“Does she?”
“Yes. She does. Last month she implied the Hendersons were getting divorced, and they’d just renewed their vows.”
“So you’re not the Cliff Walk wife who’s been glowing on the arm of a returned heir?”
She met my eyes. Held them. “I’m Trip’s friend. I’ve always been Trip’s friend. That’s not news.”
“No. It’s not.”
I picked up my scotch and drank. The silence stretched between us, filled with all the things neither of us was saying.
“Will.” Blair reached across the bar and took my hand. “Talk to me. Please. Something’s wrong, and I can feel it, and I need you to tell me what it is.”
Her fingers laced through mine. Familiar. Warm. The same hand that had held mine at our wedding, at Henry’s birth, through a thousand ordinary moments that made up a life.
I looked at our joined hands and tried to feel the connection that used to ground me.
I squeezed.
She didn’t squeeze back.
Or maybe she did, and I just couldn’t feel it anymore.
Across the room, Trip was watching us from his corner table. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes didn’t leave Blair’s face.
I pulled my hand free.
“I’m going to settle up,” I said. “Don’t wait for me.”
“Will.”
“I’ll see you at home.”
I walked out without looking back. But I could feel her eyes on me all the way to the door, and I knew, with a certainty that made my stomach turn, that whatever was happening between us was only going to get worse before it got better.
If it got better at all.
The valet brought my car around. I sat behind the wheel for a long moment, watching the club’s entrance, waiting on a feeling I couldn’t name.
Blair walked out with Trip at her side. His hand found the small of her back again, guiding her toward a waiting taxi. She laughed at whatever he said, and the sound carried across the parking lot, bright and warm and nothing like the way she’d sounded with me.
Our eyes met through my windshield.
Neither of us smiled.