4. Gordon
— ? —
Gordon
The house is dark when I pull into the garage.
It’s after four in the morning and I’m exhausted in a way that goes past tired into something numb and hollow.
The work dinner ran long, then drinks, then more drinks, and somewhere around midnight I stopped checking my phone because the notifications were piling up and I couldn’t deal with any of them.
The dinner itself is already a blur. Toasts to the company, toasts to the future, some rich stranger telling the same story three times while everyone laughed in the same places.
Sloane worked the room the whole night, steering me from table to table, whispering names in my ear before I had to shake hands.
I performed. That’s what those nights are, a performance, and I’m good at it, and I used to think being good at it meant something.
The whole drive home I kept the radio off.
Forty minutes of silence and streetlights, and the only thing I could think about was the look on Eliza’s face in that lobby.
I told myself I’d fix it this weekend. I’d clear a day, take her somewhere, make it right.
I’m always going to make it right on some day that never actually arrives.
I sit in the car for a minute with the engine off. The house looks wrong, too still, and there are no lights anywhere, not even the hallway lamp she usually leaves on because she says empty houses feel like they’re holding their breath.
I tell myself she’s asleep. I tell myself everything is fine. I get out of the car and walk to the front door, the gift bag from Sloane hanging from my fingers, and let myself in as quietly as I can.
The kitchen is dark.
I reach for the light switch and flip it on, and the fluorescent glare floods the room, and that’s when I see her.
Eliza is sitting at the island. She’s still in the midnight-blue dress she was wearing in the lobby, the one I’ve always loved, the one that makes her eyes look almost black.
Her hair is still done, her makeup still on, though her mascara has smudged under her eyes.
There’s a cake on the counter between us, covered in plastic wrap, and I recognize it before I can think.
Chocolate, three layers, the crumb visible at the edge where the plastic doesn’t quite cover.
My aunt’s recipe. The one Eliza learned years ago because I mentioned once that it was my favorite, that my aunt used to make it for my birthday when I was a kid.
She made my aunt’s cake for our anniversary. And I wasn’t here.
“Good dinner?” she asks.
Her voice is flat and neutral, and that’s worse than angry.
“It was fine. Long.” I set the gift bag on the counter because I need something to do with my hands. “You didn’t have to wait up.”
“I didn’t. I couldn’t sleep.”
She looks at the gift bag, silver with white tissue paper, expensive and tasteless and absolutely not something I picked out myself.
“What’s that?”
I look at it. Sloane bought it, said it was handled, said I didn’t need to worry about the details because she had it covered. I didn’t ask questions because I had fifteen other things on my mind and I trusted her to get it right.
“Anniversary present,” I say, because that’s what it has to be.
Eliza doesn’t move and she doesn’t reach for it. “What is it?”
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
I don’t know. Whatever is in that bag, I never saw it before tonight. Someone else did. Someone who isn’t me.
Eliza laughs, and it’s the ugliest sound I’ve ever heard from her, harsh and brittle and nothing like the way she usually laughs, which is warm and full and makes me want to say whatever stupid thing made her do it again.
“You don’t know.” She stands up, and her voice is shaking now. “You don’t know what you got me for our anniversary because you didn’t get me anything. Someone else did. Sloane, probably. Right? She handles everything else in your life, why not this too.”
“Eliza-”
“Do you even remember what anniversary this is? How many years?”
I should know this. I do know this. We got married when we were eighteen, and we’re twenty-nine now, so that makes it…
The silence stretches too long. I can see her counting the seconds.
“Eleven,” she says. “Eleven years, Gordon. I have loved you for eleven years, and you can’t even remember that.”
“That’s not fair. I’ve been working my ass off-”
“For what?” She’s crying now, tears spilling down her cheeks, and I hate it. I hate being the reason for it. I hate that I don’t know how to fix it. “For who? Because it’s not for me. It stopped being for me a long time ago.”
“Everything I do is for you.” I step toward her and she steps back, putting the island between us. “The house, the cars, the lifestyle, all of it. I built all of this for you.”
“I don’t want the house!” She throws her hands up, her voice cracking. “I don’t want the cars! I want my husband! I want someone who looks at me like I matter, who remembers I exist when he walks out that door, who doesn’t make me feel like I’m furniture in my own life!”
“You’re being dramatic-”
“The trip.” Her voice goes cold, so cold it stops me mid-step. “You promised me a trip. A few days, just us, somewhere warm. Remember that?”
I remember. I remember lying in bed with her, her head on my chest, talking about getting away. I remember meaning every word.
“Sloane moved it-”
“Sloane moved it. And you didn’t move it back.
You didn’t even tell me it was gone.” She drags her wrist across her face, angry and rough.
“An assistant’s assistant sent me a text about refunding the hotel deposit.
That’s how I found out our anniversary trip wasn’t happening.
A text from someone whose name I don’t even know. ”
“I didn’t know she changed it, I swear-”
“You never know! That’s the whole problem!” She looks at the cake on the counter, the one she spent hours making, and her face twists. “You said you’d call me. From the dinner. You said you’d check in. You couldn’t even do that.”
“I was going to, and then the dinner ran long, and-”
“Don’t.” She holds up her hand. “Don’t make excuses. I’m so tired of excuses.”
She grabs her keys from the counter, and everything in me goes cold, because I recognize that movement. I’ve seen her do it a hundred times when she’s about to leave.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Away from you.”
“Eliza, it’s four in the morning, you can’t just-”
“Watch me.”
She starts toward the door, and I follow, panic climbing my ribs.
“Then I’ll leave. I’ll go to a hotel, I’ll give you space, just don’t go. Please.”
She stops with her hand on the door and doesn’t turn around.
