Chapter 1 #2
I stood near the back of the room and watched and felt the ultrasound in my clutch like a second pulse.
After this. After the applause died and the dessert was served and the last investor shook his hand.
Then I'd tell him. I pictured it clearly — his face, the real smile, the moment it would hit him.
A baby. Our baby. Something neither of us had planned but both of us, I believed, wanted.
After dinner the crowd loosened. The bar got busy.
Music shifted from ambient to something with a low beat.
People drifted to the terrace — a wide concrete deck overlooking the water, strung with the pendant lights I'd replaced that afternoon.
I'd tested every string myself, standing on the ladder while Parker held the base and the sun came through the warehouse windows and made the bulbs look like small, warm planets.
The Sequoia team had left. The speeches were done. The caterer had recovered his dignity and his timeline and the kitchen was running on autopilot. I was ready.
I picked up my clutch from the bar. Felt the weight of it — the small hard rectangle inside, one fold. I straightened my dress. Touched my earrings. I was going to tell my husband we were having a baby, and I was going to do it on the terrace I'd built for him, under the lights I'd hung.
Cole was outside. I could see him through the glass doors — leaning against the railing, a whiskey in his hand, talking to someone.
Ben Archer. One of Vantage's first ten employees, someone Cole drank with when he wanted to be a person instead of a CEO.
They were close to the railing, half-turned from the doors.
Cole's posture was loose. Drunk loose — four whiskeys in, past the performance, past the charm, into the version of himself he only showed to people who'd known him before the money.
I pushed the door open. October air. Salt, exhaust, the low hum of the city across the water. They didn't hear me. The door was quiet and the music from inside covered the sound of my heels on the concrete and they were deep enough in conversation that the world outside it had stopped existing.
I was eight feet away when I heard it.
"I don't know, man." Cole's voice. Rougher than his keynote voice, raw at the edges in a way that only came out when he was drunk and honest. "I look at her sometimes and I just — I think about what it would be like. If things were different."
"Cole." Ben's voice. Careful. The tone of a man who didn't want to be having this conversation.
"I don't know that I love her." A pause. He lifted his glass, drank. Set it on the railing. "Not the way I've loved before."
I stopped.
The clutch was in my hand. The ultrasound was inside it, pressed against my palm through the leather. Seven weeks. The size of a blueberry. A heartbeat Dr. Pham had called strong.
"Simone's just —" He shook his head. Laughed, low and private, the sound of a man confessing something he'd been carrying for longer than tonight.
"She gets it. She gets me in a way that — Ivy's great.
She is. She does everything, she's incredible at all of this.
" He waved his hand at the venue behind him, at the lights I'd hung and the room I'd filled and the party I'd built from the floor up.
"But Simone and I have something. There's always been something there. I've just never said it out loud."
Ben was quiet. The quiet was worse than anything he could have said. It wasn't shock. It wasn't protest. It was the silence of a man who already knew.
"I keep thinking about it," Cole said. "What it would be like. If I'd met her first, or if —" He trailed off. Picked up his glass again. "I don't know what to do with it."
"Have you talked to Ivy?" Ben asked. His voice was careful and miserable.
"About what? Hey, honey, I think I'm in love with your best friend?" Cole laughed again, quieter. "No. I haven't talked to Ivy. I don't know how to talk to Ivy about anything that isn't a seating chart."
"That's not fair," Ben said.
"I know it's not fair. None of it's fair.
She's — she's a good person. She's better than me, honestly, in every way that counts.
And I look at her and I feel guilty and I feel bored and I feel like I married the right resume instead of the right —" He stopped.
Rubbed his face. "Forget it. I'm drunk."
"Yeah, you are."
"Don't tell anyone."
"I'm not going to tell anyone, Cole."
A long pause. The sound of the water below and the muffled bass from inside. Cole's glass scraping on the railing as he picked it up again.
"She built all of this, you know," he said, quieter now. Almost to himself. "The whole night. The food, the wine, the lights — all of it is Ivy. And I walk out here and talk to you about Simone instead of going back in there and telling her it's beautiful. What does that make me?"
Ben didn't answer. Neither did I.
I stood on the terrace I'd designed, under the lights I'd hung, at the party I'd built, seven weeks pregnant with his child, and I listened to my husband tell his friend he was in love with mine.
The city was loud beneath us. Traffic on the Embarcadero, a horn somewhere on the water, the bass from inside thumping through the glass.
Two hundred people were in there, eating food I'd chosen, drinking wine I'd picked, sitting in seats I'd arranged.
None of them were looking for me. None of them ever looked for me.
I was the infrastructure, and infrastructure didn't make noise when it cracked.
I looked down at the clutch. I could feel the ultrasound through the leather — the edge of it, the sharp little corner where I'd folded it.
I thought about walking up behind him. Handing him the image.
Watching his face change. I thought about saying his name, just once, just loud enough for him to hear, so he'd turn around and see me standing there and understand what he'd just done.
I thought about a lot of things in the three or four seconds I stood on that terrace.
Then I slid the clutch under my arm. Turned around. Walked back through the glass doors, back into the music and the warmth and the room full of people who thought tonight had gone perfectly.
I moved through the crowd the way I'd always moved through Cole's crowds — visible enough to manage, invisible enough to disappear. I smiled at the wife of a board member near the bar. She told me the evening was beautiful.
"Thank you," I said. "I'm so glad you came."
I passed the servers I'd hired. Passed the dessert table I'd arranged. Passed Simone, who was laughing at something Kieran said, her hand on his arm, her face bright and open and familiar. She caught my eye across the room and mouthed: Find me later.
I smiled at her. The last real smile I would ever give her.
I walked to the elevator. The doors closed. I pressed the button for the parking garage and stood very still and looked at the brushed steel wall and waited for the floor to finish dropping out from under me.
It didn't finish. That was the thing I learned that night, the thing they don't tell you: when the floor drops out, it doesn't stop.
It just keeps dropping, and you keep standing there, and the distance between who you were ten minutes ago and who you are now gets wider and wider and there's nothing at the bottom.
My hand was on my stomach. I hadn't put it there on purpose.
Seven weeks. The size of a blueberry. Heartbeat strong.
I stood in the elevator, and I said nothing, and I carried everything.