1. Brooke #2
“How much,” I asked her, because I’d already done enough of my father’s math to know that dinner hadn’t been about my footing.
Laura didn’t answer right away. She was drying a plate that was already dry. “Your father left us more than a name,” she finally said. “He left us the number that comes after it.”
My father was a brilliant architect and a catastrophic bookkeeper.
He built things all over this city that still stand, and he died leaving behind a mountain of debt tall enough to bury the house Laura still lives in, the house I grew up in, the one with my height marked in pencil on the pantry doorframe.
I inherited both halves of him, the eye and the terrible arithmetic, which I’ve always thought was the universe’s idea of a joke.
“So the Ashbournes have the number,” I said.
“Adrian has the number.” She set the plate down.
“And Adrian has a problem you can solve, and you have a problem he can solve, and Alani and I are old women who would like to stop worrying.” She looked at me then, and under the salesmanship there was a rawness she couldn’t hide.
“I would never make you. You know I’d never make you.
But Brooke, I am so tired of being afraid of the mail. ”
I looked at my mother being afraid of the mail in her own kitchen, and I understood that the choice had already made itself.
Because here was Adrian’s side of it, the part that made two desperate mothers look like matchmakers instead of what they were.
He wanted out. Not out of anything dramatic, just out of Ashbourne Holdings, off the board, away from the life where his father slid documents across a desk and Adrian signed his own name onto a future he’d never chosen.
He wanted to write. Actually write, not as a hobby a rich man is permitted, but as the whole point.
And Edison Ashbourne does not release his only son to go chase sentences without a reason he can print in an announcement. I heard the shape of it from Alani once, years and one lifetime ago, at a dinner where Edison spoke about his son in the third person while his son sat right there.
“A man leaves a company for a wife and a home,” Edison said, swirling his glass.
“That’s a story people understand. A man leaves a company to write novels is a man having a breakdown.
” He didn’t look at Adrian when he said it.
“One of those gets you a wedding announcement. The other gets you a call from the board.”
A wife was a reason, a wife was stability.
A wife made the whole thing look intentional instead of like a young man running for his life. And I needed a number, and he needed a reason, and our mothers needed to sleep at night.
So there was a contract. I read it in a lawyer’s office with air conditioning set to freezing, in language so polite and so precise that it took me until the third page to understand I was the asset being transferred.
“You can take your time with it,” the lawyer said.
“No,” I said, and signed. “I’ve read the whole thing. It’s very clear about what I am.”
Adrian signed after me. He had good handwriting, annoyingly.
Our hands were close on the table and neither of us touched the other, and when it was done he looked at me with a look that wasn’t quite an apology and said, “For what it’s worth, I’ll try to make it easy.
” I told him not to bother trying to make it anything.
I told him I didn’t need easy, I needed the debt gone, and easy was a luxury for people who got to marry for love.
He didn’t argue. He just nodded, like I’d said the most reasonable thing in the world, and I hated that the reasonableness was the first thing about him I didn’t mind.
That was the arrangement. Spelled out, notarized, and cold enough that I moved into his home already braced for a life of separate rooms.
And it started exactly that cold.
The first dinner we ate alone as husband and wife, we sat at opposite ends of a table built for twelve, and the only sound in the room was my fork against the plate. He had a manuscript beside him. I had a glass of wine I wasn’t drinking.
“You don’t have to eat down there,” he said finally, not looking up from his page. “It’s a long table. I’m not going to bite from this distance.”
“I didn’t want to crowd you.”
“You’re my wife. I think you’re allowed to crowd me.” He turned a page. “Or don’t. Whatever’s comfortable. I only meant the salt’s down here and you look like you’re rationing flavor out of politeness.”
I moved three chairs closer. Not next to him. Closer. He didn’t comment on it, but the corner of his mouth did the thing it hadn’t done all night, and I went to bed that evening a little less certain about how many years I’d signed up for.
The thaw came in pieces after that, and I couldn’t tell you the day it finished, only the moments that chipped at it.
There was the first note I left in his margins.
He’d gone to take a call and abandoned a chapter on the coffee table, and I read it the way I read everything, hunting for the line that was showing off, and when I found it I wrote in the margin, plain as anything, “You already made this point on page two. Trust the reader.” Then I went to bed and forgot to be nervous about it.
He found it in the morning. I braced for cold, for that shuttered look men like him get when a stranger touches their work.
Instead he held the page up over his coffee. “Trust the reader,” he read aloud. “You cut my favorite paragraph with six words.”
“It was a bad paragraph.”
“It was a beautiful paragraph.”
“It was a beautiful paragraph doing a job that was already done.” I braced again. “You can ignore me. It’s your book.”
He looked at the page, then at me, and he laughed, a real one, surprised out of him. “No,” he said. “You’re right. That’s the irritating part.” And he took out his pen and cut it, right there, while I pretended my whole chest hadn’t just gone warm.
And then there was the night I couldn’t sleep and came out to find him at his desk at three in the morning, the lamp low, his hands in his hair.
“Go back to bed,” he said, not unkindly.
“You’ve been out here for hours.”
“I’m stuck. It’s not interesting. Go sleep.”
I didn’t go sleep. I crossed the cold floor and sat on the edge of his desk instead, and I said, “Read it to me. The part you’re stuck on.”
He gave me the look that asks if I mean it.
Then he read. And when he got to the sentence that wasn’t working, we both heard it land wrong at the same time, and I said, “There. That’s the beam that won’t hold,” and he stared at me and said, quietly, “You’re the first person who’s ever told me that and been right.
” He rewrote the line with me sitting on his desk in the dark, and neither of us mentioned that it was the first time we’d sat that close on purpose.
That was the staircase, in the end. A hundred small mornings and one cold long table and a paragraph cut with six words, stacked up until one day I looked down and realized I’d climbed the whole thing without deciding to.
I fell in love with my husband.
That’s the part that wasn’t in the contract.
The part I can’t get a straight answer on, even from myself, is whether he did too.
Adrian is generous and attentive and he reads to me at two in the morning, and he has never once said the word.
His mother loves me, that much is clear, Alani calls me her daughter and means it and defends me at family dinners before I’ve even been attacked.
His father barely looks at me. To Edison I’m a line item that closed successfully, and he treats me with the mild indifference of a man reviewing a signed agreement.
So I have half a family that adores me and a husband who might, and I’ve learned to live in that uncertainty.
By afternoon the light in the penthouse goes gold and long, and Adrian is at his desk, and I’m on the couch with my sketchbook, drawing him.
He doesn’t know. He never knows. That’s rather the point.
I draw the line of his profile first, the way I’d start any structure I cared about, with the load-bearing line, the one everything else hangs off of.
The bridge of his nose. The set of his jaw when he’s concentrating. His hand moving across the keyboard and then going still, hovering, while he hunts for a word.
I draw him the way I draw buildings, slow and exact, giving every line the attention it’s owed, because a person is just architecture that breathes, and this particular person is the most interesting thing I’ve built my whole life around.
“You’re humming,” he says, not looking up.
“I’m not.”
“You are. It’s off-key. It’s genuinely painful and I love it, please don’t stop.”
I stop.
“Brooke.”
“You said it was painful.”
“I said I loved it. Keep up.”