10. Small Talk, Bigger Stakes
Ten
Small Talk, Bigger Stakes
Marcus called on a Thursday, about a wallpaper sample that had come in wrong — too yellow, he said, more mustard than the warm gold we’d agreed on — and somewhere in the middle of that entirely practical conversation, he asked if I wanted to get dinner.
“To thank you,” he clarified, quickly, in a way that made me suspect he’d heard himself and worried the invitation had sounded like something else.
“You’ve been incredible on this project.
I feel like I’ve barely had to think, which — for me, historically, means something’s about to go wrong, so I keep waiting for it.
But it hasn’t. It’s just been good. I want to say thank you properly, not just in an email. ”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to.” A small pause. “I want to.”
I said yes before I’d fully examined why.
The restaurant was small, unpretentious, tucked into a side street in the West Village a few blocks from the Perry Street building — his choice, and a good one, the kind of place that cared more about the food than about being seen caring about the food.
“So,” he said, once we’d ordered, once the easy work-talk had run its natural course and the conversation had nowhere left to go but somewhere more personal. “Lucy mentioned you’re going through a divorce. I hope that’s not — I don’t want to bring up something you don’t want to talk about.”
“It’s fine.” I turned my water glass slowly, considering how much to say. “It’s recent. Complicated. Not for the reasons people usually assume.”
“What reasons do people usually assume?”
“That he cheated. He didn’t. Not physically, anyway.
” I hadn’t meant to say that much, but something about Marcus’s attention — steady, unhurried, entirely present in a way I’d forgotten conversations could be — made honesty easier than I expected.
“His first love came back into his life, professionally, and he decided he didn’t know what he felt anymore. About our marriage. About me.”
Marcus was quiet for a moment, turning that over. “That’s almost worse than cheating, isn’t it. At least cheating is a decision. What you’re describing sounds like he just… stopped deciding you.”
I looked up at him, startled by how precisely he’d named something I hadn’t fully articulated even to myself.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly it.”
“I’m sorry.” He said it simply, without performing the sympathy, which somehow made it land harder than if he had.
“For what it’s worth — and I recognize I’m a relative stranger, so this might not be worth much — but any man who has you working for him and still manages to not know what he feels is a man who’s stopped paying attention a long time before that dinner happened. ”
“That’s what I’ve been telling myself. It helps, hearing someone else say it.”
We talked for two more hours. About the hotel, mostly — his plans for it, the boutique group he wanted to eventually build, the print shop the Perry Street building had once been and the particular way he wanted every guest to feel that history under their feet without ever being told the history explicitly.
But also, gradually, about other things.
My old studio, the one I’d let shrink. His last relationship, which had ended two years earlier, cleanly, without the particular kind of slow erosion I was currently navigating.
The strange vertigo of rebuilding a life you thought was already finished being built.
He didn’t ask about Sebastian again. He didn’t need to.
He asked instead about the gray-green swatch I kept mentioning, about why I loved that specific unglamorous color so much, and listened to my answer — a full three minutes about undertones and how a room breathes differently depending on what season of light it’s built to hold — like it was the most interesting thing he’d heard all week.
I realized, somewhere around the second glass of wine, that I hadn’t thought about Sebastian in almost two hours. That felt significant enough to notice, and unsettling enough that I didn’t examine it too closely at the table.
He walked me to the subway afterward. Didn’t try to kiss me. Didn’t linger in a way that asked for more than the evening had already given.
“I’d like to do this again,” he said. “No pressure. No timeline. Whenever it makes sense, if it ever does.”
“I’d like that too,” I said, and meant it, and let myself feel, for one unguarded moment on a New York sidewalk in September, something that was almost entirely unclouded by grief.
It scared me a little, how easy it was.
I thought, going down into the subway, about Sebastian’s voice in our kitchen — I don’t know what I feel anymore — and I thought that whatever this was, whatever Marcus Reyes was slowly becoming in my life, it was the opposite of that sentence, entirely.
I knew exactly what I felt, sitting across from a man who asked good questions and waited for the real answers.
I just didn’t yet know what I was going to do about it.