“I took the nursery apart last spring,” she says quietly. “Did you know that?”
My stomach drops. The nursery. The room at the end of the hall, the one we set up together three years ago when we were trying, when I told her I wanted a family, when everything still felt possible.
“That room we painted yellow,” she continues.
“The furniture we picked out together. The curtains I made by hand because I wanted them to be special.” Her voice is steady now, which is somehow worse than the crying.
“I packed everything into boxes and put them in the garage. It took me a whole weekend.”
I think about that room. The closed door I’ve walked past every day without opening. I knew what was in there. I just stopped thinking about it.
“You didn’t notice,” she says. “We have a room with nothing in it, and you walked past it every day for eight months, and you didn’t even notice it was empty.”
“Eliza-”
She grabs the cake from the counter, pulls off the plastic wrap, and shoves it into the trash can, all three layers, the hours of work, the recipe she learned for me.
“Goodbye, Gordon.”
She opens the door and walks out, spine straight, finished.
I should stop her. I should run after her and grab her arm and say whatever it takes to make her stay.
But I’m frozen. My feet won’t move and my voice won’t work.
By the time I make it to the door, her car is already pulling out of the driveway. Her taillights disappear around the corner, and then she’s gone, and the house is silent, and I’m standing in the doorway with absolutely no idea what just happened.
I walk back to the kitchen.
The gift bag is still on the counter. I open it and pull out whatever’s inside. A bracelet with diamonds, expensive and flashy and nothing Eliza would ever wear.
Sloane picked this out. Sloane, who has met my wife a handful of times. Sloane, who doesn’t know that Eliza hates flashy jewelry, that she still wears the cheap ring I bought her from a pawn shop when we were eighteen because she says it means more than any diamond ever could.
I put the bracelet back in the bag. There’s a receipt at the bottom, folded in half. I don’t look at the number. I don’t want to know what my marriage was outsourced for.
I pour myself a drink I don’t want and leave it sitting on the counter, untouched, next to the gift bag, next to the smear of frosting on the counter’s edge I’m only now noticing, and I walk to the trash can and lift the lid.
The cake is sitting on top of the garbage, collapsed against the plastic bag, chocolate frosting smeared everywhere. Three layers she spent hours making, my aunt’s recipe that she learned for me because I mentioned it once, years ago, and she remembered.
I remember the first time she made it. We’d been in California maybe two years, and she called my aunt long distance and wrote the whole recipe down on the back of an electric bill because we didn’t have paper in the apartment, and she got it wrong twice before she got it right.
The first one came out flat and the second one sank in the middle, and she cried over that one, actually cried, and I told her I didn’t need a cake, and she said that wasn’t the point.
She said everybody should have somebody who makes their birthday cake from scratch. She said now that would be her.
It’s been eleven years and she’s still the one who makes it. She made it today, for a man who didn’t come home.
I stand there in the kitchen, staring at that cake, and something cracks open in my chest.
When did this happen? When did I become the man who forgets his own anniversary, who lets his wife wait alone in a blue dress until four in the morning, who doesn’t notice when she dismantles the nursery they were supposed to fill together?
I think about the early days. The studio apartment with the mattress on the floor. Working double shifts and coming home exhausted and still finding energy to touch her because being near her was the only thing that made any of it worth it.
I was going to give her everything. That was the whole point. She sacrificed so much for me, gave up her family and her future and her dreams so I could chase mine, and I was going to pay her back. I was going to build something so big that she would never regret choosing me.
But somewhere along the way, I forgot what I was building it for.
I walk upstairs and down the hall. I stop at the door I’ve been walking past for months without opening.
I know what’s on the other side. I helped paint those walls. I helped assemble that crib. I remember the weekend we spent putting it all together, how she laughed when I couldn’t figure out the instructions, how she kissed me when we finally finished and stood back to look at what we’d made.
I open the door anyway.
The room is completely empty. Bare walls, bare floor, nothing. But there are marks on the carpet where the furniture used to be, holes in the walls where the mobile hung, and a faint rectangle on the far wall where a picture used to block the sun from fading the paint.
The paint is still yellow.
She spent a whole weekend taking this room apart, and I never even asked where everything went.
We spent a whole Saturday in here once. She had the crib instructions spread out on the floor, and I kept insisting the diagram was wrong, and it turned out I’d been holding the side rail upside down for twenty minutes.
She laughed so hard she had to sit down against the wall, right about where I’m standing now.
When we finally got it built, she hung the little felt mobile she’d sewn herself, birds in five colors, and we stood in the doorway with my arm around her shoulders, looking at what we’d made, and I thought: this is the whole point. This is what all of it is for.
Then I went back to work on Monday, and I don’t think I ever stood in this doorway again.
I sink down against the wall and pull out my phone. I call her.
It goes straight to voicemail. Her greeting is old, recorded years ago, back when her voice still had that lightness in it.
She laughs in the middle of it, at me, actually, because I was making faces at her while she recorded it, trying to get her to break.
You’ve reached Eliza, and then the laugh, and then leave a message.
I listen to it all the way through.
I call again, and it goes to voicemail again.
I call Lucas, because if she’s going anywhere at four in the morning, it’s to Gabriella and Lucas.
He doesn’t answer either.
I text her, then Lucas, then Gabriella. Nothing comes back.
I sit on the floor of the empty nursery until the sun comes up, calling her number over and over, listening to her voicemail message, hanging up, calling again.
She never picks up. Around six I stop leaving messages, because there’s nothing left to say that isn’t the same three words, and I’ve already said those so many times tonight that they’ve stopped sounding like language.
And somewhere in the gray light of dawn, staring at the yellow walls of the room we were supposed to fill together, I realize I don’t know when she stopped being happy.
I don’t know if I ever asked.