11. Sebastian Finds Out
Eleven
Sebastian Finds Out
Iheard about the dinner from my own sister, which felt like a specific kind of punishment.
“Claire had dinner with someone,” Grace said, over coffee she’d insisted on, ambushing me at a café two blocks from my office with the efficiency of a younger sister who’d decided I needed managing, whether I wanted it or not.
“Some hotel developer. Marcus something. Lucy posted a photo — the three of them at some event, and Claire looked—”
“Looked what.”
“Happy, Sebastian. She looked happy.” Grace said it gently, which somehow made it worse than if she’d said it cruelly. “Not performing it for a room. Actually happy.”
I didn’t say anything for a long moment. My hand tightened around the coffee cup. Something moved through my chest that wasn’t quite jealousy, or not only that. Something closer to grief for a version of myself Claire apparently hadn’t seen in longer than I wanted to know.
“You don’t get to be upset about this,” Grace said, watching my face. “You asked her for a divorce. She’s allowed to have dinner with someone.”
“I’m not upset.”
“You’re doing the thing where your jaw gets tight and you go silent. That’s your upset face, Sebastian. You’ve had it since you were nine and Dad gave my bike to the Hendersons’ kid.”
I didn’t dignify that with a response, mostly because she wasn’t wrong, and mostly because I didn’t want to examine why a stranger having dinner with my wife — my almost ex-wife, a distinction I was finding harder to hold onto than I expected — had lodged itself so far under my skin.
“Who is he,” I said instead. “This Marcus.”
“Does it matter?”
“I’d like to know who my wife is having dinner with.”
Grace gave me a long look, the kind she’d perfected around age fourteen, the one that made me feel eleven years old and thoroughly caught.
“She’s not your wife right now, Sebastian.
Not really. You made sure of that. You don’t get to keep the jealousy and give up the marriage. That’s not how any of this works.”
I sat with the noise of the café for a moment, the specific discomfort of being told something true by someone who loved me too much to soften it.
“I know,” I said finally. “I know that’s not how it works.”
“Then why do you look like you want to find this man’s address?”
I didn’t have a good answer. Somewhere in the last few weeks, a strange inversion had taken place — the uncertainty that had driven me toward Vanessa had started curdling into clarity every time I imagined Claire building a life that didn’t require me at all.
It wasn’t jealousy of Marcus, specifically. I didn’t know him, couldn’t hate a stranger with any real conviction. It was worse and more honest than that.
It was the sudden, sickening understanding that I had handed away, freely, without a fight, the privilege of being the person who made Claire happy.
And someone else — a man I’d never met, at a dinner I hadn’t been invited to — was apparently doing it effortlessly, in a matter of weeks, with nothing more than his attention.
“Sebastian.” Grace’s voice pulled me back. “What are you actually going to do? About any of this?”
I thought about Vanessa — the ease of those Boston flights, the mirror she’d accidentally held up to a version of myself I missed without understanding why.
I thought about Claire’s voice in the kitchen, steady and terrible.
I thought about a photograph I hadn’t seen and didn’t need to, of my wife looking happy at a dinner I hadn’t been part of.
“I don’t know yet,” I said, hating how often that sentence had left my mouth lately. “But I’m starting to think I need to figure out what I actually want. Not what feels familiar. Not what’s easy.”
“That’s a start,” Grace said, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand once, the way she’d done since we were kids, since long before either of us understood how badly a person could lose their own life without meaning to.
I finished my coffee. I didn’t call Vanessa that day, though some old habit in me almost reached for the phone.
I called my therapist instead — a Dr. Okafor I’d seen exactly twice, both sessions canceled early, both times because a deal had needed me more than my own unexamined life apparently did.
I didn’t cancel this one.